The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea (opens in new tab)

I would encourage people to read Snowcrash. I first read it like 20 years ago and have re-read it several times. It's funny, it's readable, it's prophetic, it's wacky, it's thought provoking, there's a lot in a small package.

It's also not as described in that article, the author is shoehorning something written a while go to fit a currently popular narrative. I don't think Stephenson really does dystopian / utopian, right / wrong, moral / immoral. He constructs plausible settings where people roam and do as people do.

As a tangent, I hope this new hype results in a high production value adaptation of Snowcrash or one of his other works (seveneves!), Stephenson really deserves a higher place in our cultural pantheon.

The metaverse is certainly an alluring concept. But, it’s a warning, not a suggestion. Snowcrash is _not_ about how great the metaverse is.

That being said, of course the metaverse will happen and the boundaries between the physical and the digital will become thin. I only hope we can do it without losing track of what really matters.

I like the reference to the book Snow Crash in which a metaverse environment gave people relief from a shitty world. This may be prescient: I think that the human race will servive the next 100 years (and if we don’t, I take comfort in believing that the Universe is teaming with life), but no-travel low-energy use ways to work and play with even more entertainment alternatives may be a necessity.

I worked on VR projects for SAIC and Disney about 25 years ago, and as much as I criticize Facebook over privacy issues, I like Mark Z’s vision here, in addition to Microsoft’s vision of shared virtual workspaces and AR augmentation. Being an Apple fanboy, I also anticipate their future products and systems in this space.

I have been joking/teasing family and friends for many years that governments would fade to black and corporations would rule all. I am 70 and retired so it feels like being naked no longer being associated with a large corporation (I may un-retire). I am channeling William Gibson here, but affiliations to corporations may become the new citizenship. Entrepreneurs will exist to service corporations with new tech and ideas but with little chance of forming mega-corporations themselves.

"They dropped the air ration today. I plugged in to feel the hum of the hive, but no one cared. They were engrossed in banality as always. Measuring the value of their existence in the relentless click of credits spent assuming images of artificiality. Dreaming themselves into a sleek and gleaming abstracted perfection - oblivious to the suffocated reality of their electric cage."

- me circa '89 with my head filled with Neuromancer and Mondo 2000

Sceptic here...

VR goggles are too anti-social on the local scale. Have kids? Dog? Spouse? Hard to see they will accept that you shield yourself off completely for long periods of time. You won't even see them coming when they start to grow tired... This is a fundamental flaw.

Then the metaverse... What is the usecase? Why is it fun or why is it useful? It might be cool for a while, but so are lots of other MMOs out there...

In many ways we've already been in a metaverse for a hundred year now. The popularization of Hollywood, celebrities, and the stock market are fine exemplars of its manifestation (a la Baudrillard).

Perhaps it's only natural. As a soceity, we are always seeking to lower the cost of obtaining stimuli and qualia. Things got complicated as we improved our living condition (making the shift from hunter-gathering to farming, and in the modern time migrating from rural to urban for job opportunities and access to facilities and infrastructure like universities, indie music scene, etc)

The complexity of a modern life makes it more difficult/costly to experience authentic human connection for the city dwellers (e.g. vs tribes who are still hunter-gathers). We also lost our connections with the terrains and plants.

As a coping mechanism most people look for cheaper alternatives to obtain stimuli and qualia. It's sad but there is very little we can do about that.

For the minority of us who realized this is a problem, I believe the only way out is to acheive hyper-intelligence (e.g. by becoming an expert in a field and taking psychedelics) so you can be the master of your physiology and mind, while still be able to get complex work done and be resourceful and affluent.

[edit: elaboration]

A multiverse of interlinked metaverses would be more interesting. The dystopian Metaverse, OASIS, etc have been single corporation controlled services. It would be nicer to have a standard set of protocols and APIs for anyone to create and host their own piece of the metaverse, and link them all together like the web. I really wish Facebook would do it like that, instead of implementing some crappy generic walled garden 3D version of their Groups and Pages.

Virtual reality may be our only way out of a climate/energy/resource crisis. If experiences can be simulated, and people can stay inside 8 foot hovels eating gruel while virtual reality makes it feel like Versailles and filet mignon, we could reduce resource consumption dramatically.

I would recommend anyone interested in this topic read ‘Dawn of the New Everything’ by Jaron Lanier, which is really quite honest about both the positives and negatives of VR. Having only recently had a chance to try it out, I feel like it’s really just another medium (a rather intense and currently flawed one I find), like other interactive media, with potential for expression, utility, unique communication and imagination, but also for disconnection from reality/escapism, addiction, dystopia, tracking, control etc. A lot of pronouncements in this article and the Wired one feel as overblown and one-sided as the hype is on the other side of the fence… There are perfectly good use cases for VR/AR whereby we could save on travel/pollution by telepresence collaboration, help people with eg. disabilities, perform remote work in hostile environments, offer therapeutic treatments, experiment with identity etc. or just as another form of daft escapism or art (and a potentially more active one than some at that). Nothing stops people from using it for short periods and then enjoying rich and fulfilling real lives, in the same way that you’ve got couch potatoes vs. people who just enjoy the escapism of occasionally watching a couple of tv shows/playing games etc. …I do find FB’s closed/sign-in etc. subsidised uber-tracking thang is worrying though…

Data Trash: Theory of Virtual Class (1994)[1] is an oldie but goodie, about how cyberspace is an un-equalizer, about how more and more are left behind. Publisher's Weekly review: > They have anticipated the debris that will be left by the traffic of the information highway-and they can't ignore the roadkill. What follows is a survey exploring the consequences of technology on culture, economy, class and individuality. They hold that virtual reality will supplant reality itself, that use of information will reinforce extant caste systems, and that ultimately the information highway will not be so much a tool providing us with usable data but rather it will provide those who control it with data to use us. Their findings, while alternately compelling and repellent, are undermined as they single-handedly double the lexicon of technobabble.

The book is both deadly-serious but also self-indulgent, playful, not serious writing per se.

It's long been a part of why I think the web is better & more interesting than most tech projects: hypertext markup language is a medium, a somewhat legible one (alas considerbly less so with the advent of webapps & especially React). There's not presently a lot of hooks, reasons why regular folk would want to immerse themselves in it's technics, the stratification will continue, but I continue to think there are some not-fully-visible tidal forces that make the web potentially one day more compelling, as an interesting empowering useful primary & general interface to computing in general.

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312122119

The article sees the dystopia of the Metaverse in its real world implications (poverty, escapism) and so on, and uses Ready Player One as an example, but I think the more fundamental observation about that book and the corporate Metaverse is what Derrida called Hauntology, or what Mark Fisher later described as the inability of being able to imagine new futures.

What's noteworthy about RPO isn't the poverty, it's the fact that everything in the Metaverse, and the book itself, is just a repetition of the same nostalgic elements over and over. There is no actual future in the RPO Oasis, just past, in the same way Hollywood (mentioned in another comment) and video game studios increasingly keep re-publishing the same franchises over and over.

So the real threat coming from the Metaverse might not be the poverty or degrading infrastructure which is a sort of obvious one, but the erosion of our capacity to produce any sort of genuine novelty or imagine alternative worlds. Ironically enough, the Metaverse which is supposed to be a sort of wellspring of new ideas is more like a haunted house where you end up trapped like some kind of half-abandoned MMO where people, half-dead, run through the same stories over and over.

Important to point out that Fisher saw this inability to produce any futures as a feature of our political, cultural and economic system (i.e. 'neoliberalism' overused term nowadays) and not just a particular technology.

This is what is going to burst the social media bubble.

Humans already live in a collective hallucination known as social reality. It’s a distinct overlay, distinct from our physical contextual realities and the phenomena we derive our physical laws from etc. overlay of what? Don’t ask. Variously explained as wiggles or turtles all the way down, or so I was told. I just wanted to point out that we flap our gums or thumbs a lot and ping concepts in each other’s minds via language, but speaking about stuff is not the same as the stuff itself.