Worried about The Metaverse? You're already in it.
How 21st Century Technology obscures what it really is.
Change obscures itself from us. The telephone was a revolutionary advancement in technology, shifting the nature of business, social interaction, and news, furthering globalization, speeding up commerce, and allowing for more expansive governance. That an even more cataclysmically significant technological development would bear essentially the same name, is a misdirection that hides the gravity of its impact.
A "smartphone" presents itself humbly. The name implies a telephone with a few additional features. We nonchalantly give ourselves over to the terraforming of our psychological landscape because it disguises itself as a slight modification of an existing, much more limited technology.
The Internet was far less of a trojan horse. Early names for it like "cyberspace" show a much better understanding of its revolutionary nature. Calling the device we carry in our pockets a "smartphone" would be tantamount to calling the Internet a "super encyclopedia." But it is telling that "cyberspace" is not the name that stuck. The much more mundane and domestic moniker of "the internet" becoming the preferred name shows us that we see it as. Cyberspace implies a vast new world that has opened up. "The internet" implies a series of mutual connections. That the internet in literal physical terms is “a series of connections” helps maintain the illusion that it is just a slight advancement of ideas and technologies that we already understand. But seeing the internet as its physical reality is like calling the human brain “a collection of interconnected cells.” No doubt the term “Metaverse” applied to virtual reality will soon be abandoned for something much less daunting and more pedestrian.
We like the safety of these less radical names because we want to believe that these technologies are less radical than they are. We’re allured by the benefits and possible positive applications we see in them, and we want to imagine that we can casually adopt them into the status quo, reaping the positive benefits somehow magically casting aside the negative side-effects.
“Social Media” is a wonderful example of just this. There was certainly early skepticism about what the effects of social media might be. Concerns centered mostly around being “in a social bubble” or “lowered attention spans.” And it’s not that these things aren’t real concerns, but they miss the mark on what would be the more significant problems so massively that they might as well be. As a society, we uncritically moved billions of hours of our collective attention into the space of “social media” with little concern for what the effects of that might be. A decade and a half later, we’re seeing some of those effects, and we’re starting to wonder if we underestimated the significance of the impact of “Social Media” on society. (We did.)
In hindsight, a better name for Social Media might as well have been “The Metaverse.” Social Media is a virtual space where people create and dress up an avatar and interact with other people, spending hours in an artificial environment, looking at the sights, and having conversations with the other people in that space. The fact that it’s not visually immersive is incidental. What social media is cannot be separated from the simultaneous rise of the “Smartphone.” Social media may not be a place you can fully enter physically and immerse yourself in, but it is now a place that is always around you. Always with you. The fact that it exists on a tiny little screen domesticates it in our minds, making it feel safer. You can put it in your pocket creating the illusion that you own Social Media instead of Social Media being space owned by someone else (a profit-driven corporation) that you enter into.
Here’s a quote from a New York Times article about why “The Metaverse” is so bad:
“…virtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened.”
Tell the children of the current generation that are 3x more likely to contemplate suicide because of being cyberbullied that the current iteration of Social Media is not “an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened.”
I understand that Meta’s Metaverse represents a theoretically more immersive version of Social Media which is certainly concerning and I’ll address those concerns in the future. But my point here is that if you think that the children lying in bed at night trying to go to sleep holding a tiny glowing box 6 inches from their face on which are appearing DMs making fun of their body or countless images they can never live up to aren’t already plunged into an “all-encompassing digital environment” where “unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened” you’re not seeing the reality of the situation.
The world we live in has changed over the last decade more radically than we can fully comprehend at the moment and it is critical to our ability to grapple with the additional changes that are coming in the near future that we become more aware of these changes and begin charting the new maps we will need to navigate the territory we now find ourselves in.
Letters connected us at a distance and allowed us to transmit information geographically. The Telegram and then the Telephone sped up this process. We see the Internet as another step in this change (ironically as a "smartening" of the Telephone) that allows us to stay more connected to other people with even less latency than the preceding technologies. But that conception of The Internet is an incredible underestimation of what The Internet is and its implications. What makes this sleight of hand so convincing is that The Internet is that in part. What makes the illusion dangerous is that we buy into the simplified definition because conceals the much more complex, scarier, true nature of the change.
We’re thankfully emerging out of a period of technological optimism. Skepticism and concern about the potential next wave of revolutionary technologies (virtual reality, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence) abound. But not only are these concerns not slowing down the advancement of these technologies but we still need to reckon with the technology we currently have, and if we’re not able to do that soberly and realistically, what hope do we have of addressing concerns about upcoming technologies adequately?
Our existing metaphors for thinking and talking about technology are inadequate. The old view of technology is one of tools and techniques. McLuhan theorized technologies or mediums as extensions of humans. The foot becomes the wheel, the thought the word, and a telephone an extension of a voice. The motivation behind a technology is its function. Technologies that do not function are discarded (or rather, are not even adopted into the view of what we consider to be Technology). Functionality is an element of our definition of technology. This view has served us well for quite some time. Up until very recently, we could examine technologies on an individual basis, and hope to understand their function and the impact of that function within the society. But as our world becomes increasingly technologically complex, this method of examining technology has become increasingly inadequate.
For example, when the functions of television are examined we must look at a top-level explicit function and try to understand its first and second-order implicit functions. In the 20th-century we had to begin seeing technology as both working for and on us. But we have entered an era where even this close reading is too simplified and inadequate. No single technological development can now be seen in a vacuum. Technologies are not mediums but “mediums stacked on mediums on top of other mediums.” To reduce technology to an individual tool that performs a function is to remove it from its place in a vast, interconnected, network of relationships with other technologies; and to remove it from that context is to misunderstand it. To try simply to assess a technologies’ impact on society falls apart because increasingly Technology is Society1.
How do we update our thinking on Technology so we can honestly see it for what it is? We need to recognize not just that technology is changing but that “the way technology is changing” has changed. We tend to see a change in technology as gaining a new tool, developing a more efficient means of performing an old function or adopting a new medium for disseminating information.
But we must see the macro-level changes in the way technologies interrelate, the rate at which change happens, and the way our relationship with technology animates it. It is a difference that is so hard to spot precisely because it is not the result of a single change or development or new function. The environment we now find ourselves lost inside without a map is an emergent ecosystem that is the result of many technologies rapidly co-evolving in a symbiotic fashion. We don’t see it because we don’t have the words for it. We look at what’s happening and we don’t see it for what it is, we see individual pieces, and even those pieces we don’t see for what they are. Instead of an augmented reality that is with us all the time we see a telephone that is “smarter.” Instead of a “metaverse” where people spend hours of their day in an artificial meeting space, we see media that is “social.” Instead of cyberspace, we see a “network” that connects multiple computers.
A radical change has occurred in the last 20 years and we’re trying to use unradical, old ideas, and terms to assess that change. We need to try to look at the situation with fresh eyes, to try to describe things as they really are, not as we want to see them, and we need a more holistic approach to understanding 21st-century technology. We need to chart, not the change in technologies, but the change that has happened in capital-T Technology.
The first step will be to check our assumptions about the new technology of the last two decades and to honestly reexamine the nature of many of the new technologies out of which this broader unmapped environment we now find ourselves inside has emerged.
The artificial intelligence powered spellchecker on my computer tells me this sentence is incorrect grammatically and suggests I change the “is” between “Technology” and “Society” to “in.” But the advent of the internet + social media + the smartphone means that Technology is no longer “in” Society but rather that Society is now “in” Technology. My technology is telling me I shouldn’t say this, it can’t possibly be right. Technopoly indeed.
Check out an ecological perspective in Under A White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert, a book about the future, tech, and the environment.