The Metaverse is an ideological concept, not a technological one

“Improvements in communication…make for increased difficulties of understanding.”

— Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication

Mark Zuckerberg’s 2021 announcement that Facebook was now a “Metaverse” company has drawn interest and discussion (here is a fairly good overall summary). The more optimistic have tended to speculate about just what “the Metaverse” is supposed to be. The more pessimistic have dismissed the concept as a mere marketing ploy, intended to distract attention from Facebook’s current problems.

I don’t think Zuckerberg is cynical in his belief that “the Metaverse” is the future of the internet. From what I’ve seen of his statements, Zuckerberg is a true believer. And it’s from those statements (interpreted somewhat by someone else here) that I think I can identify a rather familiar ideological apparatus at work in the metaverse: techno-utopian, techno-determinist, more than a little New Agey, and rather problematically disconnected from material reality.

Probably the most significant statement by Zuckerberg is a statement that makes no actual mention of the Metaverse: “the basic story of technology in our lifetimes is how it’s given us the power to express ourselves and experience the world with ever greater richness”. While technologists might debate about whether the Metaverse has something to do with contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR), Zuckerberg’s statement here isn’t about what technology is currently: it’s about how he thinks current technology progresses and what technology does. The key terms here aren’t AR or VR: they’re “express ourselves” and “experience the world”. The details of how any given technology does this seem to me far less important here than the insistence that technology has progressively enabled expression and experience in better and better ways, and that it will inevitably continue to do so (just so long as technology is able to progress at all).

I see in this embrace of expression and experience as unambiguous goods, which technology amplifies (with said amplification also viewed as an unambiguous good), a countercultural, techno-Romantic view of digital computing which has permeated much of the discourse around the subject at least as far back as the 1960s. People like Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Rushkoff have all partaken in it in some way. To greatly oversimplify, this view entails the idea that digital media can bridge the gap between minds, and that it can do so in a way that no other kind of media can. In its more extreme form (such as in Kurzweil’s publications), this bridging is total: in the digital future, minds can actually combine and separate in new combinations, with individuality becoming a much more contingent state of being.

In its less extreme form, it simply views the joining of “minds” via digital media to be a source of both power and emancipation for everyone who joins. Zuckerberg’s formulation of the Metaverse, in such terms, is not a statement about how the Metaverse will work as a technology. It is about how technology itself should work, with the Metaverse being a placeholder label for a future where it does so more effectively than it does in the present.

It is also, problematically, a statement about how technology will “inevitably” work in the future. Although I don’t think this is intentional, this confusion, between what will be and what ought to be, can all too easily lead to viewing current problems with digital computing technology’s implementation as due to the technology simply not being developed enough. Although Zuckerberg himself has not said this (yet), it is only a short hop from viewing “the story of technology in our lifetimes” as one of progressively enabling greater expression and experience, to the pseudocritique of current technology’s problems being due to nothing more than current imperfections in the amplification of the richness of experience and expression. In such a pseudocritique, all that’s needed to fix problems associated with the technological development of digital media is more technological development.

The more trenchant critique is first, to question whether the enhancement of expression and experience are always unambiguously good. It should not take too long to think of examples of both that become worse, not better, if they are enhanced in some ways. It is, second, to question the “story of technology” as presented. The “greater richness” of technologically-mediated experience has been extremely unevenly developed. Marshall McLuhan’s media theory has unfortunately presented “electric media” as an extension of the entire human nervous system, as a kind of culmination of all media that have existed so far, but his descriptions of earlier forms of media are likely more relevant to contemporary digital media: they extend a part of the human, but also cut off a part of the human in doing so.

Technology in our lifetimes has changed human experience, but it has not done so in a neat or continuous way. My own view is that one particularly problematic way in which contemporary digital media has altered our everyday experience is in radically reworking what it means to have a continuity of experience, and not for the better. Hopefully someday in the not-too distant future I can explain in detail what I actually mean by that. But the Metaverse is not the answer to that. It is an ideological assumption of what the future will be like, one which bypasses problems with contemporary digital computing technology rather than addressing them.