The Metaverse: A Future Shaped by Dystopian Narratives?
October 2021: Facebook rebranded to Meta, kicking off a decade-long plan to bring its Metaverse to life. In a prerecorded video, Mark Zuckerberg announced his vision of a platform that would “reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.” Following his presentation, this virtual, integrated, VR-powered space suddenly entered the mainstream media cycle and became the hot topic of the day. “In the months since, hype for “the Metaverse has skyrocketed” as reported by Business Insider (1).
From the many discussions and drawing on my literary background, I have observed one particularly interesting phenomenon. When looking at the recent media coverage on the Metaverse, cultural products such as Second Life, The Matrix, and Snow Crash are the main (if not the sole) cultural sources to build a common understanding of the Metaverse. These are sources not only in the sense of being used as references, but they appear to be mental models of a world that has already begun being constructed, imagined and experienced through games, novels and movies.
Modern day technologies appeared in science fiction decades before their time. Literature has always been a medium for futuristic imagination, and while these futures are yet to be realised, they are already living in our imagination. The word metaverse itself was first introduced by a writer, Neal Stephenson, in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. In this moment, science fiction is providing the means for imagining the Metaverse in either utopian or dystopian ways. Professor Genevieve Bell says it perfectly: “all our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings. They are backbones and blueprints and maps to territories that have already been traversed.” (2)
Knowing that technology has the potential for both creating an utopia or a dystopia, we must interrogate how much of the public opinion, but also that of technology practitioners, have been influenced by science fiction images when imagining the Metaverse. The danger, otherwise, is to be trapped into an ineluctable view of the Metaverse that is dystopian by design.
Narratives are shaped by the world, as much as the world is shaped by narratives.
An important concept known among literary scholars is that cultural products establish a dual relationship with society: they are born out of a social context, but they can also influence society in return. When it comes to technological innovation, science fiction occupies a central role, so much that it has been defined as a “form of modern-day mythology” (3) which significantly impacts how people think about and envision the future. Vincent Mosco explains how cyberspace is a material, technological and political space as much of a mythic and cultural one (4): in this sense, not only does it influence the public understanding of and attitudes toward science (5), but it can also have an impact in structuring and changing individuals’ life trajectories (6). According to the writer Thomas Disch, science fiction, through its characters, icons, stories and themes has become integral to our lifestyle and culture, providing people the raw material to envision potential futures.
Alone, cultural products (movies, games, novels) cannot create behaviours. But if given enough time and exposure to sediment, they can give birth to irrational fears and desires: beyond being escapist entertainment, they raise ethical, political and existential questions about the new technological world that become deeply entrenched into one’s worldview.
Right now, the Metaverse is composed 50% of technology and 50% of storytelling.
And storytelling can be utopian or dystopian.
The rise of technology is closely connected to an optimistic belief, what we call the myth of progress, that was born out of the mechanistic philosophy of René Descartes and saw in the Enlightenment its golden age. The seventeenth-century emphasis on the empirical method and the promises of the scientific rationale pushed the idea that technology, and machines specifically, would be a force for good. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) for example presents a utopian community driven by scientists whose discoveries and inventions bring prosperity and happiness.
A century later, the industrial revolution revealed the social toll of the myth of progress and the failing utopia of the age of machines. Novels such as Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Well’s The Time Machine (1895) and The War of Worlds (1898) captured this embryonal fear that when the dark side of humanity met the dark side of technology, catastrophe would ensue. Therefore, it is not surprising that with World War I, the first mechanised conflict, and later with the atomic catastrophe of World War II, powerful anti-science fictions in the form of novels and movies (Metropolis, 1926; Brave New World, 1932) explored the dangers of a blind technological progress. Bright visions of a techno-heaven seemed impossible after two global conflicts, and works such as Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) expressed the “technophobic fear of losing our human identity, our freedom, our values and our lives to machines’’ (7).
And then Cyberspace became a reality, in between tech-utopianism and dystopic apprehension.
In the 1960s, the Department of Defence division ARPA (later DARPA) was experimenting with a new communication system, the ARPANET, which later became “the internet”. In those same years, Daniel Galouye’s novel Counterfeit World (1964) popularised the concept of a virtual realm within a computer network; what Gibson in his influential novel Neuromancer (1987) would call the ‘‘cyberspace’’ a few decades later.
Both utopian and dystopian images are embedded in the techno-culture of the end of the century, under the boost of the fourth industrial revolution. In the 1980s Tom Furness, a pioneer in VR research at DARPA, described the new technologies used to develop flight simulators as able to create “a cyber-paradise”. The VR-powered cyberspace became an ideal, alternative virtual world, a needed escape from the banality of everyday reality: it was the vision for reaching a new level of human development, “a transcendental community of mind” (8). Within this myth of a “Digitopia” (9), virtual reality and augmented reality technologies had the potential to replace the real world with a digitally simulated one. In the meantime, philosophical inquiry started to discuss the notion of post-humanism, questioning the boundaries between human, non-human, animals and machines. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) remains possibly the most influential tech-utopian work to date to explore the shifting boundaries of materiality. Yet, according to David Noble, this ‘religion of technology’ created ‘‘delusions of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence that fuelled fantasies of God-likeness’’ (10).
Dinello told us that “when Neuromancer came out, personal computers had just started invading homes, while Internet and virtual reality technologies were little known publicly. Gibson’s vivid, strange, and frightening near-future tales of cyberspace cowboys, weaponized cyborgs, underground genetic surgeons, and evil multinational corporations struck a deep cultural chord” (7). From here, a catalogue of mad scientists, rebellious robots, killer cyborgs, malignant supercomputers and ruthless companies wanting to manipulate the mind and habits of humans as in Tron (1982), Blade Runner (1982), Videodrome (1982), and in the novels Neuromancer (1984) and Snow Crash (1992). Cyberpunk was born, soon growing to become one of the most powerful subcultures of the 1990s. In these dystopian views, the human body is turned into an interface, and the computers become the new brains, so that humans get trapped and manipulated in an inescapable technological cage, exemplified by the Warchowski’s movie The Matrix (1999).
In 2004, during a revival of interest in VR technologies, Mosco wrote “the problem is that virtual reality has more purchase on our mythic consciousness. Making a new world has far more allure than extending an old one”. At that stage, to follow that digital technomania was nothing else than “poor forecasting”. Almost 20 years have passed, and both dreamish and nightmarish visions of the Metaverse are on the rise again. Now it is worth taking the time to critically interrogate the cyberspace mythology informing our views of the Metaverse, to understand how we can use it to consciously design our futures, while simultaneously “loosen the powerful grip of myths of the future on the present.” (4)
Towards Ustopia?
As we get closer to actually realising the Metaverse, the impact of science fiction on public opinion must not be underestimated. In any literary work the writer “creates” a segment of society in his own terms, one that has the potential to shape people’s imagination and produce hopes as much as long lasting anxieties. But we don’t know how much of the hype and anxieties are rooted in realistic future scenarios, and how much are instead a product of a collective cultural imagery which influences how we envision our individual and social fates, as technology progresses on an unforeseen path.
Tech utopia is still present, and unsurprisingly very much rooted in the Silicon Valley culture of progress, disruption and innovation at all costs. This myth of a utopian Metaverse is important for what it reveals, which is a genuine longing for communal, global and democratic spaces, but also for what it conceals, including issues of data ownership and concentration of power. If there is a danger in having big tech companies shaping their visions of the Metaverse, there is also the danger of having science fiction informing our collective visions of what the Metaverse will be like.
A first step forward, is to include in conversations literary critics and cultural scholars who are knowledgeable of technology, allowing them to interrogate the cultural products of science fiction, to understand how much of these visions are realistic, and what can we learn (as citizens, business people and innovators) from these fictional scenarios. As Margaret Atwood explains when discussing her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) she prefers the definition of speculative fiction, rather than dystopia. This is because, Atwood explains, she always starts by investigating what governments and cultures have historically realised. Nothing in her novels is completely made up, and this explains why her narratives feel sinisterly and doomfully real. Then, her strategy is to push the events at their fictional extremes, to portray what could have happened (11). The ‘could have happened’ is crucial, and it is what makes Atwood call her novels ustopias, a mix between dystopias and utopias: because despite the worst premises, the worst remained constrained to fiction. And while this doesn’t mean reality is free of major problems, injustices and awful crimes, still people have proved that their survival needs and drives for freedom can shape and change the trajectory of history. According to Atwood, every narrative — and we can expand the idea to any mythology — has both utopian and dystopian elements within it, if we look closely enough.
Inspired by Atwood’s speculative approach, our job is to take science fiction as a kind of future-scenario exercise retrospectively, and then to critically interrogate the material, instead of letting it dictate how we envision a future against which we evaluate present technology and its direction. And considering that Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash, is actively working as a consultant, for example as Chief Futurist for the AR developer Magic Leap, that seems to be the right direction to balance both the utopian and the dystopian visions that currently pervade our narratives.
Martina Mendola has a Masters in Comparative Literatures, a Postgraduate Certificate in Innovation and a PhD in Contemporary Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She is currently a Researcher in The Human Sciences Studio at Accenture The Dock where she explores the changing relationship between business, technology and society.
Further readings:
References
- Mark Zuckerberg: The Metaverse Golden Goose. Business Insider (2022) https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-the-metaverse-golden-goose-2022-1?r=US&IR=T
- Bell, G. (2022) The Metaverse is just a new word for an old idea. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/08/1044732/metaverse-history-snow-crash/
- Lombardo, T. (2006) Contemporary Futurist Thought. AuthorHouse publishing.
- Mosco, V. (2004) The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- Claessens, M. (2004) “Science fiction: Intuition and fantasy” in RTD Info: Magazine for European Research, Special Issue March.
- Bacon-Smith, C. (2000) Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Dinello, D. (2005) Technofobia: Science fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- Jordon, T. (1999) Cyberpower: The Culture and Power of Cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge.
- DeGrandpre, R. (2001) Digitopia. New York: Atrandom.com.
- Noble, D. (1997) The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York, Alfred Knopf Publisher.
- Atwood, M. (2011) “The Road to Ustopia” in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia
