Selling The MetaverseYou are going to be pushed into virtual reality whether you like it or not.
By James Pogue
February 17, 2022
Last Christmas Eve, I was driving with my 17-year-old nephew through an industrial part of northeast Portland, Oregon, when he pointed out some new graffiti on a wall near his house. “How Does The Metaverse,” someone had written, in quite beautiful blue script, “Help Poor People?”
This struck me as a very poignant thing to spraypaint on a wall in a run-down section of a midsize American city, not far from a huge and heart-rendingly grim homeless encampment on Columbia Avenue. Whoever wrote it must have had a sense that a massive change in how humans live and interact was looming before us all. We can be sure that they didn’t know what this Metaverse would look like, since no one knows exactly. But they knew enough to be alarmed by it, and they must have had a sense that ordinary people wouldn’t have much say in how it shaped up and impacted their lives. They knew that there was no point in writing their congressman or the local newspaper to discuss whether or not Americans really want to live out their lives in a digital simulacrum of reality, or to question whether it makes sense for us to deploy massive portions of our nation’s capital and brainpower toward building this simulacrum. Those sorts of questions get answered by investors and tech executives, and almost no one in power in this country thinks they ought to fall under the purview of our democracy or public debate. So they were left to scrawl a plaintive little protest, on a wall between a weed dispensary and a Vietnamese grocery.
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Last spring, the early web pioneer, billionaire investor, and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen did an interview that got a lot of attention in the small world of people who theorize about tech, and almost none outside of it. It was with a pseudonymous figure who writes under the name Niccolo Soldo, who alternates between obviously satirical forays and genuinely weighty questions about how tech has reshaped human life in the past few years. About halfway through, Soldo asked Andreessen a question about whether our world of constant screen-based communication was hurting our collective mental health.
“Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege,” Andreessen answered, before going into a world-historical vision of what the Metaverse would offer to humanity. Reality Privilege was an idea he’d borrowed from the virtual reality developer Beau Cronin, who wrote way back in 2015 that physical reality, such as we experience as we go through the world in our human bodies, was a painful and unpleasant experience for many—maybe even most—of us. So it was a mark of privilege, comfort and luck, to think of non-digital reality as being truer or more worthwhile than one experienced through a screen. “If it’s hard to imagine much about your life that could be improved by porting to a new platform,” Cronin wrote about virtual-reality worlds, “then maybe you’re not the target user here. Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges. You are one of the Verified Users of the real. Congratulations for now, but beware the platform shift ahead.”
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It turned out that Andreessen had a very direct answer to the question of how the Metaverse would help poor people. “The Reality Privileged,” he said, “call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
So here’s an immensely influential billionaire, with a huge personal stake in the development of the Metaverse, leveraging the language of privilege to suggest that the opinions of people who protest that we’re being lead towards dystopia are definitionally invalid. And I’m going to offer a prediction: you will hear more arguments like this in the near future. But this is less of a new line of thinking than it may appear at first. Andreessen is just stating things more clearly than anyone had to back before we knew how ruinous the consumer technologies sold to us as social progress would be to our lives and society. Because if we can see how this Metaverse is being sold, maybe we might not end up buying it.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/selling-the-metaverse/
