<nettime> meta(verse)

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

I'm sure most of you have heard by now that Facebook is renaming itself 
"Meta" and promoting a platform called "Metaverse", basically, a shared, 
but heavily customizable VR/AR world.

If you haven't seen the video from the keynote, have look. You won't be 
able to get through the entire 80-minute show (I tried, and failed) but 
here are a few minutes to get the flavor of how dated this future feels. 
There is nothing in there that you couldn't do in Second Life and it 
even looks pretty much the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g

The best way to feel of the emptiness of the vision is probably through 
a series of super-cuts of the most frequently doled out platitudes: 
experience, the physical world, commerce/community, the future, and a 
few more.

https://twitter.com/sam_lavigne/status/1453901401977937921

The sheer backwardness and ugliness of the entire vision are depressing 
no matter whether you look at it from an aesthetic, social, or economic 
perspective. And all of this is made worse by the company's track record 
on these things so far.

The plan is pretty obviously a land grab by the company but the curious 
thing is why they believe that such land would exist in the first place.

This happens exactly at a moment when the political class seems to have 
given up preventing global heating to pass dangerous tipping points of 
no return. So, this is clearly meant to paper over an increasingly 
dystopian world to keep selling the promise of "creativity" and 
"self-expression" as a carrot, and a "new economy" as a stick. With 
Uber's and Airbnb's promise to monetize your spare resources as a way to 
deal with real-life precarity ringing hollow (indeed, monetizing your 
life _is_ precarity), the new economy of 3D creators is another promise 
to pull yourself up on your own bootstraps.

But is not just the dated dream of virtual reality replacing physical 
reality. What's more, chasing this dream will make physical reality even 
worse. For a lot of reasons, waste of resources, diverting attention 
towards crap, universalizing bias, and so on.

Underlying all of this is this notion of the world as a model. Sure, we 
all operate with (implicit or explicit) models of the world in order to 
make sense of it and be able to act in it. I'm not advocating for some 
sort of unmediated "real".

The problematic element is to have a single model which is supposed to 
replace all others. It's not just that such a model is necessarily under 
complex (the metaverse is cartoonishly so), but that very notion of a 
single model is biased, violent, and will create ugly backlashes. 
Perhaps this is the lasting influence of cybernetics, which as its 
ultimate horizon has such a unified vision where everything could be 
brought into its purview based on the reductionist notion of "information".

Against this, a plethora of voices -- feminist, anti-racist, ecological, 
indigenous, and more -- have sprung up to argue against the 
impossibility of such a unified view (often denounced as colonialist). 
They advocate for the co-existence of a wide range of 
"being-in-the-world", each embodying a different model of the world, if 
you will, that cannot be flattened into a single one. Rather, they 
retain a considerable degree of incommensurability (the tick sees the 
world like no other living being, as J.v.Uxeküll argued as early as the 
1930s) that can only be brought into one to the other through practices 
of mutual respect (because one can never fully grasp or contain the 
other) and care (because each model/world is in itself incomplete and 
depended on others as environment).

Against this life-affirming irreducible complexity that escapes 
cybernetic control is the sad vision of the metaverse, which is both 
extremely reductionist and centrally controlled. Yet, even in its most 
glossy presentation, this vision is utterly unconvincing. Perhaps this 
is a reason to be optimistic and continue to seek ways beyond 
"communication and control".









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