MetaWorse
About a year ago I bought myself a new Macbook, and with some difficulty managed to migrate my music library onto it. With some difficulty, because my old Macbook contained hundreds of tracks that had been given me years ago, or that I’d imported from elsewhere. I wanted access to them, and I didn’t want them saved on the Cloud, because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I do not need all my happy musical memories emigrating to a server farm in Loudoun County, Virginia, when they belong right here with me. Nor do I want them to have to commute back and forth on my whim, warming the planet just a bit more with each journey.
I thought that was it.
About a month ago, I needed to listen to a piece that wasn’t in my library and wasn’t on Spotify. The only place I could find it was in Apple Music. So, reluctantly, after a couple of years of ignoring its creepy solicitations, I signed up for the three months’ free trial.
About two weeks ago, I bought — legitimately, from Decca Records — a CD that I wanted to listen to on my phone. The new Macbook won’t connect to a disc drive, so I hooked one up to my ancient (2015) iMac and loaded its contents into a new playlist in my library. Well, not all its contents, because for some reason it stalled in the same place, over and over, and by the sixth attempt I’d lost the will to live, let alone listen. So I scaled back my impertinent ambitions and let it stop at Track 13.
Then I tried to transfer it from the computer to my phone. There was the playlist, on the computer. I connected my phone. I reassured the anxious bot in the sky that I had a legitimate right to connect my own phone to my own computer, hit ‘synch library’, and waited for the new playlist to appear on my phone. And waited. Eventually, the phone announced brightly that it was ready. I opened it up, found two copies of everything that was already on it, and nothing else. Meanwhile, everything that I had so carefully moved into the new Macbook had disassembled itself from the playlists into an unappetising jumble of random - but beautifully alphabetised - tracks.
So yesterday I hauled out from a distant shelf an ancient Sony Discman, plugged it in, put it on a chair, inserted a disc, attached a pair of wired headphones, pressed ‘play’ and finally got to listen to my CD more or less where I wanted to, i.e. not while staring at a computer screen. I couldn’t actually listen to it whie walking down the street, cooking supper or hanging up the washing, and every now and then as I needed to move around, I had to pause the Discman, unplug it, move it and the chair and plug it in somewhere else. But still, I had those gorgeous tunes in my ears. Technology is a wonderful thing.
What does any of this have to do with The Metaverse? Recently, you’ll probably have noticed a carefully-orchestrated flurry of more or less simultaneous, more or less identical, mentions of this coming nirvana. In May, Mark Zuckerberg said: “We want to get as many people as possible to be able to experience virtual reality and be able to jump into the metaverse and… to have these social experiences within that.”
The way he describes it, it’s a magic playground where dreams come true. And no doubt for somebody as authentically freaked out by other actual humans as he seems to be, mingling digits is probably as much fun as he can take.
A more downbeat explanation comes from my children’s generation: “You guys have fucked up this planet, so we’re going to need somewhere else to hang out that’s not at imminent risk of heat domes, tornadoes, flash floods, wildfires or drive-by shootings”. The actual risks in the real world, at least this drab and uneventful corner of it, may be many times less than in my comparatively heedless youth, when fourteen seemed the perfect age to pick up boys on the Tube en route to orchestra practice, or start a flirtation with alcohol via a double gin with a splash of Rose’s Lime Cordial. And anybody who’s had a child in the last two decades knows there’s stuff lurking within easy reach on the Web that makes those long-ago real-world adventures look like Anne of Green Gables. But those observable facts are not going to sell any mini scooter helmets, shin pads, webcams or baby alarms, so let’s bring on some more profitable alternative facts instead, and make sure even the safest among us is well and truly terrified.
And neither of those stories goes anywhere near the actual purpose of the Metaverse.
About thirty years ago, as a young film director living in Los Angeles, I was introduced to the brave new world of the digital. It was obviously going to change everything, in ways that at the time seemed pregnant only with positive possibility. So I busied myself making films about it for British TV. One of the first was about a very early virtual world, designed for terminally ill children tied to hospital beds and facing an unbearable reality. Offering them an alternative place to be, a heaven of fluffy clouds and funny avatars that used the infinite dimensions of the virtual to enthralling effect, it was an act of love as well as imagination.
A couple of years later, I made a film called ‘The Electronic Frontier’ for the BBC and Nova. It asked, ‘What would the world look like with information as money?’ and featured, among many answers, the computer in your pocket — thirteen years before the iPhone — the death of Main Street, and DeepFakes, including their political risks. Also ‘software angels’, named for their ability to ferry messages instantly and invisibly across the world. These days we call them search engines and what they mostly bring us is anything but angelic, but it’s interesting to look back and remember how ethereally wondrous all this technology looked when it was still floating freely around Silicon Valley, when Apple’s coders really did juggle clubs in harlequin pants, and ordering pizza at 11 pm to stoke a hackathon was still the Ultima Thule of cool.
Thirty years later, in late February 2020, I delivered a proposal for a Channel 4 show called Truth Decay. The idea was to wall a few celebrities up and deliver them the world, only in virtual form: news that might or might not be fake, social media posts from friends who might or might not exist and whose faces, voices and genders shifted constantly; views of the outside world that were never the same from one day to the next, exercise via Peloton bikes that could take them anywhere in the world, and nowhere, all at once. The stunt was to find out, by tweaking their virtual feeds at the audience’s whim, how long it would take them to lose all connection to actual time or space, to what they thought of as reality — to their sanity, we hoped, as you do when you’re pitching to Channel 4.
We thought, perhaps a month.
A month later, we were in lockdown. (For the avoidance of accusations of hubris, I have read Snow Crash and indeed The Machine Stops, which is a lot shorter, eighty-three years more prescient and arguably better written — both of which foresaw all of this).
Of course, if you absolutely have to stay indoors, it’s very convenient to organise the world so it can all come to your armchair, with no need to risk death or a hefty fine by going out. Unless, of course, you’re one of the large army of people still mysteriously required to pull the strings: to drive the trucks or ride the bikes or stock the warehouses that keep the illusion seamless.
We were ready for it because, in the thirty years since those first experiments in Palo Alto and Santa Clara, the physical world we’ve evolved over millions of years to interact with, to live in, and to make our own, has progressively dissolved into the interchangeable binary digits that computers understand. Of course, it’s wonderful to have a bank, a library, all your friends and all the world’s music in your back pocket; but when it’s invisible, untraceable, and infinitely mutable, how do we keep track of it — and how do we even know it’s real?
A pile of physical money tells us how near we are to broke; a physical lock enables us to feel if a door is secure or not; a physical newspaper is hard to tamper with, and a physical book can be slipped in a bag and taken anywhere in the world, without the neurasthenic scrabbling for a signal we take for granted in modern life.
Above all else, a physical book, picture, or indeed CD belongs to us, forever. Once made, it needs no software updates or constant electricity supply to continue its existence. It’s just there. Ours.
And that, for Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichal, is the problem. If they sell us something, it’s a single transaction, with no more profit to be wrung from it. But once our lives are digitised, they can be infinitely ransomed, rented back to us as long as we keep up the payments, upgrade our software, abide by their Ts and Cs — and of course, as long as they stay in business and keep those server farms in Virginia stoked with what may or may not eventually become clean energy (Virginia, as students of geology may know, has quite a bit of coal).
The software I used to buy to edit my videos — and indeed to write this — is no longer available for sale. Instead, I have to buy a temporary licence, and be prepared to upgrade and update my machines to keep up with it, until eventually the machine is deemed too old, and everything is poised to vanish forever — and I dutifully buy a new machine. Plus, for the full virtual experience, a headset, which may finally shift a few of the vast piles of unsold inventory that have been bothering Zuckerberg ever since he bought Oculus in 2014.
So this is their Metaverse. It is, in a way, a magic playground, but for billionaires to play with our susceptibilities. An ‘exclusive’ Ariana Grande concert! A cool, members-only audio networking club! The best boy racer video game ever! A virtual Sotheby’s, where you can bid with cryptocurrency for a genuine original NFT of a digital banana! And lots and lots of porn, which if you doubt, then you clearly aren’t motivated enough to look properly.
All our music, all our letters and texts and voicemails, our photos — our memories, our lives. No longer ours, but theirs, meted out to us by the grace of tech, and liable to disappear forever if we fail to pay the tithes, or the tech fails us.
Meanwhile, if anybody can tell me how to get that CD onto my phone without losing all the other music I’ve amassed over the years — please do get in touch (virtually, of course. No actual touching will be involved). I do have a phone, and it is running the very latest system software.
