September 4, 2021
A whole new world
I am starting this week’s edition with a blank canvas. Normally, I have a few topics in mind when I start writing. For the first time, I have none. So, I’m going to capture a few stream-of-consciousness thoughts which may or may not be connected to each other. Hold on, everything IS connected in some way, shape or form. Who am I kidding? Fasten your seat belts. Here we go.
One way of telling the story of the last 75 or so years would be to describe how commerce has colonized more and more of our world and experiences. “Commercialize this” is the mantra. This is hardly a novel observation, I’ll grant you that. But it is worth noting that there was once a time geography and inconvenience stood as firm barriers to commerce intruding into our lives. Now, there is no time when it is NOT possible to engage in commercial activity. Amazon is in our pockets and always open for business.
Even if we are not directly engaged in consuming goods or labor at any given moment, our experiences are designed to promote commerce. They are saturated with ads, effective or not. It’s not that commerce is bad. I buy things. You buy things. We all buy things. The point is that we should be wary of allowing markets to pervade all facets of our experience.
Mark Zuckerberg has been talking up the “metaverse” of late. The overarching goal of Facebook, he recently told his employees, “is to bring the metaverse to life.” By metaverse, Zuck is talking about creating another reality, another world that is as rich as the real world. Marc Andreessen, another Internet pioneer, claims that a preference for non-digital reality (aka real world) is an expression of Reality Privilege. In his view, for a vast majority of humans, their online worlds will be immeasurably richer than most of their social and physical realms. Time’s up for reality, says Andreessen. “We should build online worlds that make life and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
I recall wondering a few years ago what would separate the rich from the others in the future? Once upon a time, it was basics like food, clothing and housing. The rich ate, dressed and lived better than most others. Such disparities have reduced so dramatically as to not matter anymore. So, what then will differentiate the lives of the rich from the rest of us? My conclusion: The rich will be separated by their ability to afford authentic and real experiences. For example, only the rich will be able to travel to Spain. The rest of us will experience Spain vividly but our experiences will be online and virtual. In the (perhaps not so) distant future, most of us will never get to see artists live in the flesh in concerts. We will watch immersive but digital concerts. These artists will perform live for the rich in their living rooms. Similarly with food. The rich may get to eat real food. Others will consume pills or synthetic food, filled with all the necessary nutrients and might even taste like real food but will not actually be real food as we know it now. And so on. For every “real world” experience, there will be its digital twin in the virtual world. In the future, the rich will get to experience the real world. The rest of us will experience the digital version.
If you can virtually experience walking through the Prado in Madrid and it feels vivid and like you’re there in person, would it matter that the experience wasn’t “real”? Who’d even know if experiences are doctored to make you forget that you’re experiencing a less authentic, manufactured reality? Once the Zuckerbergs of the world become really good at manufacturing vivid, lifelike experiences, how far will it go? Where will it stop? There are no limits in the digital world. Even the laws of physics do not apply there. It will be a whole new world. It’s fascinating to think about it.
There is a famous anecdote about a power outage in Los Angeles when the city once went completely dark. Not a spot of electricity was to be found. Strangely, 911 emergency workers began getting a flood of calls from puzzled folks asking about a striking, glowing thing in the sky. As it turned out, that thing was the Milky Way, which many had never seen until that day. They had never experienced darkness.
It is conceivable that someday in the future vast parts of humanity will have never experienced the real world. I do not know if that’s a blessing or a curse. Is “as rich as the real world” really a compliment given that the so-called real world is increasingly becoming considered impoverished and tedious for a majority of people in it?
In any case, we are well on our way to re-encounter a question the first philosophers of mankind asked: What exactly is reality?
Have a great week ahead.