You are going to be pushed into virtual reality whether you like it or not.
Last Christmas Eve, I was driving with my 17-year-old nephew through an industrial part of northeast Portland, Oregon, when he pointed out some new graffiti on a wall near his house. “How Does The Metaverse,” someone had written, in quite beautiful blue script, “Help Poor People?”
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There are hardly any better ways in American life to express political objections to the tech- and capital-driven changes that have so reshaped our lives in the past decades—from the industrialization of American agriculture to mass adoption of the media technologies that have done so much to destroy our brains and public debate. One of our last vestiges of mainstream consensus is that we talk about these shifts as irresistible, not subject to serious objection. But something strange is happening with the idea of the Metaverse, a basket of consumer technologies that might someday add up to an immersive and interconnected virtual world— where many very powerful people hope we may soon be socializing, looking at art, buying property, and generally conducting our individual human lives through the prism of a mass-produced consumer headset. The systems that work to convince us that consumer technologies are inevitably a step forward in the march of human progress are fraying. No one was going around spraypainting anti-iPhone slogans on buildings back in 2009. The Metaverse is being planned, but it is going to take some effort to sell it.
Last spring, the early web pioneer, billionaire investor, and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen did an interview that got a lot of attention in the small world of people who theorize about tech, and almost none outside of it. It was with a pseudonymous figure who writes under the name Niccolo Soldo, who alternates between obviously satirical forays and genuinely weighty questions about how tech has reshaped human life in the past few years. About halfway through, Soldo asked Andreessen a question about whether our world of constant screen-based communication was hurting our collective mental health.
“Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege,” Andreessen answered, before going into a world-historical vision of what the Metaverse would offer to humanity. Reality Privilege was an idea he’d borrowed from the virtual reality developer Beau Cronin, who wrote way back in 2015 that physical reality, such as we experience as we go through the world in our human bodies, was a painful and unpleasant experience for many—maybe even most—of us. So it was a mark of privilege, comfort and luck, to think of non-digital reality as being truer or more worthwhile than one experienced through a screen. “If it’s hard to imagine much about your life that could be improved by porting to a new platform,” Cronin wrote about virtual-reality worlds, “then maybe you’re not the target user here. Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges. You are one of the Verified Users of the real. Congratulations for now, but beware the platform shift ahead.”
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But even Cronin seemed taken aback by Andreesen’s later elaboration of the Reality Privilege concept, and the intense discussion it produced in the tiny world of people who follow this sort of thing. “A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance,” Andreessen told Soldo. “Beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date.” But these are just the lucky among us. “Everyone else,” he said, “the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.”
It turned out that Andreessen had a very direct answer to the question of how the Metaverse would help poor people. “The Reality Privileged,” he said, “call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
So here’s an immensely influential billionaire, with a huge personal stake in the development of the Metaverse, leveraging the language of privilege to suggest that the opinions of people who protest that we’re being lead towards dystopia are definitionally invalid. And I’m going to offer a prediction: you will hear more arguments like this in the near future. But this is less of a new line of thinking than it may appear at first. Andreessen is just stating things more clearly than anyone had to back before we knew how ruinous the consumer technologies sold to us as social progress would be to our lives and society. Because if we can see how this Metaverse is being sold, maybe we might not end up buying it.
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But this world must exist, if you’re thinking about the needs of corporate America. Because almost all our major innovations in the past 50 years have been in the form communications technologies and financial tinkering. The Metaverse offers a vital new avenue for profits and growth, in an economy increasingly “decoupled,” as gentle phrasing has it, from material reality. “People may spend their time hanging out on Twitter and Facebook,” as the tech writer and Twitter gadfly Noah Smith wrote recently, “but with a few exceptions, they still produce and sell stuff in the real world. The more complex and flexible of a virtual reality the Metaverse creates, the more humans will actually be able to innovate new goods and services within that reality.”
This gives you a more realistic picture of this Metaverse than what you usually get from slavish media reports about a beautiful, seamless new world. It’s a jumble of half-developed products and speculative corporate forays, more notable at this point for the strange and inventive ways that companies have planned to monetize every aspect of virtual-world life than for any immersive VR experiences. The closest thing we have to the Metaverse as planned by Andreessen are video games, and the most radical innovations in these game-worlds are decentralized currencies and the ability (limited as yet, but growing) for inhabitants to invest in things like land and houses that they would have no hope of affording in the physical reality as we know it. But with investors already moving into the market, it may soon be as difficult for a young person to imagine buying a house in Decentraland as in the real world.
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You can already see this power at work. “Virtual worlds, immersive online experiences, digital economies—these concepts are new and different and often uncomfortable,” the investor and tech blogger Rex Woodbury wrote soon after Andreessen’s interview came out. “Even I occasionally find it all a little dystopian. But the concept of Reality Privilege resonates. Not everyone has the chance to live in Manhattan.” Who was he, with all his privilege, to argue against a chance for the reality-impoverished to live there virtually?
But he doesn’t have much of a choice either way. “This sexy VR future grows nearer with every advance in computer power,” an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Rob Brooks, an Australian biologist, stated recently. “With faster processors, better haptics, and teledildonic (look it up yourself!) sex toys that can be controlled remotely, two or more people will have the chance to participate in the same VR-enhanced, physically satisfying sex scene, while each remains in the comfort and safety of their own home.”
You may not have realized how highly planned the future of sex in the Metaverse already is. Be careful about objecting to it, or you may be accused of prudishness. “I side with the machines and against the puritans,” Brooks wrote. “I think artificial intimacy could deliver a more relaxed, inclusive, and humane sexuality, but only if societies have enough maturity to give it a chance.”
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The way we talk about tech’s role in our lives has taken on a culture war tinge, which may be why I am writing this for a conservative magazine. Words like “empowerment,” “privilege,” and “puritan” are the basic stuff of the pro-Metaverse messaging. The insinuation is that it’s vaguely repressive and reactionary to question the advancing power of tech in our lives. But this dystopia, which will do more to disrupt life in this country than any of the social changes we fight our culture wars over, is an overtly top-down project of corporate force. Corporations are the ones generating demand and creating narratives to spur the adoption of technologies they haven’t even built yet.
It’s too late to stop them from building them. But somehow I still think it may be possible to build a politics that resists the forces leading us into dystopia and continues the 5,000-year project of improving the reality we already have. Even tech executives are starting to sound worried about where this is all heading. “This metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else,” Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, said recently. “If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be god on Earth.”
That’s not quite true. They won’t be god on Earth. They’ll be god in the Metaverse. Our only option now is to build an Earth that’s preferable to it.