We have assumed control
Given all the recent discussion of the metaverse as a potential future media model, I forced myself to read Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One, which is sometimes cited as one of its inspirations. Many have pointed out that the future depicted in the novel is pretty dystopian: a world where Earth is barely inhabitable and most people choose to spend as much time as possible in simulations drawn from nostalgic cultural detritus. But that description makes the book sound coherent as a critique, when it is not at all interested in criticality at all. It's not even especially interested in world building: The occasional passages that explain the technology behind the novel's metaverse-like simulations feel ad hoc, invented as needed to try to resolve some obvious objections at the level of the story, though that too is extremely thin — the cut scenes from Red Dead Redemption are Shakespearean by comparison.
The plot of Ready Player One is overtly a pretense for Cline to give elaborate descriptions of old movies, TV shows, and video games and show how the characters have "mastered" them by watching every episode, memorizing all the dialogue, clearing all the levels, and so on. The characters' heroism is entirely a matter of such deeds of completist consumption; if this is supposed to be ironic, it's the most deadpan book I've ever read. It seems far more likely that we are supposed to be impressed with all their "knowledge" and be nodding along when we shared some of it. I played Atari too! I remember being really good at it!
The density of pop culture references leads some people to describe Ready Player One as nostalgic, but it's not really, at least not in the way I am conditioned to expect. Its characters, all teenagers motivated more or less by greed and power, don't long for their youth or for the 1980s as a magical period or even for a planet Earth that is not destroyed. The novel treats the past not as worthwhile for anything it specifically represented but simply as a storehouse of trivia that one can boast about — NFTs of the mind. The old cultural products are depicted as inadequate on their own terms, in dire need of being reworked as more immersive 3-D simulations, as though that intrinsically made them more exciting. Why watch War Games when you can be in War Games, saying the dialogue yourself? Neat!
There's nothing in Ready Player One of, say, the corny wistfulness of this passage from Chuck Klosterman's most recent book about the 1990s (excerpted in the New Yorker's review):
No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.
That is basically the opposite of Ready Player One's disposition. Despite its dystopian overtones, it loves technology and spends little emotion on the natural world, whose destruction comes across more as a relief than a warning. It clears the way to spend more time with or in media. The book is written not for people who are nostalgic for a time before internet connectivity and information overload (let alone climate apocalypse); it's for people who are nostalgic for the time when they could spend all day playing highly absorptive video games but now can only carve out a few hours to read about them.
That sounds like it would be the novelistic equivalent of Twitch streamers' let's plays, but it has none of the parasociality or spontaneity, none of the "hanging out" feeling. Instead it conjures the sad loneliness of a kid reading a D&D manual with no one to play with, no one who wants to be made to inhabit their private imaginative world. One of the things I couldn't understand in reading Ready Player One is why any of the characters needed to inhabit the same simulation at the same time, given how invested the whole premise is in the fantasy of autonomy — you can be whoever you want to be, you can play any character you want to play! One of the book's dumb plot loopholes actually breaks the simulation now and then into millions of identical simulations tailored to each "avatar" — so why wouldn't that be the default? The simulated world can't be both whatever anyone wants it to be and a place where sociality occurs. You don't have to be a Hegelian to grasp that autonomy means nothing without social recognition. It doesn't matter how many vorpal swords you own if no one else cares about it. (I kept thinking this as I skipped over all the boring descriptions of the characters' gear.)
The novel's incoherence reflects the basic problem with the "metaverse" in general: In a fully human-made reality, there would be no respite from or limit to the human capacity for exploiting other humans. Inequalities won't be wiped away on a blank digital slate; they would be given a more full expression, in every possible nuance. A layer of gamification and fandom would be layered over everything to make everything more excruciatingly competitive. Everything would become even more trackable, everyone would be deprived of anything that could be held in common by all, and everything would have a price and an expiration date. Cline tries to salvage his fantasy by positing a good corporation with a benevolent dictator who makes good and fair laws and an evil corporation that seeks to take full capitalist advantage of the affordances a metaverse would have. But there is no explanation of how these just wouldn't be the same company. Neither of them are run as charities.
The most telling sequence in the book is when the protagonist becomes an indentured servant within a Matrix-like system of total subjugation, facilitated by the same technology that makes the virtual reality possible. He lives in a tiny cube, under total surveillance, leading a fully regimented and administered life. At that point, I wanted the book to red-pill itself and take a darker turn, to have the courage to follow through on what it imagined, and point out that this is actually an improvement over logging in voluntarily into the gamified world and fighting for servitude in it as if it were salvation. But of course that is not what happens. The characters win total control over the simulation, which immediately makes it worthless to them.