🎶I never Meta world like you before…🎶 But Zuckerberg’s parallel digital universe is something we’ve been anticipating at A/UK
The networks have been aflame this week with the story of Facebook becoming Meta - or at least the holding company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Oculus VR and others, being retitled Meta (in the same way as Google became a subset of Alphabet, a few years ago).
Meta ties into Metaverse, which is a concept from the SF writer Neal Stephenson that has become a key tech-sector metaphor. It stands for a kind of fusion of several kind of online world into one - joining up social media with game spaces with virtual reality experiences, the “meta” (or arching over) element being that users or their goods can transport (or “interoperate”) from one medium to the next.
So Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook-now-Meta, has bet big on this concept. It was launched with a 70-odd minute video (click here, starting from 3.55), involving simulations of what this world might be like (while viewed through special glasses). Also, there were sometimes not-all-that-convincing simulations (or we think they were) of gushing Meta employees, weirdly including Nick Clegg, ex-UK Deputy Prime minister and now head of global comms for Zuckerberg.
Like our friends at Perspectiva, who have been trying to define the meta in metamodernism for quite a while, we were quite startled by this announcement.
Believe it or not, we were already interested in the politics of the Metaverse - it was the implied topic of one of our symposia in 2018, title 360 degree democracy, held in Brighton (see archive here). The Stanford tech professor Fred Turner spoke about his article on The Politics of Virtual Reality - we’ll come back to excerpt that in a minute.
But recently, our co-initator Indra Adnan has been promoting the idea of a “parallel polis” around her latest book, The Politics of Waking Up. This is an all too real, rather than merely virtual, form of active community, inspired by Communist-era Czech resistance networks. But one might consider using aspects of the Metaverse to envision something collectively, that could then be constructed in reality. And the triumph of imagination over limited circumstances that a parallel polis requires is similar to the leap into the Metaverse.
Our other co-initiator, Pat Kane, has been returning to his great theme of play recently - and in a presentation to the University of Colorado recently (see here, starting from 39.51), wondered whether a Metaverse required “Superplay”. Meaning play not regarded as just a rehearsal for complex living, as it functions for higher mammals (including us), but play as imagination realised near-instantly, in the avatars and constructions of a highly-malleable Metaverse, where lives are lived in a state of “real virtuality”. We will practise a “Superplay” - which we will have to get good at.
The passage below from Fred Turner’s essay, from 2015, is powerfully prescient. He compares the immersions of VR/Metaverse to the “democratic surround” of exhibitions from the 50s and 60s, which were self-conscious about forming an intelligent and autonomous citizen, as they carefully selected from the images around them. Turner wonders whether we can learn lessons from that era:
Media that offer no respite between images and no access to the world beyond the images, however temporarily, may encourage audiences to submit themselves to an overwhelming experience. And such submission in and of itself is rarely good for democracy, as Mead and the Committee for National Morale well knew.
But at the same time, the political and economic context of immersion matters enormously. The same technology that we might use to fight racism can just as easily help a beer company fight global thirst. And it can potentially undertake both missions more effectively thanks to corporate integration, media interlinking, and multi-platform storytelling.
For the mid-century designers of democratic surrounds, the answer lay in creating an open, interactive framework within which to stage our encounters with media and each other. In their view, no medium should so suffuse the senses as to disable the individual reason. Audiences should always be free to move their bodies, to gather and disperse, to identify with or ignore whatever images they saw.
By these criteria, we should celebrate augmented reality and hope virtual reality improves. For all its portability, Oculus does not so much let us be individuals together as it lets us be "alone together," in Sherry Turkle's potent phrase. Zuckerberg and many others are betting that we will soon enter shared spaces in virtual reality. If we do, perhaps immersion will promote a democratic sensibility in a way that Mead and her colleagues might have recognized.
Even then, however, the democratic potential of immersive media will still face a threat from the same forces that threaten mass and social media today: large corporations, militarized states, and the needs of the technology firms that increasingly serve them. In many cases, to enter virtual reality will no doubt soon be to enter something closer to a mall than an agora. And who will provide the holograms that will augment our daily lives?
Content providers are already racing to find out. What's perhaps worse is the fact that like all digital technologies, virtual and augmented reality generate reams of data—in fact, they have to track your movements minutely in order to provide the illusion of immersion. The data they generate will be as personal as the way we sit and walk, as intimate and local as our living rooms. States and corporations will certainly pay dearly for that information.
The question of whether or not immersion itself models anti-democratic ways of interaction remains open. But the campaign to use immersive media to make us feel more at home in closely monitored, thoroughly commercialized environments is already under way.
If immersive media are to truly serve democratic ends, we will need to confront not only the new psychological power of virtual environments, but the persistent political and economic powers of the world outside the headset.
More here. And still good questions from Fred.