The Metaverse, LARPing and the Three Body Problem
It's going to get weirder than it already is.
“There’s something about life during the pandemic that cannot but remind me of space travel. You wake up, walk around the spaceship, connect the video messaging, go back to sleep, knowing it is still nine or twelve months to planet Trantor or planet Terminus, or the next galaxy system, where we expect to arrive…”
That’s the opening from Bruno Macaes latest book Geopolitics for the End Time, From Pandemics to Climate Crisis . The book is a quick read and is like most BM work, a whirlwind of geopolitics, philosophy, supply chains and literature/cinema deep cuts. I recommend it. The idea he starts with triggered a few thoughts I wanted to share.
When Facebook changed its name to Meta, the term metaverse entered more prominently into the daily cultural lexicon. For the science fiction and tech focused, it’s not a new term, but it’s out there now more broadly than it was. When a Google or a Facebook or an Amazon signals trajectory changes towards a technology or platform, it moves the rest of tech that exists below the mega-platform level into those domains as well. That’s where the market places live now. And so there’s broad acceleration into those platforms for hundreds of companies that already exist and thousands more that don’t yet.
One way to think about it is that the metaverse is just the next level of progression towards a deeper online existence that Facebook boosted a little over a decade ago. In this regard I suspect we’re on the front edge of a massive leap forward. Video games are always a good place to look. Nothing scales massive and complex AI/ML driven experiences like video games. My 12 year old has a huge lead on me for living in the world that’s coming over the next 50 years. Which is true of history’s 12 year olds.
Another way to think about the metaverse is through the lens of coexisting worlds and comparative status.
Neal Stephensons 1992 book Snow Crash was one of the first mentions of the metaverse in the way we’re currently envisioning it. In that reality the physical world had advanced into a cyber-punk dystopia where commercial and civic institutions meshed together. The government competed with pizza chains and no one had a monopoly on violence. But inside the metaverse things were different. Hiro Protagonist was mostly a regular Joe in the world of atoms but he was famous and powerful in the metaverse world of bits. And that fame and power translated into material value. It gave him access. And that access is what he sold to pay the bills. Stephenson envisioned a world where the power of the metaverse sold access. The reality that’s materialized is that the metaverse sells influence. He was close. And may eventually be right.
Back to Macaes point. The metaverse is growing around us. And it’s growing rapidly because the world outside our control, in nature, is getting less livable. Right now, it’s the virus. It will one day be climate. And somewhere in between we’ll have civil unrest, war or other disruptions that will turn the world outside our walls into outer space. And we’ll nest in the cyber realities we’ve created.
What was once novelty will be necessity. An inventory of current state is an interesting exercise.
My corporate office closed in March of 2020. I haven’t been back in since. That’s 21 months. I’ve hired people I haven’t met in person. I’ve changed roles. I have a team that’s never been in the same room with me. I exist in a cloud of video conferences where a separate running chat provides a secondary dialogue to the focus on the screen. We collaborate on Google docs and sheets. We use Slack as our primary communication source. Email adds a layer of formality and archive. We’ve established norms and rules. We have scan patterns. We reach for levers that have become as natural as walking down the hall and knocking on the door.
I have no commentary on whether it’s an improvement. Only that it’s a change. And even if/when we return to the office, it’s likely to be just a relocation of our portal than it will be a return to a pre portal life. The backgrounds behind the images of my team members aren’t real. Only their images are. But I suspect that will change too…eventually. This is all metaverse.
My son plays…all day…with his classmates in games that are connected by the internet to common servers. They can either communicate directly through the game or on cell phone video conference calls. He spends more time with his friends playing than I did. It’s not close. He wanders away from the dinner table and is engaged with four other seventh graders without me even seeing it. His earbuds are in. His phone travels with him. I could play the basic dad and tell him he’s wasting his time but I know better. He’s immersed in the world that will be his future. This is all metaverse.
I’ve engaged with 1300 different people around the world over the last two years by playing a chess game with them. It’s three clicks on chess.com and we’re matched. It has every move I’ve ever made archived and now has a significant model of how I play and what I do when I win and when I lose. It’s provided me with an omniscient coach. This is all metaverse.
This blog, my Twitter account, my Instagram, are all virtual presences where I have an identity, a following and some value. This is all metaverse.
I shop online in a virtual market. My Peloton bike, account and workout history is another persona. This is all metaverse.
It’s true that the metaverse entering into our consciousness is less of a creation and more of a conglomeration of all that exists. The pandemic has accelerated it. We’re just missing the VR goggles. But are we?
It’s also true that we’re on new ground in terms of status and consequences.
More and more what’s left for me in the world outside my walls is recreation. What’s also true is that most people still work in the material world. And the divergence in our existence matters and will matter more in the near future. As will the convergence of my existing worlds. Once it was clearer that my online existence was distinct from the real one. Work was real. Friends were real. Spending time together was real. Facebook was just fun. Those walls are all gone now.
In Snow Crash someone figures out how to traverse from the virtual into the physical by creating a data virus that breaks from the bits into the cells of those who see it by disrupting their neurons in some unexplained way. And so ultimate consequence leaps from the virtual into the real. That may be impossible. But in some ways it’s reality. My worlds are not separate. The modern Snow Crash is some version of cancel culture and regrettable actions that could get me fired. I have different worlds. But I am one person with one legal culpability. For now at least. And this is going to be a collision of consequence we’re all rapidly struggling with. I’m sure many people who wandered smiling through the rotunda last January 6th believed this all to be a continuation of the online political LARPing experience. The jobs they lost are real. The jails they sat in are real. Their prison sentences are real. A civil war is real.
We’re bouncing around in our own version of what astronomers call the three body problem. It’s the problem of determining the motion of three celestial bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation. The bodies are real and predictable. The gravity is real and predictable. But the ambiguity of the existence of three sources disrupts the predictability of the pattern. The Three Body Problem is also a great book by Cixin Liu about, you guessed it, a metaverse.
We’ve already climbed on Maceas spaceship. Buckle up. It’s going to get even weirder than it has already. There’s a sanitation strike in my city as I write this. Trash lines the street in my quiet suburban neighborhood. In true Snow Crash fashion I sit inside on a clean screen in an existence separate from the trash. I complain about it on my twitter account. What will come of it? It’s hard to tell.
The three body problem persists.