The link-drop is back!
The Metaverse?
If you missed it, Facebook is rebranding next week. (Out with “Facebook” and in with “The Only Sometimes Evil Company”?) Whatever Zuckerberg goes with, he hopes to pivot attention from Facebook and Instagram to its other projects. We’ve already talked about the Facebook glasses and their potential privacy implications, but those are just one part of Zuckerberg & Co.’s plan to develop the “Metaverse.”
What is this Metaverse? It’s everything and nothing, but tech journalists Adi Robertson and Jay Peters have written up a delightful summary over at The Verge. They explain:
Right now, tech industry figures who talk about “the metaverse” are usually excited about digital platforms that include some of the following things:
Feature sets that overlap with older web services or real-world activities
Real-time 3D computer graphics and personalized avatars
A variety of person-to-person social interactions that are less competitive and goal-oriented than stereotypical games
Support for users creating their own virtual items and environments
Links with outside economic systems so people can profit from virtual goods
Designs that seem well-suited to virtual and augmented reality headsets, even if they usually support other hardware as well
But in most current discourse, “the metaverse” arguably isn’t a fixed set of attributes. It’s an aspirational term for a future digital world that feels more tangibly connected to our real lives and bodies.
Could be…interesting? It makes me think of avatars meeting in virtual boardrooms—or when the Dean in Community bought a VR set—so, probably silly. But Facebook (er, whatever they’ll be called next week) appears serious about this Metaverse and making bank in the process. Augmented reality games and virtual workplace tools will likely join their Ray-Bans in selling the public on why we, too, should go further up and further into the Zuckerverse.
The Metaverse sounds an awful lot like a “body network.” Isabel Pedersen, a tech theorist who writes about wearables, came up with the term in an essay last year. According to Pedersen, “body networks” conduct computing “on,” “in” and “around” the user’s body. Think everything from smartwatches and AI-enabled Ray-Bans to ingestible chips and Elon-Musk-esque brain implants.
Even though current technologies and paltforms profile us with data already, Pedersen warns that Metaverse-aligned systems would quantify our lives by another order of magnitude. And that shift would have unintended effects:
In cyber-capitalism, algorithms make decisions for us, and computers filter what we read and what we buy (or consider buying), map our whereabouts, remember faces of people we know, and often inform our next move. For us, this leads to estrangement rather than cohesion because data processes are operating covertly . . . things we used to simply feel or do are assigned meaning requiring us to know them, essentially disembodying them. Data produce a conflicting semiotic of self-awareness; signs are both covert and overt. [emphasis added]
In other words, data isn’t bad. I can track my runs, for example, in order to create a training plan and improve. But transforming every experience into data? Every interaction into a recording? What’s it for? Why do we need to know? Why do Facebook or Amazon need to know? And perhaps more importantly, what impact does that have on our relationships with and in the world?1
In The Circle, a novel by Dave Eggers, a Facebook-meets-Amazon company rules the world while claiming that “secrets are theft” and “everything must be known.” And yet, in surveilling, recording, and exposing everything, Eggers’ characters shed their capacity for interpersonal disclosure. They become humans without intimacy.
The main takeaway is this: when Facebook talks about the Metaverse, when Amazon markets rolling robots, or Spotify wants to record your voice everywhere you go, they position these things as inevitable and desirable. Pedersen calls that kind of marketing the “continuum of embodiment.” As consumers and citizens, we need to move beyond corporate marketing and consider, on a deeper level, how technologies may assist or hinder the lives we actually want to live.
But what do you think about the Metaverse? How could that technology be used for good? Do benefits outweigh the costs? Let me know in the comments!
Thinking Like a Porch
Let’s go from high-tech to low-tech for a minute. Orion, a delightful nature magazine, recently published this piece by Charlie Hailey on how to “think like a porch.” I thought this was a fantastic meditation on being with and caring for nature at home. Take this bit, for example, where Hailey invites us to his porch:
What I’m feeling is that I’m worried about the future and sitting on a porch calms me down but it also makes me anxious, because here, on the house’s edge, nature tells how everything is changing. My imagination runs wild like environmentalist Rachel Carson playing what she called the hunting game from porches. She would listen to nature’s sounds and then either go out and find the source of the sound or imagine what she was hearing. I like how a porch is the jumping off point for both. It makes room for reverie and action, just as it tells stories of joy and urgency—a bright patch of blue sky alongside the undeniable change of climate.
The porch is an in-between space, a home-place that entertains nature. Hailey claims that this kind of space is especially necessary amid climate change. The home shouldn’t be—isn’t—an insular island. Each home is embedded in and part of an environment. And according to Hailey, we realize that embeddedness by sitting on the porch. In his words:
There is no better time to rethink the edges of where we live and what we build. It’s the perfect vehicle to get outside without leaving home. Porches invite nature in. Today, architects talk a lot about building sustainably, and few architectural elements embody the resiliency necessary for the Anthropocene like the porch. We can’t engineer our way out of the climate crisis, and we can’t stop building, but we need to think about building as repairing. In its early use, the word repair meant a return home, and if a porch can help bring us to nature, it should be our new home.
We’re well beyond porch season in Oslo. But the article reminded me of sitting on our porch during lockdowns—drinking mojitos, watching squirrels, talking about the pandemic. From there, we could take in the chaotic world and make sense of our place in it.
You can read the rest of Hailey’s essay here, and you can find his book The Porch here.
That’s it for the link-drop.
Have a great weekend!
See you next week.
Self-tracking is so prevalent that The Guardian even asked: “can a person who tracks their steps, sleep and food ever truly be free?”