For Meta or for Worse

'Snow Crash' describes a sub-culture of individuals who are nicknamed “gargoyles”: those continuously connected to the metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment. Gargoyles are no fun to talk to.

A recent cartoon by Alex Gregory in the New Yorker shows a regular couple at a breakfast table. Both are wearing prominent virtual reality headsets. “Morning, Brad,” says the woman. “Morning, Angelina,” replies the man.

This, then, is one of the possible uses of the so-called metaverse. Such experiences and more are what Facebook is betting its future on.

A statement announcing that the company was changing its name to Meta explained that the metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, “sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world”. This lets you share “immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world”. How messianic.

Where does the word “meta” come from, and what does it mean? It’s a prefix from the Greek, broadly used to indicate something between or beyond. Thus, metatarsals are the bones between your toes and ankles; and metaphysics deals with the first causes of things beyond what is apparent.

As for metaverse, the word saw the light of day in Snow Crash, a fevered cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson that was published as long ago as 1992. Here, a character enters the fictional metaverse after being plugged into a computer-generated world that “his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones”.

Also read: Explainer | What is a Metaverse and why is everyone talking about it?

The premise of the metaverse appeared much earlier, however. In William Gibson’s 1981 story, Burning Chrome, followed two years later by his influential novel, Neuromancer, he referred to it as cyberspace: “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.” He went on, in his characteristic manner: “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.”

In Stephenson’s novel, the primary location of the metaverse is a large, brilliantly-lit boulevard, a virtual Broadway or Champs-Élysées. Developers build their own small streets off the main one. They can include buildings and parks, as well as create spectacles such as overhead light shows, zones that ignore rules of three-dimensional spacetime and – of course – combat arenas where people can hunt and kill each other. Many, especially those in Silicon Valley, have praised Stephenson’s prescience.

In a phrase sure to make the eyes of today’s venture capitalists light up, he writes that the metaverse is like “Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance”. The interlocking pieces of software that create this virtual world are made available for the public’s pleasure over a worldwide fibre-optic network. Here, their avatars – another word popularised in this sense by Stephenson – can meet, build, play, and fight off nasty software viruses.

One of the practical criticisms of Facebook’s virtual universe is that it relies, at least in the near future, on users wearing clumsy AR and VR headsets, shutting out the real world after swallowing the latest iteration of the blue pill. In this, too, Stephenson’s novel appears to have been prophetic.

Snow Crash describes a sub-culture of individuals who are nicknamed “gargoyles”: those continuously connected to the metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment. Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. “They are adrift in a laser-drawn world,” writes Stephenson, “scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimetre-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once”. Doesn’t sound very appealing.

The novel’s influence extended beyond Silicon Valley. In a famous episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, to mention one example, the consciousnesses of the living and the dead are uploaded into a virtual reality system, enabling them to live out their younger fantasies. More recently, Ernest Cline’s debut novel Ready Player One featured a worldwide virtual reality game that people gladly escape to, with the earth being engulfed by an energy crisis and global warming.

Facebook, of course, is hoping that its version of the metaverse will have more use cases than communing with the dead and fleeing a ravaged world. The concept of a shared virtual world isn’t new, but going by the rise of Facebook and other giant tech companies, commerce and growth will play dominant roles.

This vision of the future is “extractive, joyless, and dull”, writer and editor David Roth scornfully said in a recent piece for The New Republic. It’s “a mall-shaped prison,” he went on, through which all of humanity would wander “while being pelted with advertisements, slurs, and dumb, garish lies”. Let’s hope that the meta in metaverse doesn’t turn out to be just another four-letter word.

Also read: Meta narrative: Facebook by any other name