The Metaverse is a Contested Territory

Legend has it that six months before Facebook would rebrand as Meta, Mark Zuckerberg passed around a 2011 science-fiction novel to his employees. “This is it,” he supposedly said. “This is what we’re going to make.”

The page-turner-turned-guidebook was Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s first book and a tale of outcast-to-hero, rags-to-riches, and geek-wins-the-girl. In the year 2045, the world is an overpopulated dystopia with food shortages and a never-ending recession. To escape the dread of “real life,” people live, work, and entertain themselves in the OASIS, a virtual reality and ubiquitous internet created by the socially inept video game developer James Halliday, a “god among geeks, a nerd uber-deity.”

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Meta’s new mission is virtuality, claiming the “metaverse” as its latest territory. The term “metaverse” originated in the 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe.” This root word—universe—is the territory at stake: a single, universal virtual world.

Today, though we’ll be talking about legends and myths and fictions, it becomes clear how these shape our realities. Stories are primary influencers for world building. In fact, the etmylogical root of fiction is to form or build.

It’s also worth noting that the root of “virtual” is “virtue” or virtu (manliness) and vir (man).

In Ready Player One, OASIS is an open-source reality, a “holodeck for the home,” where all global netizens have access to otherworldly landscapes, entertainment, and escape. Its biggest selling point? It’s free.

It comes under threat through Innovative Online Industries, otherwise known as IOI, who believe the ubiquitous online environment was never properly monetized and wish to implement widespread advertising while revoking user anonymity and free speech.

Reading this, the irony is uncanny—even before their rebrand, Meta proclaimed itself to be a utopic, OASIS-like social platform where users can freely convene and connect. Beneath the surface, of course, its practice has been to privatize and homogenize our online spaces, commodify users, and sell their data. Meta’s supposed commitment to freedom of speech has furthermore been tainted by shadowbans of those deemed overly political and overly sexualized.

The metaverse’s development is often linked to advancing virtual reality technology because to inhabit a metaverse, one must be connected in a virtual world. However, we should not equate Zuckerberg’s Metaverse with virtual reality overall. The Metaverse is one company’s simulation, and there are other metaverses, virtual realities, and virtual reality tools of ongoing and past explorations.

When we think about virtual reality, hardware first comes to mind. The history of VR development began with researchers wanting to understand the physiology of human eyes.

Our eyes face forward on the cranium, like other predators, and many uses of HMDs (Head-Mounted Displays) had predatorial functions, with the military driving the development of these tools.

A Brief Hardware Timeline, or how we see physiologically

1960 — Morton Heilig invents the Telesphere Mask, the first HMD. It was non-interactive and did not feature any motion tracking.
1961 — William E. Bradley’s Headsight for Philco was an HMD created for the military’s use of video surveillance.
1968 — Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull invented The Sword of Damocles, a militaristic tool funded by the Department of Defense and the CIA.
1984 — Jaron Lanier popularized the phrase “virtual reality” and his team at the VPL (Virtual Programming Languages) Research Lab invented the Eyephone, a HMD that featured head tracking.
1990s — Virtual Reality fully entered the public consciousness and pop culture in the 1990s, with films like The Lawnmower Man (1992), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and The Matrix (1999).
1995 — Nintendo’s Virtual Boy is one of the first consumer VR devices released, but it was discontinued a year later, in part due to its low-fidelity and the motion sickness it seemed to cause.
1999 — Philip Rosedale founded Linden Lab, a developer of VR hardware like The Rig, a VR device users could wear on their shoulders. Like the aforementioned devices, development was difficult, but they went on to create virtual worlds, like the well-known Second Life.
2012 — Oculus Rift was announced (first crowd-funded on Kickstarter before Facebook’s acquisition).
2014 — Google Cardboard is released.
2022 — Meta continues to pour billions of dollars into the development of VR headsets, aiming for the ever-changing cutting-edge of size, weight, and speed.
2045 — In Ready Player One, players access the virtual environment through a wireless, one-size-fits-all OASIS visor that’s smaller than a pair of sunglasses. With harmless, low-powered lasers the image is drawn onto its wearer’s retinas, immersing their entire field of vision in the online world.

With the evolution of VR technology, we see the same story mirrored across sci-fi and reality: the hardware gets smaller and lighter, while the software allows for more pixels and more frames per second.

However, it would be a mistake to conflate the development of VR software and hardware with virtual reality itself.

In Rendering Worlds, a course co-taught at The New School by Deborah Levitt and Sarah Rothberg, the two define virtual reality as “any online digital platform—Second Life, of course, but also Instagram—in which the user participates in a virtual world, as well as to the new media technology that bears this name.”

While contemporary conversations about the metaverse often revolve around the sale of new products, to focus on one particular piece of hardware or software would miss the network for the nodes.

It’s not about the tool, it’s about how the tool is used.

When talking about the metaverse, we should look past the existing or forthcoming tech and instead consider our own stake in the future’s development. What do we, as netizens of the evolving virtual world, want it to be?

In many ways, virtual reality—and the metaverse by association—pits the future defined by its citizens against a future defined by for-profit corporations. “To a certain extent, the tech industry writ large depends on futurism,” writes Eric Ravenscraft. “Selling a phone is fine, but selling the future is more profitable.”

hard vs. soft

A more instructive guidebook might be science fiction that proposes possibilities for alternative societal systems. While novels of “hard” science fiction like Ready Player One focus on the future shaped by hardware, “soft” science fiction illuminates how new psycho-social frameworks might shape our collective experience.

While it’s clear why tech’s billionaire class is drawn to hard sci-fi as fodder for future-building, soft sci-fi by authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Mark Dery show what kinds of worlds might be possible when we prioritize social questioning over technological evolution.

“We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called ‘technology’ at all.”
—Ursula K. LeGuin

A Brief “Soft” Timeline, or how we see socially

19th century — panoramic paintings and 360-degree murals allowed people to be immersed in an artificial field of vision.
1933 — the first published use of the term “virtual reality” is found in Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and its Double. For him, “it refers rather to a particular potential for metamorphoses in states of matter and being that may be accessed via…theater.”
1958 — Charles “Chuck” Harrison—one of the few prominent Black designers of the time—popularized the View Master, a stereoscope with a manually-turning film reel on a cardboard disk.
2006 — Jaron Lanier and his team coined the term “homuncular flexibility” to describe how the human body gestures could guide the motion of unaccustomed avatar body forms.
2007 — Nonny de la Peña, “the Godmother of VR,” created the genre of “immersive journalism” and suggested the potential of the HMD as a device for empathy.
2009 — Skawennati, who is widely considered the first Indigenous net artist, created the machinima TimeTraveller about a young Mohawk man who uses time-traveling sunglasses from the 22nd century.
2011 — In Radhika Gajjala’s essay “Snapshots from Sari Trails: Cyborgs Old and New” explored secondary marketplace communities in Second Life.
2014 — Ela Darling became the world’s first VR porn performer.

As a society, what might happen if we focused on the evolution of VR through the lens of its social implications? As Deborah Levitt writes in “Five Theses on Virtual Reality,” “VR builds theories of worlds through our experience of them...

It enables us to use aspects of our perceptual systems in ways that other media do not to investigate problematics and scenarios.”

By using Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One as a frame, we can more clearly discern the social complications of VR, focusing on race, labor, and sex.

RACE

By the final quarter of the novel, it’s revealed that one the protagonists, Aech (pronounced “H”)—assumed to be a white cis male—is actually a Black woman named Helen Harris.
She claims it was her mother’s idea to conceal her race and gender, as with user anonymity and a carefully crafted avatar, she would have more agency. “The OASIS was the best thing that had ever happened to both women and people of color. From the very start, [Helen’s mother] Marie had used a white male avatar to conduct all of her online business, because of the marked difference it made in how she was treated and the opportunities she was given.”

This type of freedom found in race swapping has been part of the lore of virtual environments since its creation. In Lisa Nakamura’s 1995 essay “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” she describes online role-playing sites that offer the participant the ability to select their race, gender, and physical appearance, which she frames as “identity tourism.”

“Players who elect to describe themselves in racial terms…are often seen as engaging in a form of hostile performance.”

The race-swapping participant, then, plays in a familiar, tokenized performance, appropriating alternate racial identities without the risks associated in physical life. In this way, it actually has the opposite impact of the “empathy” VR rhetoric; in fact, it reinforces stereotypes and a sense of otherness.

LABOR

As the physical world becomes increasingly unlivable in Ready Player One, labor moves to the metaverse.

Clip from Disclosure, HT Cab Broskoski

Similarly, and thanks in large part to the work-from-anywhere tech culture prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Meta employees can now hold meetings in Horizon Workrooms—a virtual conference room with a wall of windows overlooking nature.

In Ben Tarnoff’s 2021 essay “The Metaverse is a Cubicle,” he suggests two primary reasons why, even with all the fantastical potential for virtual environments, employees might find themselves floating legless in a meeting room with an artificial view.

The first reason for recreating the office environment is control.

“Employers want to find a way to exercise managerial control over remote workers, to bring the collaborative and socially cohesive aspects of in-person work to remote/hybrid environments, and to push work to lower-wage regions.”

The second is freedom—or at least the illusion of freedom.

“Employees want to retain flexibility around WFH while also finding a way to mitigate the unpleasant elements of WFH (Zoom fatigue, hybrid headaches, anxieties about lack of visibility leading to being passed over for promotions, etc.).”

This virtual, metaphorical cubicle feels like the physical cubicle we’ve come to associate with the white-collar world, first introduced to give employees the feeling of having a personalized workspace without sparing them from round-the-clock managerial surveillance.

SEX

In Ready Player One, the protagonist Wade Watts, after becoming one of the top players, is able to purchase a state-of-the-art rig. These toys include teledildonics, haptic devices that create the sensation of bodily contact, and hi-res visuals of his (virtual) sexual partner. He stops using these gadgets to have VR-assisted sex, when in frustration, he proclaims it’s nothing more than “glorified masturbation.”

The artist and educator Melanie Hoff questions, if we’re able to build a new world, a new way of connecting with others, why would we only replicate what we’ve seen before? What pushes people to imagine is the need to imagine: a survival mechanism to find release from the pressures of your current reality. Figures like Zuckerberg and Cline require less imagination for change because the status quo benefits them.

“Sex is the world our desires produce.”
—Melanie Hoff

Clip from Demolition Man, HT Luiza Dale

“All sex is physical and all sex is virtual,” Hoff describes. In our conversation, they explain how virtual sex engages in physical processes, like bodily arousal. Even when in physical contact with another, those sensations can be transformed in the mind, creating virtuality since they are not present in the physical.

Virtual sex and physical sex exists on a spectrum. Digital mediation, then, also does not have a distinct border. While a conventional example of a remote-access sex toy is a teledildonic, this could also include the iPhone or any screen-based device. Sex is an imagination game.

Critics claim that the metaverse is an old dream that will never achieve the ubiquity that its evangelists predict. “VR is a bit like a rich white kid with famous parents: It never stops failing upward, forever graded on a generous curve, always judged based on its ‘potential’ rather than its results,” writes David Karpf in Wired.

There are a couple reasons that this time, in 2022, might be different. Notably, the technology has improved dramatically. Even if avatars still do not have legs in Horizon, the hardware is light and fast, and likely to advance with over $18.5 billion a year spent on VR/AR R&D by Meta alone. And, as Tarnoff notes, with remote and hybrid structures finding permanence as the pandemic wanes, people (both employers and employees) are seeking new ways of connecting and working online.

Assuming the metaverse will only grow in prominence moving forward, let’s begin to shift our focus from the “hard” technologies of VR towards the “soft,” re-envisioning social structures.

“VR helps to shift our powerful cultural attachments to particular notions of individual and social group boundaries through experiences that ... reveal the flexibility of the human itself in relation to (its) others.”
—Deborah Levitt

This shift returns to the origins of the phrase “virtual reality” itself, as described by Artaud in his proposition of theater. Theater and storytelling allowed for metamorphosis, a new potential for representation.

We don’t need new technologies, describes James Bridle, but “new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought.” The fictions we share ultimately shape future pathways. The focus, therefore, is not on the new or different, but on how these lead to the potential for change.

In the final pages of Ready Player One, Halliday laments, “As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

Perhaps this is the biggest myth spread by the novel. Reality and virtual reality is not an either/or binary. Virtual experiences are informed and shaped by physical experiences, and vice versa. As our digital technologies continue to enhance, driven by nostalgia and platform capitalism alike, what we need are new perceptual structures and soft approaches to worlding.