(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

On October 29, 2021 Mark Zuckerberg gave a video presentation across hundreds of platforms, announcing the change of the Facebook corporation name to Meta, and the inauguration of what was being called “the metaverse”. The metaverse, Zuckerberg explained, was a new totalising online environment in which people and groups were free to meet, explore, change where they were, who they were, etc.

To demonstrate, Zuckerberg suddenly appeared as a cartoon avatar — looking, it must be said, not significantly different from the man himself — moving around a landscape, standing next to a roasting fire, playing cards with a robot and a unicorn, and so on.

The resulting reaction was a mixture of relief and anxiety. Relief because it was clear that what was being proposed was on the face of it, a next-generation Second Life, that alternative dreamscape of clunky avatars and bizarre pseudo-events against rigid backgrounds.

Second Life had appeared just as distributed computing power made multiple interaction in real time possible; the metaverse has come along just as this sort of interaction can be rendered smooth-flowing and naturalistic in real time.

Relief then, because it seemed that this was all they had — this nerd vision of cool straight out of 1998. Anxiety, because of a suspicion that no matter how bad it was, they would impose it on us anyway.

Were there some 10-year-olds somewhere for whom the metaverse looked pretty cool?

Unlikely, because they’re more likely to be on TikTok, a far more kinetic site, or on something you or I haven’t heard of yet. It’s difficult to imagine anyone outside of Meta’s minions getting excited about it. And many of them will simply be pleasing the great god Zuck.

The question is, what sort of thing like this could possibly be cool and attractive? Am I jaded, or would even a complete Sensurround 3D experience still meet with a lack of excitement? Why do such ever-more elaborate offerings fall short? Is the internet moving in the other direction — always towards the lo-fi of TikTok, Instagram and Twitter?

If that’s the case, then it’s bad news for Facebook… arrrgggh, I mean “Meta”.

The group has recently made a major commitment to the metaverse, moving thousands of new engineers from old Facebook into VR, and hiring thousands more VR specialists. The drive towards a wholly new environment seems less to do with a promethean drive to seize the heavens than it is with the fact that Facebook usage is stalling and falling.

This year for the first time, its accumulation of users and user-time has stalled. Facebook was a hit with youth when it came out, and then became a staple of the middle-aged as youth became tired of it. It has compensated for falling first world use with growth in India and Africa. That its expansion would stall has been prophesied for years, and now it is here.

To a degree this was inevitable. Facebook began as a text-and still-picture-heavy platform, with the promise of multiple forms of expression — personal messages, broadcast updates, pictures, forwards, curations, etc — mixed with a dose of narcissistic self-enhancement.

One was broadcasting a pic from holidays to all one’s friends, not sending it to a few; expressing one’s opinion like an op-ed writer, not just having a conversation. The simple act of calling its lists of addressees “friends” rather than “contacts” gave it an extra burst of sugar-water, a tiny serotonin hit, that was then often removed by the site’s FOMO effect — the curated presentation by others to suggest exciting and complete lives.

But Facebook’s ensemble of effects now looks archaic, a host for more exciting media. What had barely been technically possible before the inception of social media is now its lingua franca, its glue. There is the question as to whether the take-off of a media form like Facebook can only occur if it is the cutting-edge for the entire sphere, and not merely for a section of its audience. Once the edge has been lost, the uptake by new groups will always start to fall away proportionally.

Once that process starts, the mathematics of networks take over. The less comprehensive it is, the faster it is relinquished, and a landslide ensues, as it did with MySpace.

Social networked media is inherently monopolistic. On the one hand, it gestures towards a post-capitalist framework, in which such a universal network is run and owned democratically. But as long as it exists within a capitalist framework, its trajectory and orientation is inherently totalitarian. Facebook could not simply stop and be what it is; its first stage was a mere prelude to what it must become, which is the ownership of as much of the experience of interconnection and collective life as possible.

But what Meta/Facebook may start to run up against is not the technical limits of reality-simulation, but the existential limits of such. The inability of purely scientific-mathematical communities to understand this distinction is what has driven decades of failure in simulation and AI.

Ultimately in derives from the fundamental standpoint of Anglo-American philosophy, which, over a century, has sought to deny the founding notion of “continental” philosophy, that the world is a thing-in-itself, or a collection of such — that reality presents itself to us as being beyond the sum total of its appearances to us.

Not only is the metaverse reduced to two senses out of five (unless they are going to revive the various ’50s-era experiments in Smell-O-Vision, or the satirical notion in Huxley’s Brave New World in which people attend the “feelies”, movies that use two handles to communicate touch), but the simple contingency of the real is absent.

Forms of simulation and media always fade en masse as they reach the limits of novelty. Marshall McLuhan’s point about “hot” media yielding to “cool” media (film yielding to TV) applies here: there have been three attempts to normalise 3D cinema and all have failed, as did the immersive sound systems of the 1970s. All add too much to the representation, in ways that smaller changes (i.e. from black & white to colour) do not.

But that does not mean that an utterly inadequate, threadbare metaverse would not be enforced by intersecting powers of monopoly capital and the state. In this scenario, the metaverse would be hooked up to workplace communication, state-citizen communications — i.e. having to become a unicorn avatar to get your vaccine certificate — and for-profit global education corporations so it can be normalised into children’s development and create a generation dependent upon it, impoverished as it is.

Thus there is definitely an attempt with the development of the metaverse to create an environment in which every aspect of existence over passages of time is wholly owned — an answer to the problem that capitalism can never fully totalise its control, because of the pesky residual reality of the real.

But it is more likely to be a partial futurism, as satirised in films and books such as Brazil and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the future is determined by the accumulation of unintended consequences which silt up, so that nothing works.

For young people, Facebook has become a machine which revives the collective oppression of the closed village, amidst an atomised world of the city.

The argument for the city was that, whatever loneliness and isolation it involved, it did offer the chance for mobility and reinvention, while the village, whatever the surveillance, judgment and shaming it wielded, also offered collective life and rich meaning. Facebook extends the persecution, shunning and scapegoating of the schoolyard — schools are essentially villages of teenagers — and extends them to the wider world.

In the two decades of operation of social media, we have watched adolescence go from being a period of liberation — combined with a mix of danger, psychic and otherwise — to be a period of life, in which extreme anxiety, radical psychological isolation and suicidality (attempted, acted-out and real) have become endemic, turning the period into a white-knuckle ride to early adulthood for many parents and kids alike.

Cowed by largely overblown false moral panics of the past, we have failed to interrogate the possibility that social media’s acceleration of processes has taken us across a threshold.

Such technologies, which required a level of understanding of social processes which we to some degree acquired in the 1960s and 1970s, have come along, as decades of neoliberalism substituted simplistic and demonstrably false ideas of what social life is.

Hence the gap between technological advance and understanding is large, and much of the discourse is about corporate monopoly dominance. Whatever the impossibility of the metaverse becoming dominant, it could certainly do mass mayhem in further damaging the capacity to fully socialise youth — the very teenagers most in need of being “flung” into the real would be those most likely to crawl into the alternative reality of the metaverse.

The upshot? The failure of the metaverse — its visible process of failing now — may create a moment of recognition in which an understanding that technology is not a non-neutral development in human life, and a real process of thinking it through can begin.

It’ll take a couple of decades, though…