Is The Metaverse Good?

The metaverse is hot again but who actually wants one and why?

A couple weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to spend some time in both Smoky Mountain National Park and Shenandoah National Park. I’m far from an outdoorsman—I’ve never hunted, rarely camped, and probably can’t start a fire—but I increasingly find being in nature restorative, calming, and reassuring. There’s a beauty and majesty found in the natural world that can’t be recreated by humans. While overlooking a vast valley in the Shenandoah, I was captivated by sheer magnitudes, the height of the mountains, the depth of valleys, the density of the trees, the innumerable insects flying and buzzing around. Perhaps it’s a byproduct of growing up in the suburbs on the east side of Cleveland and now residing in Brooklyn, but experiences like these allow me to rest and put my mind in order. There’s something profoundly human about enjoying and experiencing nature. We’ve evolved to see more shades of green than any other color and water has an inherent calming effect.

When I got back, there was a roaring discussion about what might be considered the exact opposite of the natural world: the metaverse. It’s difficult to pin down a real definition of the metaverse because, well, it doesn’t exist yet. The term was coined in the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which takes place in a dystopian America and follows the protagonist, cheekily named Hiro Protagonist, as he tries to figure out what’s going on with a new computer virus, Snow Crash. He spends a lot of his time in “the metaverse,” which is described as a “computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones.” It’s a three-dimensional virtual world where Hiro can walk around and interact with other people at places like a library or a nightclub. It’s sort of like how people log into Fortnite or other video games and talk to their friends, except it’s more than just a game and it’s not on a screen.You feel as if you are actually there. 

But depending on who you talk to, you might get another definition. I don’t think the differences between the various conceptions of the metaverse really matter for our purposes, but if you want to learn more, here are some options:

• Mark Zuckerberg recently brought the metaverse back into the conversation, and you can read his definition and thoughts on turning Facebook “into a metaverse company” here.

• Back in May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained Microsoft Azure’s product offerings as a metaverse.

• Venture capitalist and other things Matthew Ball writes extensively about the metaverse, including a nine-part primer and a list of eight core attributes something must have to be a metaverse.

• If you want a more in-depth introduction than I have given, but you would just like an executive summary of the sources I’ve listed, I would highly recommend this write-up from Ben Thompson atStratechery.

• I also definitely recommend reading this interview with Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson from 2017, where he discusses the metaverse.

• Here’s an article from Forbes on what THE METAVERSE MEANS FOR CRM!!!! Do not read this lol.

I’m less interested in the specific details of what a metaverse is than I am in why the leaders of major tech companies and VC firms are so eager to create it. Do we need a metaverse? Would a metaverse make the world better, would people be happier? Is anyone even bothering to ask these questions? When I read the accounts above, I am not left feeling optimistic on any front. Take this passage from the Zuckerberg interview:

“I don’t know about you, but a lot of mornings, I reach for my phone by my bedside before I even put on my glasses, just to make sure, get whatever text messages I got during the middle of the night and make sure that nothing has gone wrong that I need to jump into immediately upon waking up. So I don’t think that this is primarily about being engaged with the internet more. I think it’s about being engaged more naturally.”

He’s basically saying, “Well, I am on the internet from the second my eyelids move until I fall asleep at night, so why not make the internet better?” Set aside if the metaverse would make the internet “better”—is it healthy to be on the internet all day?

Moving on, Zuckerberg talks a lot about the economic benefits of the metaverse.

“This is something that I hope eventually millions of people will be working in and creating content for—whether it’s experiences, or spaces, or virtual goods, or virtual clothing, or doing work helping to curate and introduce people to spaces and keep it safe. I just think this is going to be a huge economy and frankly, I think that that needs to exist. This needs to be a rising tide that lifts a lot of boats. We can’t just think about this as a product that we’re building.”

Zuck views the metaverse as something that could create economic opportunity and even help fight inequality. He cites a study by Raj Chetty that more or less explains how important where someone is born is to their economic earning potential. So the thesis is, the metaverse would minimize the importance of geography.

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But there’s something undeniably unsettling about these tech lords, who arguably more than anyone else have shaped our current political hellscape where everyone is fighting all the time building a new world that is supposed to fix economic inequality.

It just sounds insane on the face of it. In 2016, the World Bank said Silicon Valley was exacerbating economic inequality. Facebook is perpetually involved in antitrust litigation. And of course, it’s not just Facebook. Microsoft was declared a monopoly years ago. In October, the DOJ sued Google for monopolistic behavior. Amazon is so powerful Jeff Bezos is going to fucking outer space for fun. Ben Dreyfuss, formerly of Mother Jones, writes on his Substack that it is in fact social media that is the cause for why everyone is so mad about politics all the time. He makes a very compelling argument:

“What happens after some very bad thing is brought to the attention of your group? You and the rest of your group condemn the news story or bad tweet or whatever that moral violation is (even if you only just scoff to yourself). You are bonded closer together and your moral framework is reaffirmed. Except social media platforms have gotten incredibly vast and inevitably you will discover a group of people who disagree with you. They are the other group. And there are lots of them and they are defending that which you find indefensible. It does not matter that there might as well be as many people who agree with you. You are shook. There are more monsters in the world than you thought.

In this world—a world that you entered entirely because of social media—there are monsters under every other bed; snakes slithering under every other stone; there are cannibals afoot and if you make one small mistake they’ll pounce and gobble you up in the night. In a world like that, it only makes sense to be angry!

That world isn’t real. It’s a fiction. But it’s a fiction we’re all increasingly trapped in.”

So why would we want the folks who created this to make an entirely new world? Who is asking for this besides those with a financial incentive for it to exist?

As Brian Merchant brilliantly lays out for Vice, the metaverse is and always will be a dystopian phenomenon. The metaverse of Snow Crash came into existence because the capitalist overlords had destroyed the real world. In that novel, nearly everything is privatized. Poverty is the default. Death is everywhere. People are living storage containers and getting murdered by their employers for delivering pizzas late. That gave birth to the metaverse. As Merchant writes:

“In the world of Snow Crash, the metaverse is not viewed as particularly cool—it is necessary, because the real world has become so unbearable. Ditto in the most famous book to update the metaverse’s architecture for our modern, pop culture-saturated era: Ready Player One. Its Oasis is basically the Metaverse if it were written by a neural net trained on 80s movies and 00s video games. 

That book too is set in a nearish dystopian future where desperate people are driven to escape their unpleasant lives into a vast virtual environment—it is insinuated that either the Oasis is so popular because the world is so bad, or the world is so bad because the Oasis is so popular. This is a weird nexus at which to want to build out your company’s future! And yet for a time, new recruits to Facebook’s Oculus division were handed copies of the book as required reading.”

(I encourage you to read the rest of Merchant’s article, it’s quite good and goes more in depth on the absurdity of tech lords building a metaverse.)

I began this essay talking about beautiful trees and mountains, shades of green and the sound of running water, and you may have thought, “Where are you going with this, Joe?” And then, “What did that have to do with anything, Joe?”

Aside from the danger I perceive in a metaverse created by Silicon Valley capitalists, I think the idea of spending an inordinate amount of time online in a digital space runs counter to what it means to be human. I think it's the case that a huge number of people don’t spend enough time in nature as it is, and I, living in Brooklyn, would count myself as part of that group.

There’s voluminous research that demonstrates benefits to humanity from being in and near natural environments. For example, a series of studies in 2010 by psychologists Richard Ryan, Netta Weinstein, and colleagues found that:

“…These five methodologically varied studies revealed a consistent positive relation between being outdoors and subjective vitality. This effect appears to be independent of other significant influences on subjective vitality such as levels of physical activity or social interaction, and is at least partially mediated by the presence of natural elements in the setting. These subjective vitality effects may help to explain why people often appear to be drawn to natural settings, and why as a culture we might want to think about the importance of sustaining the natural elements that surround us and enhancing people’s opportunities to access them.”

Vitality is defined in this study as “having physical and mental energy. When vital, people experience a sense of enthusiasm, aliveness, and energy available to the self.”

So, in other words, being outside energizes us, among other things. There’s also evidence of other benefits. A separate study by Weinstein, Andrew Pryzbylski, and Ryan (2009) asked simply, “Can nature make us more caring?” The answer seems to be that yes, it can. An excerpt from “Self Determination Theory” by Ryan and Edward Dece:

“Weinstein, Pryzbylski, and Ryan had people in a room in which they either were or were not in the presence of indoor living plants while they engaged in a paradigm involving reward distributions. Participants had to decide either to share money made available to them, knowing only that the money would be shared with a second student and that they could potentially lose all the funds, or to keep the money without risk of loss but without benefit to another student. Those in the more natural setting were more generous, even though it carried risk, whereas those immersed in non-natural settings were less likely to give to others.”

There is such an abundance of evidence that nature and the outdoors are integral to human wellbeing that it is part of formal theory. One of the propositions of Basic Psychological Needs Theory is that “meaningful exposure to living nature has a positive effect on subjective vitality relative to exposure to non-natural, built environments without living elements, and this relation is mediated in part by basic psychological needs.”

Look, I’m not a troglodyte. I don’t think all technological advancements are bad. There’s a lot of good that comes from online communities, they provide a sense of belonging to millions of people. There’s a reason why Fortnite is so popular. Hell, I once started an esports website and I work for a digital news publisher. The internet is a huge part of my life. But I do think it’s worth stopping and asking, “Wait, is this good?” Do we want people having virtual meetings all day talking to other people’s avatars? Does anybody want this? If the metaverse does have utility, do we want it to be built by the already powerful tech giants? Is this anything more than rich people acting out childhood fantasies?

And what about the real world? Why not try to fix the problems here? If Zuckerberg is concerned about geographic economic determinism, why not try to help impoverished and under-resourced areas? It seems that even just planting some more trees and making places literally greener might have a helluva lot more impact than investing literal billions of dollars into virtual reality meetings. Another excerpt from Self Determination Theory, emphasis added:

“Weinstein, Balmford, DeHaan, Gladwell, Bradbury, and Amano (2005) recently used interviews of people across the United Kingdom to assess the perceived quality of people’s access to views of nature and the amount of time they spent in nature while also measuring their sense of community cohesion. Their results suggested significant connections between these variables, showing that more access to nature was linked to greater community cohesion, which in turn, predicted lower crime and also greater well-being.”

When I read about the metaverse, it seems like folks are trying to solve problems that don’t exist, or going about “fixing” things in a counterproductive way. Yeah, virtual meetings and staring at screens all day is shitty. The solution, to me, does not seem to be to just live inside our screens. We have loads of evidence of things that increase wellbeing, promote wellbeing and literally make people more compassionate. Maybe invest in those things.