//:metaverse_commentary_alpha [Exploring Cyberpunk 2]
The messages in cyberpunk were misinterpreted as roadmaps. Can we get the vehicle turned around in time?
Pretty much everything we say, everything we see, every person we interact with online is filtered through—and allowed by—a corporation. We own, much less control, next to nothing.
This is by design. Just not ours. This lack of information control is maybe the most fundamental way that our day-to-day lives are influenced by elements of cyberpunk. Or at least the people who think the insidious elements are schematics for building a world where only they matter.
Worst of all, we are letting them do it. It’s already unclear if we can, at some point, rescind that permission.
In October 2021, the term metaverse entered the vocabulary of millions of people. I’m certain that most of them thought that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg had invented not only the term but also the concept behind it: a connected and shared virtual reality where people could have “immersive, all-day experiences” where they can “feel present with the people [they] care about.”
After all, this was how he announced the rebranding of his company from Facebook to Meta. It was “the next chapter of the internet,” according to him. So the whole thing, from concept to execution had to be his, right?
It wasn’t. He didn’t come up with the term. He didn’t come up with the idea. It’s not his. It never was. It never will be.
But Zuck is laying claim to the very concept of a shared, connected online space. So are other billionaires like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Or, maybe more accurately, their corporations are.
Even worse than that, there are millions, if not billions, of people cheering them along, providing support, and actively working against their best interests. This happens partially out of ignorance, but it happens mostly out of propagandizing the public into sycophantic Yes Man-ism.
Truth or (Don’t You) Dare
The truth isn’t subjective. Using the metaverse here as an example of how that lack of subjectivity is eroded away, we can see that objective truth first becomes blurry and then nonexistent.
By Zuck standing there in 2021 at Facebook Connect and telling people about his vision for the “next chapter of the internet,” by using the term metaverse, by rebranding the company to Meta, and by never once mentioning the people and texts he is directly imitating, emulating, plagiarising, and—let’s be clear—straight-up misunderstanding, these corporations are showing us that nothing, not even ideas, exists outside of their influence. And anything that does, won’t for long.
Every day, information literacy drops. People won’t and can’t see beyond or through what’s directly in front of them. When someone tries to call out misinformation, to retract or clarify, they are met with vitriol and disdain—and fear.
At the same time, the content moderation systems fail. Fail the people they’re meant to protect, at least. In practice, they work exactly as intended. Everything we see is filtered and skewed favor of the class in power. In this case, that’s stakeholders in companies like Meta, X, Google.
We have to rein them in before it’s too fucking late. If it’s not already.
First There was Cyberspace, Then Came the Metaverse
Okay, so let’s go back a few decades to where this started. The internet’s been around a long time, but not in the way we currently know and use it. For most of the modern internet’s life, the online world has been referred to as cyberspace, a catch-all term that William Gibson invented for his 1984 novel, Neuromancer.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void.
Later in the book, he expands the description to something even more recognizable to us: using a device to experience a curated, digital world.
He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.
It wasn’t until the widespread adoption of smartphones that the internet truly started to resemble Gibson’s cyberspace. Though sites like Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, and, yes, Facebook had already begun moving moved from the static web to interactive cyberspace of Web 2.0 (also called “the social web”) in the mid-aughts.
But even those ideas weren’t new. Neal Stephenson created those when he wrote about the metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash and took cyberspace one step further:
By drawing the moving three-dimsional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the earphones, the moving 3-D picture can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack. […] He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is called the Metaverse.
Sound familiar? How about this?
[The Street] is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, minuaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it. […]
Developers can build their own small streets feeding off the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go hunt and kill each other. […]
They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the world-wide fiber-optics network.
We’re basically there now, with our own version of cyberspace and the metaverse. Even at 2k resolution, free-combat zones, buildings that break spacetime, and fiber-optics networks! There are any number of games and platforms that line up exactly with those descriptors.
Of course, Stephenson goes on and on after that, but here’s the dystopian, cyberpunk part that we haven’t quite made it to yet, but people like Zuck et al are rapidly directing us toward:
In order to place things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money […] goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for develping and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
And there it is. There’s the goal. There’s the part that Zuck and the others have latched onto and have slowly engineered our online spaces.
There’s the insidious part that should have been a warning to anyone reading about the nature of conglomerated power in a supposedly open, free, and public setting. Instead of seeing the misery such a system can facilitate, they only saw a pathway to power.
Right now, we don’t need permission to add something to the internet. We can go anywhere we want. We can associate with whomever we choose, however we choose. Sure, we have to pay domain fees and hosting costs, but there are very few permissions we have to needed to create something. To “place things on the Street,” as it were. To simply be on the Street.
If the corporations have their way, though, that’s going to change. You can already see early prototyping through the draconic moderation policies of privately owned and controlled platforms like X.
The Internet Is Ours. But They Want It.
It doesn’t take a huge amount of reading between the lines to see why Zuckerberg chose Meta/metaverse for his branding. There’s a message there, a promise made.
“All of this belongs to us.”
The problem with that is that we—as users, consumers, creators, and people—thought these spaces were ours. We inhabited them like they were real locations. We populated them and popularized them.
But in reality, they were never ours. We just wanted them to be, and because of the convenience these corporations offered us through their platforms, we didn’t realize the amount of control we’d surrendered.
The longer we continue in this direction and congregate in places where we can be observed, filtered, screened, corralled, and surveilled, the closer we are to allowing the people who entirely misunderstood and disregarded the messages—of literature and media they claim to revere!—rewrite the warnings into blueprints for a world that’s fit for only them.
Don’t believe me? The publisher for the newest editions of Snow Crash uses it as a marketing headline, calling it “a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators.”
It’s true. Unfortunately, the texts were misinterpreted because the trappings of post-human cybernetics, neon balustrades, and diving headfirst into the matrix were so cool. And they are. In fiction.
The everyday reality, however, is terrifying. We should all be afraid of what’s coming, and we should all be afraid of what’s already here.
Gibson, Stephenson, and all the others did inspire generations (including ordinary people like me and you!) but for those who became the so-called Silicon Valley innovators, that inspiration led to precisely the opposite of what was intended.
That’s all for today, friendos. There’s a lot more to talk about, so stay connected.