Metamobility, progressing a Modern Technological Idea
Philosophical Notes
Not so long ago, I was planning to write about the “blended spaces flaneûrs” phenomenon (to saunter using digital navigation to be bathed in urban impressions). The problem would be the impossibility of merging the experience of physical space with that of digital space. When using digital map applications, one stops paying attention and therefore stops perceiving the urban landscapes; one loses sight of architecture, traditional places, monuments, sounds, and odors of the cities. Using digital navigation to saunter can be disengaging. However, with the emergence of metamobility, I understood that blended spaces might be a transitive reality that will not last. Metamobility is said to be an augmented reality through which users will be able to modify their environment with the assistance of robots, overcoming “limitations” of space and time. As incredible as it may seem, the idea of overcoming space-time using technology is at the core of Modernity. Let us briefly look at how modern technology has tried to overcome these “limitations”.
What is Metamobility?
The Hyundai Motor Company has recently put into words what it thinks will be the future of human mobility:
A smart device-metaverse connection that will expand the role of mobility to virtual reality (VR), ultimately allowing people to overcome the physical limitations of movement in time and space. Hyundai Motor also shared its vision of how robots will act as a medium between the real world and virtual spaces, enabling users to make changes in the metaverse to be reflected in reality.
Let us understand its vision. Firstly, mobility has a variated gamma of meanings. One may think of body mobility, social mobility, or mobility in terms of goal-oriented movements such as heading to the office. It is possible that each of these kinds of mobility is thought to be transformed into a connection between the metaverse and smart devices. For example, in case one breaks a leg (or maybe just because one does not want to move), a smart device or a robot will visit our grandmother who lives in another city. But also, imagine that one is infected with another new coronavirus in the future: a robot will take our place and accomplish our tasks at work (with the risk of doing better than us). Social mobility will be easier but boring because one will try to get to know new people, partners, or tutors, avoiding traffic jams or saturated subways. Sounds good to me…
But, let us imagine something more exciting. What if, instead of robots or smart devices, our brain is fully connected with the metaverse, and by this means, we may overcome other kinds of limitations such as contemplating La Gioconda without visiting the Louvre in Paris or, even better, being in a concert without realizing that we are not actually there. Parents who do not have enough time with their kids due to endless work may give a good night kiss before going to bed. We will move within different space-time frames. Shifting from our reality to metaverse by winking would let us be simultaneously in the limited space-time reality and the non-limited metaverse reality. This shifting will probably take us to a blended reality composed of the virtual and natural, where time would be reduced to instantaneity. Let us see if this becomes true.
Space and Time; a problem for modern western civilization
The traditional frame of space and time, which our senses and consciousness synthesize to make sense of reality, has been changing alongside the emergence of technological devices. The Hyundai Motor Company may be part of this technological project: Metamobility will solve problems involved in human mobility within limited space-time dynamics. Other problems that were solved by Modernity are the following: uniformizing time while dissociating it from space with the mechanical clock; accelerating time using vehicles that speed up increasingly; enabling presentism by wiring intelligent devices; (and now) duplicating space-time experiences by connecting people into augmented reality. As Michel Foucault would put it, let us highlight some key points of how space and time have become a problem to be solved by technology.
- From a sociological perspective, Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity) points out that modern temporality has liberated the estimation of time from a place. Before modern technology, questions of when could not be dissociated from questions of where. Modern times arrived when technology enabled the uniformization of time in different places. Giddens links the expansion of the civilizing project of modernity with the possibility opened up by the clock to standardize time and activities in different places. That is, the clock enabled, before anything else, the phenomenon of globalization through the use of the Gregorian calendar and the progressive metaphysics of thinking of an infinite and progressive future. Once it was possible for different regions, with different rhythms, to be homogenized in the same system of temporal measurement, space became separated from the place. That is to say, space and place coincide as long as physical presence is the mode of interaction in a social context, but when social interactions no longer depend on presence, we can speak a separation between space and place. As such, space becomes phantasmagoric in modernity. Uniformizing time in heterogeneous places is one of the most important progress of modern western civilization.
- For the French thinker Gilles Lipovetsky (L’ere du vide) postmodernity was characterized by its ephemeral time, in which everything was destined to disappear in a short period of time. Postmodernity did not last too much. The postmodern temporality has been relegated to the dustbin of memories: the empire of the ephemeral has changed its hue. The here and now of postmodernism, the morality of the instant, with its liberation from norms and tradition has been transformed into the cult of the optimal state in the perspective of a future that threatens the present: foreseeing, anticipating, planning, preventing are the norms of our time. The insignia of hypermodern times (Les Temps Hypermodernes) is the contradiction of real-time denying the modern future, forming an instantaneous present of permanent optimization. As such, there is no absolute negation of the future, as Bernard Stiegler (La Technique et Le Temps 1) would have thought with the appearance of real-time offered to us by intelligent devices, but only the blurring of the secularised modern future of the eschatology of religions in the idea of progress. The hypermodern future, which probably governs our mentality, is sustained by techno-scientific dynamics:
“The technical-scientific binomial yearns to explore the infinitely large and the infinitely small, to reshape life, to manufacture mutants, to present a semblance of immortality, to resurrect extinct species, to program the genetic future. […] The neo-futurism that is being prepared will not resemble revolutionary futurism”.
- The French geographer Paul Virilio (Vitesse et Politique) has first pointed out that Modernity can be characterized as a process of acceleration, in which time tends to be nullified. Following this path, Hartmut Rosa (Alienation and Acceleration) proposes to understand the process of modernization in terms of acceleration, speed, and alienation. One of the aspects that have contributed to the spatio-temporal compression in late modernity is the technological acceleration of transport, communication, and production. For example, engines, trains, railways, radios, telephones, the internet have increased in their production and use. Railways travel faster over the same distance than horses; telephones enable communication without physical encounters; the internet has enabled virtual encounters, overcoming space-time limitations. The phenomenon that has shown a remarkable correlation with technological acceleration is the experience of shortage of time.
- Johannes Weyer (Die Echtzeitgesellschaft, wie smarte Technik unser Leben steuert)believes that we are living in a real-time society in which the digitalization of everything can be transformed into useful information in ever shorter time intervals. Take automatic door sensors, for example. The detection distance of the bodies can be programmed to activate and it is also possible to register how many people enter, how many stay inside, for how long, their time of entry and exit. Cameras surveilling streets register citizens’ biometric data, measure their temperature, and together with a database of their movements, it is possible to know who they have crossed paths with on the street, who they frequent, what places they visit, and what their routes are. In short, the availability of real-time data is made possible by devices that are interconnected and capable of recording and processing data of situations happening.
Nevertheless, real-time society is paradoxically timeless. The period in which people used to act and live is being compressed. Moving from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ requires only following the route marked by Google Maps or Waze. These applications are delegated to plan, visualize, choose and evaluate in terms of movement and time maximization, i.e. they act intelligently. For devices that work in real-time, the most important thing is that the user acts, executes movements following instructions in a situation that is temporally reduced to the present and current. In a word, smart devices are characterized by directing our behavior through the analysis of data and the use of algorithms, eliminating the connection with what has already been experienced in other moments and with the shape of the distant future. Rather, the past and the future become narrow, short-term, confused with the now.
It is hard to tell to which extent metamobility will modify our experience of space and time, but we can be sure that this technology is inheriting the modern vision of technology. As we could see, time and space have been “problems” that technology is ready to solve. Just like many other enterprises throughout history, Metamobility is trying to solve the “new limitations” of both space and time that are arising along with social and economical needs. It is understandable that delegating tasks to robots through metaverse will be a good option for people oppressed by scarce time or for people who would like to use their time doing something more interesting. Definitely, we are on the edge of a new transformation of space and time experiences. One thing is clear: modern technology follows the trend of solving the problem of doing more in different moments and places, without being worried about the limitations that time and space impose on us.
Further Reading
GIDDENS, Anthony. The consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
LIPOVETSKY, Gilles. L’ere du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Folio, 1983.
LIPOVETSKY, Gilles, and Sébastien Charles. Les Temps Hypermodernes. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004.
ROSA, Hartmut. Alienation and Acceleration. Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. NSU Press, 2010.
STIEGLER, Bernard. La Technique et Le Temps 1, La Faute d’Épiméthée. Paris: Galilée, 1994.
VIRILIO, Paul. Vitesse et Politique. Paris: Galilée, 1977.
WEYER, Johannes. Die Echtzeitgesellschaft, wie smarte Technik unser Leben steuert. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2019.
