It’s a wonderful meta-life
Silicon Valley aims to keep us just happy enough
IF OUR TECHNOLOGICAL overlords get it right, the future will be beautiful. Picture a young man living in a home as lovely as any he can imagine; the furnishings are modern and his windows overlook scenes of tropical waterfalls and the ocean perpetually at sunset. Every item he could wish to collect lines the walls of this space, and he can indulge every passion. He can call his friends to join him any time, and every movie, artwork, video game, television show or book ever produced is instantly available.
He needs to leave this space, this metaverse, only to sleep or eat or tend to other unavoidable physical needs. But when he removes his futuristic Oculus headset, he is suddenly reintegrated into a very different—physical—reality.
In the “real” world, he is just a guy sitting alone in a small, dirty apartment. The rented walls are unadorned. The mattress on which he sleeps is grubby and grey; his plastic furniture is broken and chipped; he is alone. And, truth be told, he is perfectly happy with this state of affairs. Why waste resources improving this crude sphere— known by the derisive label “meatspace”— when his other, virtual life is as perfect as human imagination allows?
If we listen to the likes of Meta, née Facebook, and other major technology companies, this is the Next Big Thing: an always-on virtual reality space that can intersect with the physical one—like an all-encompassing Pokemon Go. Wearing goggles or glasses, individuals will be able to work, play and socialize. We already have early versions of this technology in the form of video games like Second Life. The only advance, as recently announced by Meta, will be physical hardware that will allow us to tap into that digital world, seamlessly and constantly.
Even if Meta succeeds with its metaverse— and there is considerable skepticism that it will—the concept is both promising and unsettling. Remember that technology companies are essentially corporate futurists: to survive, they try to navigate the world to come. And the world they are betting on is, in fact, deeply dystopian.
Understanding why requires a brief detour into economics—specifically, the theories of Thomas Piketty, one of the most influential economists of our time. Piketty suggests that we’re heading into a period of economic stagnation fuelled by slowing population growth, in which wealth will increasingly be concentrated among the elite. This will have a brutal impact on class mobility; in low-growth environments, we retreat into hierarchical, feudalistic socioeconomic structures, where the rich get richer and the poor stay that way.
There’s a growing sense that Piketty’s predictions are playing out before our eyes, which might explain why a surprising subsection of the Silicon Valley set has begun championing a universal basic income (UBI). Something like a UBI can subsidize technological disruption, which is a nice way of saying it will keep the peasants in line when artificial intelligence and robots replace them in the workforce.
But in a society where social mobility is