Solitary confinement
It remains true that no one looks quite as guileless and credulous as when they are wearing VR goggles. Not only are the goggles an unmistakable visual emblem of submissiveness, a willingness to let some corporation constrict your entire sensorium and mete experience out to you on its terms, but they also indicate your complete vulnerability in the space where your body actually is. One would almost need to be isolated in a locked chamber to feel safe in VR, to guarantee that no one would intrude on you and see how foolish you look, if not worse.
Promotional stock photos for VR like the one above often feature a model smiling in wonderment, like they’ve just seen their first donkey at a petting zoo. Sometimes their hands are making stilted gestures to convey that they are manipulating unseen virtual objects in some meaningful way. Rarely will there be another person in the image who is not wearing VR goggles, because if there were, it would be hard to imagine them not smirking at the person with the brick-sneaker strapped to their face. When I see the images of solitary people using VR, I wonder where their friends are. It always makes me think of the Nathan Fielder line: “They're all just out of frame, laughing too.”
VR requires physical isolation, which may be part of why it is easy to imagine bosses making employees use it. In a VR workplace, employees are under total surveillance (everything they do can be measured, optimized, and standardized), and they have no access to co-workers in unsupervised space and opportunity to air grievances, build solidarity, or organize. With VR, certain limits on exploiting labor are lifted — see Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, where impoverished workers are compelled to use VR to control construction robots abroad, for one possible destination — while new forms of work discipline can be imposed, whether it is the ritual humiliation of donning the headset to appear in a cartoon conference room or having to avail oneself of the avatar-customization properties to flaunt your corporate enthusiasm, like wearing so much flair on your Friday’s uniform. And of course to function, VR depends on more straightforward and invasive forms of monitoring like eyeball tracking. How many blinks should you be allowed on company time?
When Facebook first announced its absurd metaverse pivot, lots of commentators dutifully cited (if not read) venture capitalist Matthew Ball’s bloated blog posts about the concept and focused on what kind of consumer experience it supposedly promised. (Won’t it be magical when a DC Comics avatar can meet a Marvel avatar in a Nintendo game?). There was lots of talk about “feeling really present” as though we should all breathe a sign of relief that presence itself had finally been commodified.
But it was also clear from Facebook’s keynote that it was not really for consumers but for managers. At the time, Gian Volpicelli noted in a Wired piece how Mark Zuckerberg’s interview introducing the concept
dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the metaverse’s ability to increase “focus time and individual productivity.” He coined the dreary formula “infinite office,” a supposedly desirable scenario in which metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros.
Now Facebook has managed to foist the metaverse back into the news cycle, in part because media outlets feel obliged to report on its developer conference, which happened this week, but also because the company tried out a post-ironic marketing strategy:
It’s “funnier” when you know the animated legs in its demo were also faked.
Perhaps this was an effort to change the narrative after leaked memos revealed that Facebook’s own employees hate the metaverse. Imagine how fun it would be to work at a company where, with imminent layoffs hanging over everyone’s head, your boss told you this: “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds.” Talk about affective labor. Everyone in this Carl’s Jr. should make it their mission to fall in love with the Famous Star with Cheese!
Earlier this week, The New York Times ran a story about Facebook’s “struggles” with the metaverse, basically outlining how it remains (like “the blockchain”) a cumbersome solution that solves no particular problem. In response, one of Facebook’s flacks went on the record with a classic tech company retort: “Being a cynic about new and innovative technology is easy. Actually building it is a lot harder.” It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate. It takes guts to build “immersive meeting experiences.” By all means, let’s have the company whose main competitive advantage has been its systematic unscrupulousness lecture us about cynicism. And by the way, everyone reading the newspaper should make it their mission to fall in love with Meta, because they are seeing past the small-minded naysayers to ensure that, as Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed in the conference keynote, “we get to the point that the 200 million people who buy new PCs each year for work can do some or all their work even better in the metaverse.”
After all, as John Herrman reminds us in this piece for New York magazine, the metaverse is enterprise software first and foremost, and the hype around it is meant to get managers, investors, and executives interested, not consumers. “Understanding the metaverse as a set of software tools that you might be told to use, like expense software or a videoconferencing platform or a task-management suite, isn’t especially exciting, but at least it makes sense,” he notes. Tech analyst Ben Thompson comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that VR’s main use case is for meetings (“mentally I was truly in a virtual meeting room,” he writes — are you excited yet?) and that headset adoption will be driven by companies buying them for employees. He speculates that Facebook may ultimately dwindle into being a hardware maker for its new partner Microsoft, whose enterprise software is already infrastructural for lots of companies.
Of course, the proposition of workers not just having to use Microsoft Office but being compelled to enter into it, to inhabit it as a kind of world, where its functionality prescribes the limits of what they can sense, is not likely to excite them very much. It would instead reinforce a sense of work as both an inescapable doom and an intrinsically meaningless activity that occurs in a fictitious nonspace, where employees must depend on the boss even for the semblance of a shared reality. And it would make "the metaverse” a place you commute to and long to leave behind in your off hours — in a sense it is the opposite of the internet, which serves as a mode of escape that is shot through an office worker’s day, a means for stealing time back from the company. The corporate metaverse is an effort to abolish that escape route.
Any efforts to promote the consumer-facing metaverse, I think, should be understood as a way to try to distract us from noticing that trajectory: that it is a means of trapping and containing labor. In the Times this past weekend, providing the sort of ideological pseudo-balance that it loves, was an article by Kashmir Hill detailing her personal experience using Horizon Worlds. “There is no shortage of skeptics mocking Meta’s plans,” she dubiously explains, “but how many of them have actually experienced the metaverse?” Even if it weren’t glitchy and terrible, the consumer experience wouldn’t exactly vindicate Facebook’s plans, which are not simply to please users. A critic is not obligated to spend one minute in testing a tech company’s product to raise questions about its sociocultural implications or the business models behind it. Some of the “skeptics” are not concerned that the metaverse will be disappointing to play around in; they are worried that it will become invasive, coercive, and exploitative; that it will unfold with all the harm, greed, and negligence that have characterized Facebook’s flagship products. Which ethnic minority will be terrorized in the metaverse first? How many right-wing goon squads are immersively marching in virtual paramilitary exercises?
Hill’s discussion of Facebook’s metaverse safety features is not especially reassuring:
The metaverse is a new frontier for trolling. One popular YouTuber named Ethan Klein streamed a session last month when he tried to be as sexually explicit as possible while surrounded by kids in the Plaza. (He got kicked out and barred for two hours.)
Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, has said the company wants “almost Disney levels of safety.” Horizon has user tools designed to deter virtual assaults and threatening behavior, including a personal boundary that keeps other avatars from getting too close; a “safe mode” that allows a user to escape into a solitary confinement cell; a mute function that can silence another avatar; and a polling function that can gauge whether a group feels a disruptive user should be kicked out.
It’s not hard to imagine a “polling function” itself becoming a form of trolling, not to mention putting others on mute (a feature that undermines the considerations and negotiations necessary to make space public). And what could be sadder than having to put yourself into a “solitary confinement cell” in a product called Horizon Worlds? How different is that from the choice to put the goggles on in the first place?
This article makes me afraid. Please mute its author and take me to my solitary confinement cell.
"... as though we should all breathe a sign of relief that presence itself had finally been commodified." Dang. Everything really is for sale.