What lies beneath the Metaverse?
28 October 2021: the Internet is awash with videos of Mark Zuckerberg painting a future he’s dreamt up for us. Holograms, teleportation, experiencing outer space — these are no longer sci-fi dreams but the reality we’ll all be able to experience when Facebook brings us the Metaverse. Forget climate change, forget the four walls you’ve been stuck in for the last 18 months, forget the homeless people you walk past on your way to work. All of this will be gone in the Metaverse. “Just put on your Quest headset”, and what was once a dream will become a reality.
In a world characterised by injustices such as growing inequality and climate change, escape to a virtual utopia is certainly alluring. However, the ‘real’ world doesn’t just disappear when we enter a virtual one. The ‘real’ world is what makes the virtual. When Zuckerberg tells us that “things that are physical today […] will be able to be holograms in the future”, he’s drawing on a long cultural history which attempts to create a dualism between materiality and information (Hayles, 1999). This ideology, which Hayles dubs ‘the posthuman view’, privileges “informational pattern[s] over material instantiation” (Hayles, 1999; 2), aiming towards a future where information is completely separate from the substrates which carry it.
This view has been potent in the development of the Internet and its conceptualisation as an equalising and democratising force (van Dijk, 2013). Rarely do our online experiences highlight the connecting cables lying under our oceans (Philip, 2021), the minerals mined across the world in dangerous conditions for our chips and batteries (Crawford, 2021), or the cognitive labour underpinning our so-called intelligent systems (Gray and Suri, 2019). Indeed, the metaphor of the Cloud has been a potent one: conjuring up ideas of information floating above our heads rather than the reality of the energy-guzzling server farms which host our data (Ensmenger, 2021). In this material reality, the Metaverse is not a virtual world we can escape to, but rather an additional layer in the technical stack separating us from the environmental and human exploitation that underpin our day-to-day technologies.
Highlighting the exploitative materiality that underpins the Metaverse also raises questions about who gets left behind: who gets to “just put on [their] Quest headset” when it’s priced at £299? What Metaverse do blind or visually impaired people experience? What happens to those who can’t wear headsets? The Metaverse offers yet another example of network technologies which promise democratising futures without considering the very real social conditions in which they are embedded (van Dijk, 2013). These concerns are not withstanding the incredible concentration of data the Metaverse would enable Facebook (or ‘Meta’) to collect, accelerating the trillion dollar company’s exploitation of free digital labour for financial gain (Zuboff, 2019). And so, while these viral Meta videos may boost sales of Oculus VR headsets or help to distract from the scandals the company is currently experiencing, they should also remind us of the concentration of power in the hands of elite individuals, of how their digital platforms distract from the labour and exploitation which underlie them, and of the inherent exclusions in the futures they wish to create for us.
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