Meta meta meta

"A Cyborg Manifesto", Facebook, and Sol Lewitt

OK - it’s easy to make fun of the metaverse; I’ve made fun of it twice in the last day to two separate people; I’ve shared at least five memes about it; I’ve considered whether Mark Zuckerberg is actually AI from the uncanny valley and wants, like ET, to go home. The impulse to make fun of the metaverse is very similar to making fun of TikTok in its early days, or Pokemon Go. Fish in a barrel, etc. The impulse is tripled, perhaps, when the company investing ten billion dollars into the metaverse is Facebook — shooting ten billion fish in a barrel.

We’re already in the metaverse. The single greatest piece on the metaverse was written in 1985 by Donna Haraway - A Cyborg Manifesto. In the essay Haraway points out that we’ve always been cyborgs; we have always annexed ourselves with some form of technology — whether it be a spear to hunt a wildebeest, or armour to protect us in battle. The pencil is technology; the paintbrush is technology; the red of a cardinal’s robe is technology. They’re all annexations of the self which seek to further the self in a way that surpasses the merely physical — consider the red of a cardinal’s robe, for instance. It doesn’t offer some manifest physical benefit; there are no superpowers like invisibility or flying contained within. Yet what it does do is proffer symbolism — it denotes power; the very red denotes the willingness to spill blood for Christ. Sol LeWitt pointed out that art can be a concept — here is a concept in itself; contained in red robes. The red of a cardinal’s robes or the crown of a king is an engagement in the meta.

This goes back to Haraway’s manifesto:

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and nonphysical is very imprecise for us.

This has been true for thousands of years. The boundaries in Greek mythology between the real and the imagined are deliberately imprecise; the point isn’t that Icarus did fly close to the sun with wax wings; the point is he could’ve. The point is we built a mental model in our head of what happened.

What is Icarus to Facebook’s “pivot”? The point, I think, is that the meta has always been around us — some examples of how we use it in everyday life are scanning in with our phone (the ultimate cyborg accessory) using the COVID tracker app; taking a photo and posting it on Instagram, using an Instagram filter, paying using a credit card where an idea of money is transferred from one entity to another.

The point is we are already living in the metaverse and we always have.

Haraway suggests the boundaries of the physical and the non-physical are becoming increasingly blurred. This is perhaps a critique of Locke’s monumental Treatise on Government (1690). The single most important concept I have learnt from the law was described by Jane Kelsey to me over email one day — “Locke: government has no greater purpose than the protection of property.”

This is what Locke wrote in 1690. His theory of labour rests upon mixing your labour with that of something natural (the dirt, a field, some beasts upon the field). The implications of Haraway’s suggestion are something that theorists have been battling with for years — what happens when that labour is mixed with something not natural; something purely conceptual?

Consider Roblox. I didn’t know anything about Roblox until my friend mentioned how her kids play it all the time. The Roblox model is beautiful: c. 44 million daily users and 6 million creators, making content all the time. There’s labour mixed within there — creating a new experience or game or whatever. Yet the labour is so divorced from the ‘real’ — there is certainly labour powering all the servers (thousands and thousands of them) and maintaining them. But the boundary between the physical and nonphysical? It is imprecise.

Consider Facebook. Facebook’s social network is an example of a transitory technology: it’s the epitome of “flat” internet content (if you were to construct a brief timeline, the timeline might be — AOL > Geocities > Myspace > Facebook). There is a “walled garden” approach taken; the platform acts as an annexe to the “real”. It keeps the distinction clear.

Consider Instagram — user-generated filters on “stories”, stories themselves, posts; an evolving content-space where the garden walls aren’t closed at all.

Zuckerberg, to his credit, has long understood that the experience of “classic” Facebook is not a be-all and end-all. This is a management attitude to be lauded — Kodak had the technology for digital cameras and did nothing with it for a long time. Kodak is no longer a mega-cap company, nor does it have one of the most enviable “moats” in business. Resting on laurels is the single biggest killer of a business, no matter how good it is.

Another example: In 2002 imagining phones would be tiny computers that would serve as a complete extension of our very selves seemed far-fetched. Snake was the height of technology. They’ve since become essential; they’re become so inextricably linked with ourselves — they are the most complete version of the “metaverse” because we don’t even think of them as new or fanciful; they merely just are.

Let’s consider the metaverse as two things. The first is the one that really came into being with advances in biology and computing. As Haraway describes:

In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or database construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of fow of a quantity called information.

Let’s call this the metaverse I. Facebook is an exploration of metaverse I, as is Google: these are rational responses to parsing huge quantities of information.

Let’s say metaverse II - the one Zuckerberg is so interested in - is predicated on something coding cannot solve. Randomness. To quote from Sol LeWitt again:

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.

Irrational judgements lead to new experience.

This is the beautiful thing about humanity. There is an endless capacity for randomness and surprise and beauty. The metaverse II — the one of which TikTok and Roblox are the leading exponents — is rooted in Lewitt’s third point — irrational judgements lead to new experience. “Open” systems are infinitely more complex and surprising. The metaverse II deals in randomness and humanity.

Will Zuckerberg transition from the metaverse I to II well? Time will tell. Yet it is clear that the speed and capacity of technology has finally caught up to the metaverse II. We live in the metaverse already; we are all cyborgs. Get ready for more.