Recently, I was asked to write a piece describing the “beauty of the Metaverse,” the augmented world through virtual reality. It’s arguably the next chapter of the internet and promises a new way to socialize and communicate with people around the world in a unique digital sphere. It’s made to be boundless, persistent, and immersive. It promises to revolutionize the education and healthcare experiences. These noble goals are impressive and have the potential to change people’s lives and the way that they navigate the world. While I could have made the aesthetic argument for how technology could benefit aging populations and the sublime connections that it facilitates, at the end of the day the article (below) became more of a critique regarding the lack of spiritual beauty taken into account in the development and use of capitalistic technologies like virtual reality and Metaverse. The editor decided that this was not the type of “beauty” they were looking for (opting for something more “fashionable” and “pretty”). I did not understand the assignment, it seems, or perhaps the editor and I had different moral opinions on the philosophy of beauty. That’s not why we are here though. We are here to discuss the “beauty” of commercialized virtual reality, or lack thereof.

Stepping back from analyzing the Metaverse on its own merit, the current progression and relationship of digital technology with society first must be contextualized. Before we can analyze the beauty and functionality of virtual reality, we must untangle the complex interactions amongst human psychology, late-capitalistic economic models, and the electronic interfaces that mediate and represent our interactions with the real, confabulated, and constructed worlds around us. Without caution and intentionality in how we utilize our ability to manipulate reality in digital space, we risk the dangers of fundamentally altering, perhaps even irrevocably, the things that make us human in the first place.

We are cyborgs already

A cyborg is a human who, throughout technological modifications, gains superhuman abilities. Contemporary feminist philosopher Donna Haraway claimed that, “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” 

Because so much of human life is mediated by technology. It’s how we navigate the world with GPS and communicate through text and email. We are cyborgs currently even without the use of virtual reality headsets. Much of our lives, our experiences, our feelings, our passions are online. We feel this when we realize photos weren’t backed up or when we can’t remember a password to a social media account. Without those digital parts of ourselves we feel incomplete. We lose parts of ourselves when we are not plugged in.

Much of our selves are already housed in technological spaces. Haraway has gone onto say that, the “cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” The internet changes how we know things, it’s where we get our news and information, it’s the platform through which how we discuss ideas amongst our digital communities. Through these performances, the digital becomes an extension of our identities.

Extending our relationship to technology to virtual reality is really only shortening the lag between ourselves and our digital devices. To send a text or to Google something, your thumbs have to type it out — or perhaps you use voice command and ask Alexa to do it for you but still that takes time. If we are fully plugged into the computer world, the response time is immediate. 

However, the lack of boundaries between human and technology forms a problem. Again, Haraway: “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert… The boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us.” While the use of tools has anthropologically defined the human species, technology (especially digital frameworks that can run on their own like AI or machine learning) is in itself a separated and related actor. Technology controls us as much as we control it. 

Commodification of souls

There’s the pithy truism uttered back in 1973 by the artist Richard Serra: “if something is free, then you are the product.” Late-capitalism has run with this concept and capitalized on human data as the commodity rather than — and in addition to — material objects. In our enlightened modern societies, capital is synonymous to value, unstructured time is sacrificed to productivity and progress, fear-based narratives alienate us from other people atomizing the individual further away from themself and others in more cases than not. People are reduced to their capacity to consume other products, and these days the products are vague and ever-transitioning trends, political views, and personalities.

bell hooks described that high achievers within a capitalistic system “suffered internalized self-hatred [and] invariably acted out in ways that undermined their success… to complicate matters [they] may feel the need to pretend that they are self-loving, to assert confidence and power to the outside world, and as a consequence they feel psychologically conflicted and disengaged from their true being.” When the product is our self — and the data that we generate — then the disentanglement between our soul and our commodified self is utterly complex when our lives are enacted and embodied through digital technology. 

Culture convinces us that consuming will fulfill our fantasies, but this is not the real practice of living. Commodification and capitalistic metrics give us something we can easily measure, but leave us feeling disconnected from both ourselves and each other.

Considering the world of online dating: we find the frequent trend of women swiping left on men less than six feet tall regardless of their other characteristics. In this case, height is the metric by which we judge our potential partners (sure, maybe we want them to be virtuous too but, gotta be tall first and foremost). In her book How to Not Die Alone, Logan Ury described a study “using data from a popular dating website [where researchers] found that a man has to earn $40,000 more each year to be as desirable as a man one inch taller.” Perhaps these mere facades will be easily looked over within the constructed reality of the Metaverse — especially due to the finances required to have a VR headset in the first place — but metrics beyond height consciously and unconsciously drive our decisions. 

When certain personalities and behavioral traits are rewarded within a system, and promoted extensively by AI and thus mimicked by humans to follow the trends, we will play the game to fit in. Moreover, we are rewarded for playing the game, not asking about the rules. hooks “was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day… turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again.” This is what happens when we pay more attention optimizing our strategies within the system than questioning the “rules” in the first place. 

It’s like Goodhard’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We can’t blame ourselves, our friends, or influencers for following trends, or for any social media user to continue to sell their data for likes and mediated connection: we’re just operating within the rules provided by the platform. hooks goes onto say, “when greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior. It’s the culture of exchange, the tyranny of marketplace values.” 

The popular docudrama The Social Dilemma describes how social media was engineered to keep your attention, and as such many of the algorithms — the ones that feel catered and special for you — are designed to keep you on the platform and steer you towards content that’ll keep you consuming. “Our best machines are made of sunshine,” Haraway says, talking about bright and life-giving they seem to be. “They are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile… The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly,” because “people are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque.” The danger of melding with our technology is that it’s not a perfect fit, it’s not going to be seamless, and we need to question what we’re losing about our selves, our souls, and our humanity when we integrate more with our digital machines. 

Healing our relationship with technology 

Analyzing our relationship with technology is nothing new, but existential philosopher Martin Heidegger realized something important: that humans manipulate and change nature to achieve our ends. Everything around us, especially in modern times, is a form of technology, it’s something man-made, something built. As such, technology represents the world to us through different mediums be they digital or analogue. However, the more and more contrived our realities get, the media becomes an illusion and our brains are tricked into thinking that the engineered world of human technology is base reality. And while it is real in the sense that the digital world does exist, there’s a sense that it’s detached from a different type of natural environment, a non-human nature. 

Joakim Vindenes, a professor at the University of Bergen, stated that “technology, with its essence, does not and can not, view anything in the world ‘as it is,’ it is only judging terms of utility and means to ends; it is seen not as good, but good for.” This only makes the detachment between human values and ethics (the good) with the commodification and capitalization of our selves as products (the good for). If and when we allow the technology to meld seamlessly into our lives without strong intentionality, we risk becoming the product of someone else’s — the people and systems running our industrial society — goals. 

Moreover, Vindenes goes on to say that “if we only interpret the world as potential means to an end of ours, we don’t really see the world as it is, or as it reveals itself.” Beyond the distinction of good and good for, technology, if left unchecked alters our experience of reality to such a degree that we’ll only truly experience reality mediated through machines and apps. The real reality of nature could be so obscured that it’ll be foreign to future generations. 

In some corners of modern society, we see a backlash to this hyper digitized movement. Minimalism, off-grid living, returning to app-less flip-phones, hipster record players instead of streaming services, and “slow-living” in general are all trends that (while highly commodified) are on the rise. Slow living itself is a mode and process to try and repair and restore our connection to the world and see beyond the infrastructures of technology and society.

With all movements, there are indeed radicals that seek more imposing change to the world ranging from harsh digital censorship to outright destruction of industrial society. Under a reactionary anti-technology zeitgeist, a film about the infamous Unibomber, Ted K, hit theaters nationwide. This movie demonstrates, intentionally or otherwise, that there is an aesthetic pull towards understanding Kaczynski’s motivations and puts the viewer in his head (this is the power of good — or at least effective — art: to shine a lens into an ideology and sometimes to inspire subsequent action). Kaczynski’s writings forewarned a society ruled by technology, and even though his actions were deplorable, the ideas behind them resonate with many across the political spectra. Even the actor playing Kaczynski, having read Ted’s manifestos for the role, found himself uncomfortably agreeing.

“Crowding, rapid change, and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of societal problems… Constitutional rights do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a ‘free’ man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.” [I mean, he a’in’t wrong?]

The internet as we know it is run by for-profit companies to the point of questioning how functional our democracy is. It uses the insidious tools of surveillance capitalism to claim and commodify human experience for the price of behavioral data to manipulate our choices. Cloud-based data storage contributes a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry. It’s tempting to take the advice of a highly educated ecoterrorist to smash it all down, to become a luddite intentionally breaking down the infrastructure that a harmful system relies on, to vigilantly take matters into our own hands to reduce green house gasses without waiting around for policy makers to do something about it. 

Conclusion

The conclusion, however — and, hopefully, obviously —, is not to destroy tech corporations or harm the individuals running the system in general or developing virtual reality in particular. It’s our data that’s on the cloud, it’s by our choice that we upload so much of our souls online. We use big tech like Facebook (er, Meta) and Google because they are there and everyone else is using them. Stepping away from the easy route, we find handfuls of alternative platforms with different business models. Anne Applebaum says that, “none of these initiatives will ever be ’the new Facebook’ — but that’s exactly the point. They are intended to solve specific problems, not to create another monolithic mega-platform.” It’s our responsibility to seek out and support the alternatives that better align with our mission, on an individual level but also a the community, national, cultural, and international levels. 

There is something unique and beautiful about our ability to transcend ourselves and become cyborgs, to create a communication system out of waves and silicon, to at least trick our brains into minimizing the distance between each other when the world is big and lockdowns (driven by pandemics, politics, and war) are real. The nuance and balance that we strike in trying to attain our various socio-political-economic needs is by no means easy, but it’s certainly not found at the extremes of primitively off-gridding or completely plugging into the digital world, however tempting they both are depending on the moment. 

In the meantime — because individuals only have so much autonomy and agency in these complex industrial systems — restrictions on corporations to mine and sell our personal data should be regulated to at least steer individuals towards making better and safer decisions for themselves and their communities. Without federal privacy laws regulating how data is collected and used, companies will continue to do what they want with us to meet their own metrics of success. Already, these companies compile so much information about our daily lives without the use of VR. Now imagine the types of personal, psychological, and spiritual data they’ll have when you’re plugged in, try to see yourself as free as the world Meta constructed “for you,” and then tell me how beautiful that feels to your soul. 

References 

• Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev, “How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire,” (2021), The Atlantic.
• Steven Gonzales Monserrate, “The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage,” (2022), The MIT Press Reader.
• Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” (1991), Simians. 
• Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” (1954). 
• bell hooks, “All About Love: New Visions,” (2000).
• Theodore Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” (1995), The Washington Post & The New York Times. 
• Peter Larsen, “‘Ted K’ filmmakers reveal uncomfortable discoveries in telling the Unabomber story,” (2022), Press Telegram.
• Jeff Orlowski, “The Social Dilemma,” (2020), Netflix. 
• Tony Stone, “Ted K,” (2021), In Your Face Entertainment. 
• Logan Ury, “How to Not Die Alone,” (2021). 
• Joakim Vindenes, “Heidegger’s Virtual Reality,” (2018), Matrise. 
• CJ The X, “Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos – Video Essay,” (2021), YouTube.
• Shoshana Zuboff “You Are Now Remotely Controlled,” (2020), The New York Times.