The Metaverse™ is dead. Long live the metaverse.

How Mark Zuckerberg's virtual playland helps disguise the fact that America already is the metaverse.

A growing chorus of journalists and observers are taking turns calling the Metaverse a farce or a failure with an unusual amount of relish. 

“Has there ever, in the history of mankind, been this much time, money, and effort poured into something that nobody actually wants?” asked Washington Post journalist Jason Schreier on Twitter this week.

Indeed, this was supposed to be the year of the Metaverse gold rush. Yet, the “next version of the Internet,” as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called it, looks increasingly like fool’s gold in the wake of the economic downturn-cum-recession that’s emptying the pocketbooks of Metaverse-heavy companies. To wit: Cryptocurrency is on the ropes, job postings with the word “metaverse” in them plummeted by 81 percent between April and June, and Zuckerberg’s high-profile Meta gamble has cost him personally $71 billion. 

One tech blogger recently claimed that the Metaverse launch would be the biggest flop in the history of the internet. “If the pandemic should have taught us anything by now, it is that people yearn for the real world, for real-life interactions, for going out, travel, sport, or even a simple walk in the park,” he wrote. “What people do not want is being chained to a digital device at home for days on end.”

That’s a common refrain, with the implication that humanity is busy breaking our silicon chains because we’re filled with a post-pandemic lust for the unmediated life just outside the front door. 

But what if that’s a fantasy, one that’s partially disguised by the fact that few are donning Meta’s goofy VR goggles to drink virtual Heinekens or shopping in an Xbox version of Wal-Mart? 

Ask any American, and they’d say they prefer the flesh-and-blood world over the cyber world, but our daily screen time says otherwise. At the height of the pandemic, the average adult spent up to 19 hours a day staring at a screen of some kind, and we’re having trouble weening ourselves back to pre-2020 levels. Consumers logged a record 3.8 trillion hours on their phones last year and downloaded about 230 billion apps. Two-thirds of people in the U.S. check their phones nearly 160 times every day. “My day is about the transition from The Bad Screens to Good Ones,” a friend of mine said recently. 

That’s why it didn’t sound like a gross overstatement when Washington Post journalist/influencer Taylor Lorenz pushed back on the common refrain that Twitter Isn’t Real Life. “Social media is where (younger people) live, socialize, date, connect, vent, cope, and more,” she tweeted in April. “...social media is the real world, especially for the last two years.”

During COVID, the months-long cancellation of much of the material world doubled as a shock doctrine for an always-online society in which work, play, shopping, socialization, and economic life occur on the Internet first and trickles down to “meatspace” second. Global consulting giant McKinsey estimated that the initial eight weeks of strict COVID-19 pandemic protocols like lockdowns and social distancing vaulted digital adoption ahead by five years. 

The hot new social phenomena of the 2020s all originated online: Zoom parties, Dogecoin, million-dollar NFT’s, and Tik-Tok millionaires. Remember the anticipation of so-called Hot Girl Summer or Feral Girl Summer in which young people were going to return to screen-free life with reckless abandon as COVID panic eased? A fever dream expressed online. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has recently reclassified Hot Girl Summer as a “state of mind” rather than a call to party with your friends; a “utopian notion.”

Perhaps we dream of utopia because parts of America increasingly resemble a dystopia. Since 2020, we have witnessed the ravages of climate change on our environment—hurricanes, wildfires, and heatwaves—along with a horrific spike in drug overdoses, homelessness, and crime. According to one report, half a million American households currently lack basic indoor plumbing, a disturbing fact in a time in which the rich get boutique healthcare and private police forces. Even the social fabric has frayed further. Americans are fistfighting over political disagreements, ignoring traffic laws, and uploading every uncomfortable moment with each other on social media in the hopes of digital mob justice. Meanwhile, depression and suicide are on the rise, more young people are swearing off dating and sex, and personal identities are fragmenting and beginning to resemble online avatars. 

Silicon Valley sees the foundation for the Metaverse already in place, and with good reason; there’s a correlation between the amount of time spent online and the decline of the material world.

For decades, prominent writers and intellectuals have warned that we’re already in a metaverse. Chief among them is French theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose seminal 1981 work  Simulacra and Simulation described the contours of it—not as one unified platform but a digital archipelago of images and signs from a new realm of computer, media, and technological experience.

A good way to think of this informal metaverse is a summary of Baudrillard’s work in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Caught up in the universe of simulations, the ‘masses’ are bathed in a media massage without messages or meaning, a mass age where classes disappear, and politics is dead, as are the grand dreams of disalienation, liberation, and revolution.” 

Other writers and intellectuals have described this “universe of simulations” as well; Guy Debord labeled it the Society of the Spectacle, Marshall McLuhan’s version was the Global Village, and for Thomas de Zengotita, it’s The Blob. Here from the confines of the metaverse, we might know it better as The Matrix. One journalist recently compared the metaverse to The Matrix but “without the tubes and the enslavement.” 

Baudrillard was something of a spirit animal for the Keanu Reeves films, but he was famously not impressed with their philosophy. 

The Matrix, he thought, was built on a false binary between the artificial world of computers and the real world of flesh and blood. Those two realms had long ago collapsed into a manufactured simulation of reality, a “hyperreality” that we had lost the ability to detect, partly because the system had a defense mechanism. It tried to “reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production,” he wrote. Hence, The Matrix, was the byproduct of an established order reassuring us that there was an authentic reality left to preserve from the threat of artificial intelligence. “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce,” Baudrillard wrote in 2004.

Walt Disney’s theme parks worked the same way, he insisted. Disneyland needed to exist in order to convince an earlier generation that we were living in the Real World. The childlike fantasies of the Magic Kingdom served as an “ideological blanket” that hid the fact that every place surrounding it had already become a manufactured simulation of reality. America essentially was Disneyland, a pacified phantom of its former self reflected back to us by the mass media’s carnival of mirrors. 

If he were still alive, Baudrillard might argue something along those lines with the Metaverse. The promise—and possible failure—of the blockchain-powered digital playground of the future may function as a useful camouflage that conceals the fact that contemporary America is the metaverse. 

Ultimately, the Metaverse™ may need to die so that the metaverse can live.