Out of the Metaverse

From 5 February, Dr Arbery looks at the frightening prospects of the so-called 'metaverse'. I've posted about its horrors before, here and here.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Glenn Arbery, PhD

Earlier this week, I read in The Economist about the astonishing investments being made in research and development by the five largest technology companies—Alphabet (Google), Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. What kinds of research and development? Among other things, such as autonomous cars, “Apple is planning a virtual-reality headset to compete with Meta’s Oculus range and Microsoft’s Holo-Lens.” These investments are part of what the article describes as “the metaverse race.”

Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article explaining “the metaverse” for innocents like me. Forgive me if this is common knowledge, but I needed the explanation by Brian X. Chen, who writes that in the metaverse, “virtual reality serves as a computing platform for living a second life online. In virtual reality, you wear a headset that immerses you in a 3-D environment. You carry motion-sensing controllers to interact with virtual objects and use a microphone to communicate with others.”

This prospect sounds like something that Jonathan Swift would have loved to satirize, like the philosophers of Laputa who had to be slapped in the face to recall them from their abstractions. If you look up 3-D headsets, you will find pictures of people whose eyes and ears are covered with a sleek device that entirely hides the world before them. Their hands wave in the air. It’s hard to tell how exciting it must be in there with their avatars, if you see what I mean, because they look so clueless. Imagine a room filled with such people, each of them occupying space, each of them absent. Big Tech is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the hope that this kind of technology will be the next thing, as big as the smart phone or the personal computer earlier or the Internet itself. Chen quotes an expert on these matters, a venture capitalist named Matthew Ball: “It’s moving into what people call ambient computing. It’s about being within the computer rather than accessing the computer. It’s about being always online rather than always having access to an online world.”

Those Big Tech billions make a Swiftian future feel less laughable than terrible. Huge investments are driving young people toward an artificial world, and profits for these companies are the raison d’etre. And we can bet the metaverse will be addictive. These companies already deploy algorithms based on our personal actions online, our purchases, our website visits. At least one writer has claimed that artificial intelligence already controls us. “The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry,” writes Ayad Akhtar. The unspiritual disembodiment of the metaverse is clearly what we are being groomed to desire.

But do people actually want to be “within the computer” that uses us? Or do the thrones and principalities of virtual reality decide such things for us? It’s difficult to say loudly enough how antithetical the metaverse is to everything we do at Wyoming Catholic College. Our cell phone policy is famous, of course, and our Philosophical Vision Statement speaks repeatedly of “a reality external to the mind,” a knowable world that the plunge toward unreality seems engineered to destroy. Why? Because the good to which it points cannot be expressed in terms amenable to Big Tech.

I’m especially struck this week by what happens with our students in their four-year immersion in the reality external to their own minds—the great intellectual tradition, the landscapes of the Mountain West, their teachers, their priests, their fellow students. This week, the seniors have been giving their orations, a phenomenon that impresses underclassmen, parents, and guests of the college every year. They don’t put on a V-R headset. They stand at the front of a room filled with real people and speak for half an hour on some topic of their choice, using just a few notes, and then they answer tough questions from the faculty panel and the audience. It’s bracingly real: in person, not an avatar in sight.

Isn’t this the next thing we really want—young people with vision and confidence, willing to stand up and speak the truth, which, as Aristotle says in the Rhetoric, is the most powerful persuasion? The metaverse is pure sophistry, the flattery of an audience it literally encompasses—and there’s a little schadenfreude in the news that Meta’s stock has been in freefall. Our students speak on behalf of God and the best of our inheritance. Where are the billions being invested on their behalf?