Listen: Pondering the Potential of The Metaverse for Dystopian Purposes

Here's an interview about Making a Metaverse That Matters on the Plutopia News Network, hosted by Internet OG Jon Lebkowsky with fellow OGs Wendy Grossman and Scoop Sweeney. Watch above, though please disregard my disheveled look — I realized only at the very last moment that this was an on-camera interview!

One spicy topic we get into that other interviews about the book haven't yet brought up, starting at around 43 minutes in:

The desire by many technologists to turn the Metaverse into a dystopian pacifier for the poor of the world. While little discussed (it's only one of many dystopian possibilities, and not the most likely), I do think it's worth knowing how many serious and/or successful technologists really do think a VR-powered metaverse could ever be satisfying escape from real misery.

Excerpt from the book:

Back in 2014, shortly after Meta announced acquisition of virtual reality company Oculus VR for 2 billion dollars, the firm’s very young founder Palmer Luckey appeared onstage at a Silicon Valley conference devoted to VR and creating the Metaverse. Someone in the audience asked Luckey why he spoke of a “moral imperative” to bring virtual reality [and the Metaverse] to the masses.

"This is one of those crazy man topics," Luckey began, “but it comes down to this: Everyone wants to have a happy life, but it's going to be impossible to give everyone everything they want."

Instead, he went on, developers can now create virtual versions of real experiences reserved only for the wealthy. By which he meant people sitting in the room with him. “It's easy for us to say, living in the great state of California, that VR is not as good as the real world,” he concluded, “but a lot of people in the world don't have as good an experience in real life as we do here.”

Instead of providing the poor of the world with a better material life, in other words, we might provide them with virtual versions. “VR can make it so anyone, anywhere can have these experiences,” as Luckey put it to me later. Luckey has since left the Metaverse industry, unceremoniously defenestrated by Mark Zuckerberg after the 2016 election, when it was revealed that Luckey was secretly funding a pro-Trump troll group. (Which is somewhat ironic, because after Luckey helped elect Trump, many miserable people really did yearn for an escape to a better world.)

But he is far from the only person in the VR/Metaverse space who has said similar things. It was actually John Carmack who first spoke about a “moral imperative” to develop the Metaverse, and as far back as 1999. The term alludes not to Kant but, as Carmack once told me by e-mail, is a line from the 80s movie Real Genius. (“So don’t take it too terribly seriously.”)

But he is quite serious about the moral part: “There is no technical reason why a VR headset needs to be much more expensive than a cell phone,” as he put it to me. “These are devices that you could imagine almost everyone in the world owning. This means that some fraction of the desirable experiences of the wealthy can be synthesized and replicated for a much broader range of people, and that is a reasonable characterization of the positive aspects of a technological civilization.”

Carmack and Luckey are hardly alone among pioneers of the virtual reality/metaverse business who well and truly believe that their technology is an adequate pacifier for the underprivileged.

“In a sense some of the things he’s saying are mild in relation to what some of my friends in Silicon Valley say,” as VR pioneer Jaron Lanier once told me, when I asked for his thoughts on Palmer Luckey’s vision of a virtual utopia for the poor. “I hear a lot of talk that people who are rich and successful will be immortal and everyone else will get a simulated reality. And that’s the kind of thing that’s really evil that might lead to a violent reaction.”

To judge by the heavy sigh when I bring up this topic with Matthew Ball, The Metaverse author has also heard similar pronouncements many times.

“I think that's a depressing and sad argument to make. There are so many ways in which we can understand 3D simulation and the Metaverse as solving or helping to solve current problems — access to opportunity, to jobs, to education. But those who believe that it IS the solution, that it's sufficient… I really do find it offensive, insensitive, and ignorant.

“And that's because these are societal problems, they're human problems. They're questions of me-versus-them or us-versus-you. And the idea that well, we've now got technology that's good enough for the real thing, and thus, let's give it to them and move on, is disrespectful and wrong.”

Much more, of course, here.

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