Look at all of our tech billionaires trying to leave the world to evade responsibility for their malevolent influence on it. Anything to avoid being confronted by the workers they exploit or the victims of the ethnic and religious clashes facilitated by their platforms. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are flinging themselves into space; Elon Musk is burrowing into the earth; now Mark Zuckerberg is retreating into a virtual “metaverse”.
What is a metaverse, you ask? Well, late last year a former Facebook data scientist, Sophie Zhang, accused the company of having known about - and failed to prevent – attempts by heads of state and other political actors in Honduras, India, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere to manipulate and mislead their populations, leading to political instability, the harassment of activists, and possibly preventable deaths. Instead of immediately addressing these issues, Zuckerberg decided to try to rebrand his platform – currently awash with tyrants and conspiracy theorists and pictures of your adorable baby niece who you have never met because your sister read some things on Facebook that led her to believe that Covid is a hoax and that vaccinated people like you are carrying a tracking device in your arm – into an idea pulled from a 30-year-old science fiction novel.
The word metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which has been very influential in Silicon Valley circles despite satirizing ideas that are now taken up literally and with great enthusiasm by our tech visionaries. The book imagines a space that blends together the real and the projected, the physical world augmented by virtual constructions and sensations, an environment enhanced and improved by the imaginative powers of people who work at tech companies. Zuckerberg describes it as “an embodied internet”, a physical space that one accesses through expensive tech like VR goggles, where you can buy things that do or do not actually exist, play games, and talk to virtual representations of real people but also probably a lot of bots, too. If you haven’t seen Ready Player One, imagine a massive, perpetual Sims game combined with Pokemon Go, an invisible world of interaction and engagement that surrounds you but you cannot see or engage with if you lack the proper technology.
It’s not just Facebook, of course. Apple, Google, and other companies are investing huge resources in the virtual and augmented reality technology and infrastructure needed for the metaverse, despite it never really working and creeping a lot of people out along the way. And of course despite the fact that the whole idea – of living in a consequence-free space of your own imagination, separated out physically and psychically from your fellow citizens to prance around with avatars and phantoms – is philosophically and psychologically objectionable.
This is a predictable goal for an industry that decided its workers were too precious to take real public transportation to work and created special buses to take them directly from home to the workplace. An industry that has complained viciously of the real problems of the real world in which it exists, like the homeless population of San Francisco, while also working hard to avoid the taxes that would assist in creating the housing and social services needed to care for the less fortunate. Of course their solution to a disappointing world isn’t to wade into the mess to try to create stability and security for all, but to avoid, evade, blot out, replace, escape.
As much as these self-proclaimed geniuses like to imagine they are inventing something entirely new, there is historical precedent. Power-mad rulers, once they encounter the limits of their ability to rewrite reality to their liking, often build simulacra better suited to their delicate sensibilities. There was Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who transformed his castle into an operatic fantasyland with a series of water features, despite the leaking, swamping, and flooding that his servants and guests had to deal with. Or Marie Antoinette’s fake peasant village where she recreated rural life. Instead of cholera and crop failure there were just infinite cottagecore garments and frolicking little lambs. Or our former President Trump, cropping photos of his inauguration celebration to fill in the patchy crowds. What kind of world will Zuckerberg create? One without congressional hearings, one imagines. One awash in the blood of slaughtered Burmese, one assumes.
There is, of course, a utopian gleam to the metaverse. The idea of transcending one’s physical limitations to engage with new ideas and populations and exchange information and resources is appealing. These were, however, the same fantasies that got social media platforms where they are today. They were going to spread democracy and freedom! Instead, they’ve been hoarding wealth while they bust up their workers’ unions, sow chaos through the dissemination of conspiracy theories, and offer the perfect environment to harass, bully, and torment the already vulnerable.
Much like the reasonable responses to Elon Musk’s plans to colonize Mars, the reasonable response to the plan for a Facebook-facilitated metaverse should be: shouldn’t we fix this world, before we set off to create – and then probably destroy – others? But cleaning up after the billionaires will be our job – the job of those who can barely afford actual housing, let alone virtual property. As always.
Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist
