The 21st Century Impasse

There is a line in John Milton's Paradise Lost:

“The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven."

J.K. Rowling in Harry Potter:

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Your perception of what's real is your reality whether that is physical or not.

Humans are signaling creatures. We signal virtue, vice, status, power, wealth, fame, and intelligence to the world with our actions. People say things like time is a flat circle and history repeats. I don't believe in that. I like to think of time being a flat circle on a new canvas. The new canvas is produced by changing technology. So even though our primordial behavioral patterns have remained the same, the arena in which these patterns play out keeps changing. So in a way, every moment in history only happens once.

The "Metaverse" has been a huge buzzword for everything and anything ever since Facebook rebranded its company to the term "Meta" derived from Snow Crash, a Sci-Fi dystopian Neal Stephenson novel.

Buzzwords are dangerous because they stop you from thinking hard about things.

What does the Metaverse even mean?

Does it mean living inside VR 24/7?

Does it mean GTA 5 on a Blockchain?

Does it mean we'll spend more time on the internet than on the physical one? (If that's the case then we are already in the Metaverse. Especially thanks to the pandemic.)

Does it mean we'll experience the world through a screen or AR glasses? *(But that is already happening. Look at how people behave in a concert, they are experiencing the concert through their phone's camera which is then streaming to their social media profiles.)

So is the Metaverse the future or the present?

To be honest the definition doesn't matter. What matters is a complete paradigm shift that is happening right before our eyes. Something that has been at the core of human nature. It is the question of Identity.

To understand this we need to take a trip in memory lane to the early 1990s and 2000s when social networking found its inception. Social networking started with the rise of the internet with companies like Friendster and Myspace giving people a chance to have virtual identities. While Friendster, and Myspace all had the first mover's advantage the real winner of the social networking revolution was Facebook. Facebook is an extremely important company to study if you want to really understand our current century.

What problem did Facebook really solve for it to beat Myspace and Friendster whom all had strong network effects?

Identity Layer for the Internet

The problem Facebook solved was the problem of real identity. The internet did not have an identity layer. You could look up information about things and places on Google but you couldn't look up where people are and what they are doing in their life. If you listen to the oldest interviews of everyone involved with Facebook whether it is Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, or Sean Parker they all talk about the same thing. Facebook gave people a chance to translate their real identities into the virtual world. This made it a new platform for both good and bad parts of human nature to play out, If you look at Facebook and everything they have done since its inception from the lens of identity then every decision it made makes more sense. The acquisition of Instagram came at the right time because people had started to shift from looking up what someone is doing in their life on Facebook to Instagram. The acquisition of Oculus on the other hand was a bet on the future. A future that looks different from the present.

I am not a big fan of the advertising business model that powers all of the internet today. Facebook renaming to Meta lowkey reminds me of this scene from The Wire. But, the one thing you cannot say is that the Oculus Quest 2 is a bad product. It is a very well-engineered headset that is the closest we had to consumer VR.

If you still think VR is a gimmick then try spending 2 hours inside a Quest. Get the Big Screen App and watch a movie or TV show in your own personal theatre, try playing Half-Lyf Alyx on PC VR, and then try to say "VR is a gimmick". The very words will stick in your mouth. VR is coming whether you like it or not. 2-3 more iterations and everyone will be inside one of those headsets before you know it.

With VR comes the opportunity to customize your appearance in whatever shape or form you want, killing all the existing group identities that come with Nature and Biology. But one thing that was really interesting about the Facebook/Meta Super Bowl ad was a complete 360 from their original vision.

Peter Thiel when asked about the success of Facebook attributed it to something like (paraphrasing) "People didn't want to be digital dogs or digital cats, they wanted to be the real version of themselves. " However, the Super Bowl ad is all about digital pets.

Why did the company do a 360 on what made them successful? Why focus on an identity that is different from your actual identity?

Let's take a step back to John Milton's Paradise Lost:

“The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven."

What's happening here is, that we as a species are at an impasse both technologically and culturally. If our perception of what's real. makes our reality then we could be anything we want. We are no longer tied to the rules of Nature. Isn't that amazing? VR can produce the most egalitarian, completely inclusive world where all of the cultural problems of the modern world ranging from racism, sexism, and group identities can finally go away. So maybe this time we are trying an alternate ending to the social networking story of the 90s and 2000s with virtual identities different from real identities taking the lead.

But Wait.

Let's take a step out of the world of technology and look at the other half of the world. Not everyone is on board with this technocentric future. Our modern-day religion called "Science" very casually avoids the question of violence and the negative aspects of human nature. Whether it's the recent Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Palestine, it's safe to say we have not solved the problem of violence. We are in a world today that says "Men and Women are equal" and at the first moment of trouble we say "Protect the women and children". Ukraine for example tried to employ martial law and arm every man over the age of 18 while sending women and children out of the country or to shelters. This is not a criticism, we should protect women and children first. However, that is the complete opposite of the idea that men and women are equal. We don't know how the war will end at the time of writing this article but it is very clear that Ukraine is winning the war on Twitter but at the same time being more and more open to Russian demands (which seems to be a sign that they don't really have the leverage they are showing off on Twitter). The virtual battleground victory means very little if you lose in the physical base reality. All of this is a sharp reminder that when our physical world starts falling apart due to natural or human-made causes, our constructed artificial realities fall apart and we are left to face our physical realities.

Now here's the fun part, In Paradise Lost, the line

“The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven."

was said by Satan himself. If you're a fan of Straussian reading ("The idea is that when you read something, there are sometimes two layers of meaning. There is the “exoteric”, most-obvious meaning, which is the normal meaning that normal meaning would reveal. After you understand the exoteric meaning if you keep thinking about it, you may be able to understand a deeper “esoteric” meaning." The distinction between exoteric and esoteric is that, with text, an author offers certain ideas or meanings, the exoteric ones, that are explicit, obvious, or apparent, and between the lines offers additional or other meanings, the esoteric ones.)

Satan said this line after being cast out of heaven and forced to live in hell along with other fallen angels. He also says something like "It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven." The esoteric reading could be that all of this is good old fashion, copium. All Satan could be doing is just trying to make himself feel better about living in a pit of fire. But whether he likes it or not, a pit of fire is a pit of fire and it will catch up with you sooner or later. So just like Satan, we humans and our "Metaverses" and "Artificial realities" could just be temporary escapes from the limitations of physical reality.

So What does it all mean? Does it mean we should stop trying? Does this mean that we are stuck to the rules of Nature and the cultural battle between group identities?

The future is not a destination set in stone and we are traveling to it mindlessly, the future is the product of our collective actions. I would say a Metaverse with complete equality of opportunity, free of all bias, and free of limitations of physical reality is worth fighting for.

Sometimes the most important fights you will have are the ones you know you are not going to win.