Meditation: On The Metaverse

If you’re concerned about the impending digital dystopia … don’t be. You're already in the metaverse. In fact, you've always been in a metaverse.

This isn’t advocacy for the Simulation Hypothesis posited by philosopher, Nick Bostrom, which suggests the advancement in computing power will allow future generations to run a vast number of highly detailed simulations of their ancestors.

In his 2003 paper, Bostrom claims, “then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.”

This theory isn’t without its high-profile backers, Elon Musk believes there is a 99.99% chance that the universe we inhabit is a computer simulation.

Is this really such an absurd idea?

Entire portions of society are built within a religious framework. Imagined powers and places of the afterlife cause us to behave and represent ourselves in a certain way. Many followers of a religious order are instantly recognisable with clear identity markers, all set in accordance with a founder’s central thesis and all in the hope of securing the very best spot in a virtual afterlife under the rule of hypothetical, ethereal forces.

Our governments and economies are propped up on the uniquely human skill of believing in an imaginary state. Money is a perfect example of our ability to assign immense value to paper tokens.

It could be said that the encroaching metaverse is more monetisation than virtualisation. As a company, Meta, have been distilling the religious precepts and laying them out, bit by bit, for nearly 20 years as well as enacting their own version of the crusades in commerce.

As online tribes governed by unseen higher powers, we've been trained for the metaverse.

Rather we’ve trained ourselves, because, whilst Facebook's transition to Meta may look like a company leading the charge in a virtual revolution, one might argue, they are simply being responsive to user behaviour.

The metaverse is a place in which an idealised, abstracted version of oneself can exist in digital environments - this should be easy for any existing social media users who carefully curate their identity and the bio lines beneath their avatar.

We are already using avatars; the majority of profile pictures are airbrushed, edited and filtered. These new, digital approximations are immediately recognisable to the self as the self. These polished, ultra-focused, emptied-background, whiter-toothed, wider-eyed, beautified versions create no lag in the brain for recognising it as its true exterior.

In a recent interview for Esquire UK, British artist, Mike Nelson was quoted as saying:

“I do feel like we’re starting to live in digital time instead of human, animal time … I think it’s quite confusing for us, because it’s putting history on one level: everything’s the same, because with a click of a button you can be somewhere else, like it’s nothing. Our bodies continue ageing, and yet everything else is frozen in time.”

The problem presented here is that the reality reflected in our mirrors becomes an offensive, intolerable, downgraded version of oneself and the ego will seek solace more and more in virtual reality.

The reason that we hide behind online personas is to run away from - or at least temporarily sidestep - our feeling of inadequacy, fear of mortality and primitive social anxieties. However, these feelings and fears are only exacerbated by constant comparison against other perfect, online personas and the impression that we are somehow excluded from the events we see posted. Surely this will only worsen as our digital world becomes fully immersive and hyper realistic.

If this is truly all a simulation then we have reached a point in which we are using a simulation to escape the simulation. Where does this descending spiral end and how do we get off the carousel?