I've Seen The Metaverse - and I Don't Want It

I’ve seen the metaverse – and I don’t want it
The tech world has been overtaken by the seductive idea of a virtual utopia, but
what’s on offer looks more like a late-capitalist technocratic nightmare
I have spent large portions of my life in virtual worlds. I’ve played video games
since I was six; as a millennial, I’ve lived online since adolescence; and I’ve been
reporting on games and gaming culture for 16 years. I have been to Iceland for an
annual gathering of the players of EVE Online, an online spaceship game whose
virtual politics, friendships and rivalries are as real as anything that exists outside its
digital universe. I’ve seen companies make millions, then billions from selling
virtual clothes and items to players eager to decorate their virtual selves. I’ve
encountered people who met in digital worlds and got married in the real one, who
have formed some of their most significant relationships and had meaningful life
experiences in, well … people used to call it cyberspace, but the current buzzword
is “the metaverse”.
Ask 50 people what the metaverse means, right now, and you’ll get 50 different
answers. If a metaverse is where the real and virtual worlds collide, then Instagram
is a metaverse: you create an avatar, curate your image, and use it to interact with
other people. What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that it’s worth money.
Epic Games and the recently rebranded Facebook are investing billions a year in this
idea. When Microsoft bought video game publisher Activision for $70bn last week,
it was described as “a bet on the metaverse”.
The tech world seems to be leaning towards some kind of early 00s conception of
wearing a VR headset and haptic suit and driving a flying car towards your perfect
pretend mansion in a soothingly sanitised alternate reality, where you can have
anything you want as long as you can pay for it. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s now-
infamous presentation of the future of his company, with its bland cartoonish avatars
and emptily pleasant environments. It is the future as envisioned by someone with
precious little imagination.
I do not deny that some people want this vision. Ready Player One was a runaway
hit. But the metaverse as envisioned by the people currently investing in it – by tech
billionaires such as Zuckerberg and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, by techbro
hucksters selling astonishingly ugly generative-art NFTs and using words like
“cryptoverse” – can only be described as spiritually bereft. It holds no interest for
me.
Virtual worlds can be incredibly liberating. The promise of cyberspace, right back
to its inception, has been that it makes us all equal, allowing us to be judged not by
our physical presentation or limitations, but by what’s inside our heads, by how we
want to be seen. The dream is of a virtual place where the hierarchies and limitations
of the real world fall away, where the nerdy dweeb can be the hero, where the
impoverished and bored can get away from their reality and live somewhere more
exciting, more rewarding.
Anyone who is marginalised in the real world, though, knows that this is not how
things go down. Virtual worlds are not inherently any better than the real one.
Worker exploitation exists in them – look at World of Warcraft, in which
Venezuelans farm currency to sell to first-world players, or Roblox, in which young
game developers have put in long hours on unregulated projects for little reward.
Misogyny and homophobia exist in them, too – ask anyone who’s ever had the
misfortune to sound female on voice chat while playing a multiplayer shooter, or be
non-gender-conforming on Twitch. As for racism, well – it is alive and well, and
seemingly emboldened, in the digital world.
The idea that a metaverse will magically solve any of these problems is a total
fantasy. All that they really do is reflect the people that make them and spend time
in them. Unfortunately, nothing I have experienced in any virtual world makes me
feel good about the idea of the metaverse – because it is being constructed by people
to whom the problems of the real world are mostly invisible. Unless companies put
immense efforts into dismantling prejudices and unconscious biases, they are
thoughtlessly replicated in whatever they create. Nobody has yet found a way to
effectively moderate anywhere online to keep it free from abuse and toxicity and
manipulation by bad actors. Given what’s happened with Facebook, do you trust
Meta with this responsibility? Do you trust Microsoft with it?
And what will the metaverse look like? Who gets to decide? Outside the sanitised
aesthetic of the Zuckerverse (and old virtual-world standby Second Life), the main
artistic references we currently have are either the gaudiness of Fortnite or Roblox
or the no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare that is VRChat. Then there are the
seemingly endless runs of vapid NFT art, many of which are tied to their own
promised metaverses, drawing in their buyers with the promise of community. Every
time I see a newly minted set of images (well, links to images) go up for sale I’m
like, really? ANOTHER series of rad skulls? It is all just so powerfully adolescent,
and yet apparently, they continually sell out. These are currently the people
determining what the future might look like. It is depressing.
I would feel better about the idea of the metaverse if it wasn’t currently dominated
by companies and disaster capitalists trying to figure out a way to make more money
as the real world’s resources are dwindling. The metaverse as envisioned by these
people, by the tech giants, is not some promising new frontier for humanity. It is
another place to spend money on things, except in this place the empty promise that
buying stuff will make you happy is left even more exposed by the fact that the
things in question do not physically exist.
As far as I can work out, the idea is to take the principle of artificial scarcity to an
absurdist extreme – to make you want things you absolutely don’t need. The problem
is not that I think this won’t work. The problem is that I think it will. The current
NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to
jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer, and honestly it is eroding my faith in
humanity. What gaping deficiency are we living with that makes us feel the need to
spend serious money on tokens that prove ownership of a procedurally generated
image, just to feel part of something? This is all happening, of course, while the
Earth continues to heat up, and at enormous environmental cost. I can’t help but
wonder if these giant companies are so intent on selling us and the markets on the
idea of a virtual future in order to distract us all from what they are doing to the real
one.
I have seen what virtual worlds can do for people. I have spent my entire adult life
reporting on them, and what people do in them and the meaning that they find there.
So the fact that I’m now the one standing here saying that we don’t want this, feels
significant. Meta has patented technology that could track what you look at and how
your body moves in virtual reality in order to target ads at you. Is that the future of
video games and all the other virtual places where we spend time – to have our
attention continually tracked and monetised, even more so than it is in real life? The
virtual worlds of games and the early internet used to be an escape from the
inequalities and injustices of the real one. To see the tendrils of big tech and social
media extending towards the places that have been a refuge for me and millions of
others is disturbing. I don’t trust these people with the future. The more I hear about
the metaverse, the less I want to do with it.
Essential words for writing and speaking
1. Metaverse - the internet considered as an imaginary area without limits where

you can meet people in virtual reality (= images and sounds, produced by a
computer, that seem to represent a real place or situation).
He imagines computer users interacting in a simulated three-dimensional world
called the Metaverse.
2. Collide - If the aims, opinions, or interests of one person or group collide with
those of another person or group, they are very different from each other and are
therefore opposed.
What happens when the two interests collide will make a fascinating spectacle.
3. Lean towards - to be interested in something and be likely to do a particular
activity.
He said he was leaning toward entering the race for governor.
4. Sanitise - to change something in order to make it less strongly expressed, less
harmful, or less offensive.
The military wants to allow only a sanitized report/version of the incident to become
public.
5. Envision - to imagine or expect something to happen, appear, etc. in a particular
way.
He envisioned a partnership between business and government.
6. Immense - extremely large in size or degree.
He inherited an immense fortune.
7. Dismantle - to show that a claim, statement or explanation is not true or correct.
If you disagree, then dismantle the argument with some sort of well-argued counter-
proposition.
8. Frontier - the limit of something, especially the limit of what is known about a
particular subject or activity.
Space is the final frontier for us to explore.
9. Erode - to gradually destroy something or make it weaker over a period of time;
to be destroyed or made weaker in this way.
Her confidence has been slowly eroded by repeated failures.
10. Distract somebody/something (from something) - to take somebody’s
attention away from what they are trying to do.
You're distracting me from my work.

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I’ve seen the metaverse – and I don’t want it

1. Metaverse - the internet considered as an imaginary area without limits where

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