The metaverse leapt into popular awareness in 2021, in a world all too prepared for virtual sociality thanks to a year and counting of pandemic social distancing and Zoom Christmases. Last April, Epic Games announced $1 billion in investment to build “revolutionary” connected social experiences. In June, Facebook announced itself as “a metaverse company”, with 10,000 employees working on virtual reality products and experiences, and by October, it had rebranded itself as Meta, driving a flurry of commentary as people scrambled to work out what that might actually mean.
The word quickly made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, where it’s defined as “a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users”. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, whose “Metaverse Primer” essays have done a lot to shape thinking around the concept, wrote of it: “You can walk into any experience or activity, and potentially address almost any of your needs, from a single starting point or world that’s also populated by everyone else you know.”
Online video games are probably the easiest way in to imagining the metaverse. They allow for flexibility of interaction (for example, while Fortnite began as a shooter game, it now tags itself as the place where you can “Watch a concert, build an island or fight”) as well as scale (Fortnite has over 200 million players). There are also their highly developed internal economies and social organisation – in Second Life, for instance, users can build houses and open businesses, which contribute to its $600 million economy.
But the metaverse is potentially more than just a gateway to digital experiences. It crosses over into physical experiences too. Augmented reality, where the so-called IRL (“in real life”) world is visible alongside digital content, does not require special headsets or fancy glasses. Recall the Pokémon GO craze of 2016, where collectible monsters manifested on street corners through the window of an ordinary phone screen. Pop star Ariana Grande has already played concerts in Fortnite, outfitted in flying, iridescent shards of virtual glass, complete with glowing white eyes. Perhaps next year you’ll attend a concert in full VR while your partner watches it via TikTok Live on their Apple glasses. The future is surely hybrid.
Who owns this space is yet to be determined. We might hope for a pluriverse of platforms and experiences that we can explore as we desire, walking between worlds while bringing our identities, social relationships and digital possessions with us. Tech companies, however, seek monopolies. Interoperability will be challenging, requiring more cooperation than the Web 2.0 era of social media ever achieved.
Still, the metaverse does not have to be owned by a single company, whether Zuckerberg’s Meta or any other. In October 2021, San Francisco tech opinionator Shaan Puri offered a broader and more persuasive definition: “The metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life.” It’s not new, he says, but rather “a gradual change that’s been happening for 20 years”.
The cyberpunk origins of the metaverse
Gradual then became sudden. The Covid-19 pandemic ruptured social interaction, with the CoMix social contact survey reporting that levels of social interaction plummeted 75 per cent during lockdowns, only recovering to about 50 per cent of pre-pandemic levels during the fairly unrestricted summer of 2020. In December 2021, Britons were averaging 2.7 contacts per day, barely higher than the first lockdown. We have seen a profound retreat to the nuclear family: sex outside a cohabiting relationship was literally illegal for several months, and lifestyle media is awash with talk of “pruning friendships”.
As metaverse discussions washed backwards and forwards last year – at a time when I, living alone, went days without face-to-face social interaction – I started to wonder whether I was not already living in a virtual world. Twitter, with its dramas and “main characters”, was a conversation I checked in on so many times a day it became a continuous, collective narrative. Discussions with friends (many of them also “extremely online”, as the phrase goes) would switch seamlessly between digital and offline events. Zoom calls gave me a daily fix of faces. A direct message turned into a date in VR Chat. I have always perceived my online interactions as real and significant, and during lockdown this proved a saving grace: that time may have been tedious, but I never felt disconnected. Virtual social interaction proved surprisingly sustaining. Worlds are ultimately created in the mind’s eye, not on a screen or a graphics chip. Language has had that conjuring power since time immemorial.
The metaverse is not in fact a new idea: the term was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. “When you live in a shithole,” he wrote, “there’s always the Metaverse.” Stephenson famously described a virtual world owned and governed by corporations, mirroring the miseries of an anarcho-capitalist security state outside. It’s a 90s concept, then. So what can we learn from thinking about it through the actually existing online worlds of that time?
I’m thinking of the MUDs and MOOs of the 1980s and 90s: text-based “multi-user dungeons”. LambdaMOO was the largest and best-known, with around 10,000 users in 1994 and an architecture based on developer Pavel Curtis’s own California home. Players would enter through a space called the Coat Closet, which led on to the Living Room, a hangout and place for conversation (complete with a virtual gossiping cockatoo). Keyboard commands let you move – left, right, up, down – and upon entering a new room, a description would load on your screen, suggesting various possibilities for action. You could chat with other people in the room in the standard messaging manner.
Two books provide a vivid record of life in these virtual worlds: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell in the US, and The Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier, by Indra Sinha in the UK – both published in 1999 but centred on events some years earlier.
Sinha was an ad man. Tasked with writing copy to sell modems, he decided the first step had to be getting to know the internet, “the oases and caravanserais of cyberspace: this bulletin board, that multi-user game”. He quickly became hooked, staying up all night on secretive forums and running up phone bills of £700 a month. His marriage grew strained, but Sinha was intoxicated by the people he met: “Jarly the hacker, the lovely and lecherous Calypso, Luna the roleplayer who denied she was human”, as well as their stories. “What stories! seductions, vampings, fleecings, quarrels in cyberspace that turned into real world bomb threats, a feud that began with an online murder which ended up closing down a whole network,” he told the era-defining forum The WELL in 1999.
The book is freighted with insight for the potentials of life in the metaverse. Sinha emphasises how this virtual existence keeps bleeding into real life, and he sought to “convey the real experience of what it had been like to live in several worlds simultaneously” where “it was ALL real to me. All equally real, or equally unreal.” People keep crossing over, meeting up at parties and activist campaigns or turning up on each other’s doorsteps looking nothing like their characters online. Heightening this, Sinha utilises a flat narrative style in which it’s not always apparent where action is taking place. Emotions, especially, bleed over too. “The first lesson of cyberspace: that although everything around her, including herself, is fantasy, the terror is real.” Yet, as one of Sinha’s interlocutors tells him, “It is always important to draw the distinction between player and character”: that is, online life is a performance, and should be read as such.
"A subset of the human imagination"
Meanwhile, Sinha describes his behaviour – and that of his fellow travellers – as an addict might: the telephone line to the modem “a hollow vein awaiting a needle” that might open up “a vast and chaotic world of the imagination”. The book’s marketing pitched it as a sequel to Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of An English Opium Eater and it knowingly slips into the same traps: even when trying to convey the darkness of these virtual worlds, the phantasmagoria and the seduction remain compelling. Sinha later said in an interview that, ultimately, “cyberspace is nothing more or less than a subset of the human imagination”. This, to him, is both its blessing and its curse. The human imagination can chart some Stygian currents, and this is something the metaverse (and its governors) must confront.
Julian Dibbell, a technology journalist, gives us another story from these early virtual worlds, prefiguring what’s ahead. It is to my mind one of the canonical stories of online community, ethics, and what exactly it means to “be” on the internet. It’s called “A Rape In Cyberspace”.
It’s 10pm in LambdaMOO, the text-based California house party. The entire experience is just databases and code, Dibbell reminds us: all of the entities present, “rooms, things, characters”, are just subprograms that interact “according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world”. That night, a character called Mr Bungle brings a “voodoo doll” to the party – a subprogram that attributes actions to other characters that their users did not actually create. They’re not entirely “kosher” in this space, we’re told, but they’re also often amusing.
“He could have sent a command to print the message ‘Mr._Bungle, smiling a saintly smile, floats angelic near the ceiling of the living room, showering joy and candy kisses down upon the heads of all below’,” Dibbell writes. Instead, Mr Bungle uses the program to simulate the violent rape and assault of a number of characters in the room, before the others present manage to work out how to disable him.
What has just happened? A few dozen young people, sitting at computer terminals, have seen a sequence of words appear and scroll down their screens. “No bodies touched”, Dibbell emphasises. Nobody even saw any graphic images. Yet, as the LambdaMOO community come together in the days after to talk through what has happened and what should be done, one of the women affected finds herself writing with “posttraumatic tears . . . streaming down her face”, which Dibbell takes as “a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere fiction”.
“I’m not calling for policies, trials, or better jails,” another victim later writes. “I’m not sure what I’m calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn’t happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass.” Thirty-odd people hash out all the possibilities. Had it merely been some kind of thought experiment, as Mr Bungle later claimed? Or should he be “toaded”, that is, killed? Through this deliberation, Dibbell writes, the party-goers “become, finally, the community so many of them already believed they were”.
Viewed 30 years later, this episode may seem curiously utopian. Whatever we might say happened, here is a community taking harassment seriously. Mr Bungle was indeed “toaded” – a kind of social death, not just for his avatar but for the man behind it too, expelled from the LambaMOO community. Would gamers do the same today? I’m not sure of the answer.
Dibbell and Sinha were writing at a time when people were pretty confident that the online world wasn’t real. In 1993, the New Yorker published Peter Steiner’s now famous cartoon, where one hound at a computer quips to another, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Back then, the internet was, as Sinha’s subtitle puts it, “the electronic frontier”, open and lawless. It had not yet been captured by business, and was far from its current enclosure by Big Tech.
Since then we have seen several iterations of this “reality” debate, which, I would argue, is really a discussion about how we should treat each other in the digital world. Do online actions have consequences, or does the fact they’re “virtual” mean they’re immaterial? In Alone Together, psychologist Sherry Turkle fretted, “Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind?” She argued that interacting with avatars simulating emotion posed a serious threat to our abilities to relate to one another IRL. Other scholars have explored the ways in which online relationships provide support – for example, how LGBTQ young people used online communities to find solidarity. Online trolls were seen as tricksters until it became evident that they could cause real harm.
A decade of digital change at once
Then the pandemic arrived, and a decade or more of social and digital change happened all at once. Grandma learns how to use an iPad; Zoom’s stock price soars; people adjust to working with colleagues they’ve never met in the flesh. Finally, the idea of making any kind of neat online/offline, real/unreal distinction is put to bed as the fool’s errand it always was.
In his new book Reality+, released in January, philosopher David J. Chalmers argues that we not only can but increasingly will live a meaningful life in virtual worlds. In an interview with the New York Times, he notes that “most of these basic kinds of things that matter you ought to be able to get in a virtual world”, from social relationships to learning, and setting and achieving goals. Being in a simulated environment does not make these experiences somehow “unreal” or insignificant, he argues: they may not be wholly the same as IRL, while some experiences – from awe at nature to the joys of embodiment – are “a century” away from being replicated, or may never be. But, he told the Times, “It’s clear to me that virtual worlds have a lot to offer,” although “this doesn’t make them a panacea.”
The metaverse remains an apparition of speculation and hype, scepticism and hope. Technologically, the space is wide open, and some capabilities will not be fully realised for decades. Yet I wonder whether we’re talking about it now not only out of fascination with what’s next, but as a means of understanding the present day – and the fact that the IRL and the virtual have already merged. Public life is profoundly shaped by the online – politics, for example, is governed by WhatsApp groups and Twitter posting, and MPs use their time in parliament as a chance to create viral video moments. And vice versa: “Virtual space has to be understood as an embodied space in which actual-life selves, practices, and norms continue to exist,” the philosophers Katleen Gabriels and Marjolein Lanzing argue. This is why the “Bungle Affair” felt so violent for those involved, even though nothing ever physically happened.
Rather than a discrete “place” that you may enter and exit from, it might be more helpful to imagine the metaverse as a persistent digital layer of reality. And as with the rollout of the internet in the first place, you won’t fully recognise what it is, until you realise you’re engulfed.
This article is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe today.
