This feeling that you're really there
As someone who, on multiple attempts, couldn't get past the first few pages of Snow Crash, I am reluctant to discuss the "metaverse," the concept currently being hyped by Facebook and a host of venture capitalists (and the tech press that does their bidding) as the next realm beyond the online experience we have now. Are you disappointed that the internet is not even more invasive and all-subsuming? Do you wish you were under more surveillance, with more layers of intellectual property and algorithmic mediation between you and anyone you care about? Have you always dreamed of DC and Marvel characters interacting in the same space? Maybe the metaverse is for you.
The description that best seems to capture what the "metaverse" is about is this one from Wendy Liu: "virtual reality with unskippable ads." The idea seems to be to impose forms of augmented reality on people at all times so that their consciousness can be more closely tracked and perpetually inundated with ads and branded content, while their interactions with other people will necessarily be mediated through the "interoperable" private platforms controlled by Facebook or Epic Games or Roblox or whatever other companies wedge themselves into the matrix. Many of these companies want you to eventually wear their augmented-reality glasses so that you literally see the reality they want you to see, like They Live in reverse.
Mark Zuckerberg has recently been harping on the idea of the metaverse as "an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places..." Sounds great, like when James Woods sticks the VHS tape into his intestines in Videodrome. On the most recent Facebook earnings call, Zuckerberg said that the company was "continuing to invest very heavily in building technology and product to deliver a full sense of presence." Translation: Facebook would like to own everyone's ability to be "present" anywhere, so that you can't be "present" anywhere or for anyone without its mediation. All places are the same place: Facebook.
More important, Facebook would also like to secure the ability to prevent people from any right to absence. Much as the company has strived to make having a Facebook profile mandatory to get along in everyday life, it would like to make it difficult for people to refuse to be present in the "metaverse." (They don't make up shadow profiles of non-users for nothing.) When Zuckerberg says that "in order for the metaverse to fill its potential, and we believe that it should be built in a way that is open for everyone to participate," that should be understood as meaning that no one will be able to escape it. ("Participation" is generally code for compulsory availability to exploitation.) The metaverse is fundamentally a place you will be forced to be, where every device is smart (tracking you and charging fees and functioning as a constant advertisement for itself) and every other entity is swathed in proprietary content meant to signal its social credit. The metaverse will be "presence" as a nightmare you can't wake up from. (Insert Derridean analysis here.)
The opposite of the metaverse, however, is not some unmediated realm of sense certainty where our presence is simply given and "real." The internet is already something we can't log off from; we don't have the option of containing its effects to "online." We can't ignore how it has reshaped physical space, or how the presumption of connectivity affects what we can do at nearly every moment, even if only in a negative way, as when people attempt "digital detoxes." The hype about the metaverse is in part trying to normalize this already existing condition, as though it were merely perfecting a situation we've already chosen — only that "we" is really just a certain slice of elites who truly and consistently benefit from it, while everyone else experiences waves of vulnerability, persecution, precarity, and exhaustion along with the convenience and opportunity and occasional experience of social connection. We have to have versions of consensus reality, but the metaverse — consensus reality administered by venture capitalists — seems like the worst possible extrapolation of the ones we're already in.