Here, in the metaverse, nobody has any connection to anyone else beyond owning a headset, a weak tie if ever there was one. Consequently, the conversations tend to stay on the level of small talk... in practice, when you remove everything that gives someone’s life shape and meaning, the essence that’s left doesn’t have a huge amount to say beyond stray thoughts on bitcoin or the latest episode of The Last of Us.
On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be lining up to join the misfits still populating it.
It’s the dynamic at play on Facebook, where the company throws family members, lifelong friends, and chance acquaintances — strong ties and weak ties, to use the sociological terminology — into your feed so that, over time, you stop being able to distinguish them, stop being able to tell who your real friends are or what a real friend even is.
In an op-ed published by CoinDesk, Janine Yorio and Zach Hungate of Everyrealm, “a metaverse-focused innovation firm and investment fund,” argue that the metaverse “will allow us to do things we cannot do in reality, much as video games do. We can destroy things and kill people without fear of punishment or retribution. We can be risqué and push cultural and societal norms beyond traditional boundaries, cloaked by anonymity and invincibility in the metaverse. We can fly, experiment with drugs, and cheat on our partners.” To be clear, these are people who think the metaverse is a good idea. The primary attraction of the metaverse, per Yorio and Hungate, is that none of the normal rules and obligations we have to one another apply. The real world, with its endless laws and limitations, is mainly there to showcase the endless plasticity of the virtual one;
After a certain number of hours in Zuckerberg’s personal universe, you find yourself asking questions like “Does he think this is good?”
If I were Zuckerberg and I’d spent $36 billion building a metaverse, I’d make sure when I launched it there was something to do. Why would he go to all the trouble of building a virtual world, then leave it to the users to make their own fun, as if they were at a holiday camp in the ’80s?
In my experience, though, this upending of social norms has a strange flattening effect on interactions in virtual reality... You can see that same flattening effect brought to life, if that’s the word, in Horizon Worlds, where users choose their own avatars, but with Meta’s template, all end up looking somehow the same: joyless, determinedly winsome cartoons of themselves, like something from an Intro to French textbook. Everybody’s the same height here in Horizon Worlds; everybody’s face is symmetrical. Almost nobody is fat or old, age usually being signified only by white hair, as if it were just some nonintuitive fashion choice.