American family clustered around a television

The Quadra Project: Living in the Metaverse

The beginning of trouble can be linked to the advent of television. The first hint of a problem that has now grown out of control was identified in 1961 by Newton Minow, the leader of a Federal Communications Commission that was authorized to report to President John F. Kennedy on the effects of television on the personal and social psychology of Americans. Minow’s executive summary described a medium that was filled with “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” Minow concluded that TV was creating “a vast wasteland” in which an alternate reality of entertainment was disconnecting Americans from the actual world in which they lived.

Since 1961, the screens that brought TV from a few networks into several million households have multiplied manyfold. Computers and cellphones are now ubiquitous, and the “wasteland” has morphed into a communications creature of a more worrisome character. And this has been abetted by social media, a distribution of information that is wholly unregulated and resides outside the principled integrity of journalistic accuracy. The psychological effect is somewhat like the manipulative and pacifying dynamics of the “feelies” in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, “Brave New World”. The collective psychological condition of living entirely within a reality of virtual entertainment was given the term “metaverse” in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, “Snow Crash”—the root components of metaverse are “sensory” plus “whole”.

This virtual reality doesn’t have to be commercially promoted as a special visual and auditory space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment. As Megan Garber so insightfully writes (Atlantic magazine, “We’re Already in the Metaverse”, March 2023), our pervasive digital world has already created this reality for us. We’re living in it right now. Every day. Our perception of reality is being skewed by input from Twitter (now X), Facebook, TikTok and other digital platforms. The glowing screens, by the billions, are with us all the time, and they are actively generating a distorted and sometimes an entirely imaginary sense of reality.

The result is a blurring of fact and fiction, of truth and entertainment. If you don’t like one reality, change screens. Then settle into the reality of your choice. Forget the distinction between presence and escape. The arbiters of evidence, the task that was once the sacred responsibility of journalists, has been abandoned in the melee of digital freedom that now arrives custom designed from all directions.

This melee gets sorted out by selection processes that have little to do with facts. The most conspicuous example is the “echo chamber” that reverberates information back and forth between self-selected users. Each echo selects, confines and amplifies its particular reality. Accordingly, each reality focuses so narrowly that it becomes isolated enough from others as to be bizarre. QAnon is an example. Its followers occupy a fictional slice of the universe that is written, directed and produced, as Garber explains, by a trusted but anonymous someone. The metaverse that it creates is so separated from empirical evidence that its followers are unable to rationally connect to the rest of society.

Exacerbating this isolating process is what the psychologist John Suler has described as the “online disinhibition effect”. This is “the tendency for people in digital spaces to act in ways they never would offline”, a process suggesting that the digital world is regarded as a form of reality in which other people can be treated as objects. The result is abusive language and treatment that would never occur in a real world where people communicate face-to-face. This communication barrier is amplified by each metaverse highlighting the importance of the person who occupies it. The two dynamics combine to create irresolvable differences between people.

Those who control information have tremendous power because they make reality by influencing and guiding the perception of others. So anyone living in a metaverse can ascend to levels of unprecedented authority. Former U.S. president Donald Trump is a classical example of someone who has mastered this power. The distinctive metaverse he occupies is identified by the 30,573 documented lies he told during his term in office. It’s more generally defined by one in which the electoral system of the United States is dysfunctional, the civil service is unequivocally corrupt, the honed legal processes of nearly two-and-half centuries now operate at the level of “witch hunts”, and an organized conspiracy of the “deep state” is intent on destroying the flawless character and heroic quest of the only principled and virtuous man who is capable of leading his country out of a dark abyss. This fantasy, in itself, would not be a problem, but so many others have joined him in the metaverse of his invention that it has created schisms with the potential to tear apart their country.

While it’s existentially and philosophically correct to acknowledge that we each live in our own metaverse, to have beneficial effects they all must share fundamentally similar attributes. The inherent dangers of living in an isolated metaverse are immense. We can’t function as societies if we don’t agree on a basic framework of reality. And we can’t solve crucially important environmental problems such as global climate change if we can’t even agree that they exist.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra 

Top image credit: Family watching television ca 1958. – By Evert F. Baumgardner, courtesy Images of American Political History, source: National Archives and Records Administration. Posting online by Dr. William J. Ball, Images of American Political History, believed to be in the public domain.