Smoke-And-Mirrors Futurism
If you want to augment reality how about you make it possible for me to buy a house
I’d like you to take a moment and try to remember what you thought the future would look like when you were younger. Maybe you imagined a future where the early internet’s clumsiness was ironed out and gave way to a boundless and interconnected world. Maybe you’re a bit older, born with a little more hope, and dreamed of recreational space travel or flying cars. No matter what you imagined, I’d bet that it didn’t look like this.
Unfortunately, the future is here.
That’s Mark Zuckerberg’s newest addition to The Metaverse; it’s some sort of bad Epcot, I think? I’ve been puzzled by The Metaverse lately after watching the documentary We Met In Virtual Reality. The doc follows a number of individuals and couples who found friendship, community, and love in virtual reality. Specifically, they found these things in the world of VR Chat, a game that’s essentially functioned exactly how The Metaverse is supposed to function since it was released in 2014. Users adopt avatars and interact in digital spaces that (ostensibly) can exist in ways that the real world can’t. I enjoyed the documentary, finding that it treated its subject matter without the usual “omg this is so WEIRD” tone that usually gets applied to coverage of online subcultures.
With relatively similar (read: rough) graphics, I found myself stumped as to why I’ve found VR Chat charming and The Metaverse appalling. Sure, the backing of a multi-billion dollar corporation that has a vested interest in making all our uncles insane didn’t help, but there was something more going on here.
The first of these images is, one can assume, what a fun night out will look like in The Metaverse.
The second is one of the couples from We Met In Virtual Reality.
There was a time in my dumber years where I might’ve made fun of the VR Chat users and their deeply earnest, deeply horny, avatars. But in the face of so many brazen attempts to homogenize our digital identities, something that oozes so much personality can really only be endearing to me now. This is like seeing an old Angelfire page or a well-maintained Xanga. The internet provides fewer and fewer opportunities for expression like this and I see no reason to laugh in the face of a couple who’ve found one. Their Horned, horny, and tatted-up, avatars are pushing the bounds of the reality in which they spend their non-digital time. In other words, they’re taking advantage of the fact that they’re in virtual reality.
Meanwhile in The Metaverse, everyone is dressed like somebody you know from work but harbor a quiet disdain towards and they’re all hanging out at the Minecraft version of every outdoor bar in the country. It feels all at once entirely lacking in self awareness and completely embarrassed of itself. This is all we have it screams, thousands of years and this is all we have.
Now there’s no reason to assume that The Metaverse won’t improve its look. In its eventual release iteration, I assume there will be plenty of beautiful sights to behold and otherworldly landscapes to float through. But no matter how many updates are hastily applied to The Metaverse, it can never escape its own malignant blandness.
And that’s the pickle that all the Big Brain Billionaires find themselves in these days, isn’t it. They all want to declare themselves geniuses and futurists but when the time comes to share their vision, we get this.
And if the issue remained isolated to Billionaire TED Talks and product launches, it likely wouldn’t bother me as much. But this type of faux futurism has leaked into the culture at large. There’s a constant stream of “innovations” that don’t improve, enrich, or simplify our lives. All these nothing inventions do is put a Genius Bar facade on whatever crumbling piece of our societal infrastructure lies beneath it. It’s all essentially variations on this:
Clean lines, bright colors, and brighter lights. The future is now! Aren’t you so glad to be here? The Metaverse approach has even found its way into restaurants.
Thank God we can finally see what food would look like in 3D. I was just telling a friend that I had a hard time making decisions at restaurants primarily because I couldn’t look at a cartoonish rendering of Goopy Carbonara from The Sims before ordering.
Listen, I know I sound like a grump. I know. I understand that some of this stuff brings people joy, in the way that I understand that the right enrichment toys can make a lion forget that there’s a savannah. Maybe these dumb things are just dumb things. Maybe this is just what we should expect of the modern world. The companies give us access to every human mind screaming in unison and in exchange we let them turn our uncles’ minds into soup for profit. If they decide to give us a boring, branded, void where my boss can use emoticons to inform me that my team has been laid off, that’s just the price of doing business in the future, isn’t it? I should be grateful, shouldn’t I?
I don’t make a habit of imagining the future anymore because I don’t like being terrified or mad or remembering that I don’t have retirement savings. But every now and then I’m able to imagine one in which even one of our ultra-wealthy benefactors decides that it might be fun if people liked him. Maybe then, they’d do something actually transformative, and finally find themselves befitting of the moniker of “futurist.”
More likely, I will someday be murdered by a Star Wars Storm Trooper branded security guard for accidentally using my Nestle Water pass to enter a Disney Operated (Amazon owned) Air Filtration Center. A guy will snap a pic and remark that their uniforms have an easter egg from the Clone Wars Animated Series.
Until then, I think it’s best to learn to laugh at the misfires. Like those awful robot dogs people were once so smitten with, this technology will someday improve to a point where we won’t be able to ignore it. We’ll all be floating, sexless, avatars taking meetings in our metaverse office. We’ll be stuck wondering if our new face cream will do anything for headset-chafe, hoping that the horny denizens of VR Chat managed to escape while they still could.
And while there is a way to make virtual reality work, to make friends, feel joy, and explore your identity from the confines of a computer chair, The Metaverse will never be the place where it’s perfected. You will never sit on a Metaverse patio, drink in hand, feeling the cool night breeze on your skin. You’ll never forget where you are.
I cackled: “Meanwhile in The Metaverse, everyone is dressed like somebody you know from work but harbor a quiet disdain towards and they’re all hanging out at the Minecraft version of every outdoor bar in the country.”