Silicon Valley needs a new idea because it needs you to not spend too much time realizing how many of its old ones have crashed and burned.
SPEAKER_01Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, PowerSmarks, and this week my guest is Friend of the Show, Brian Merchant. Yes, he's back again for the third time because after Facebook's announcement of the metaverse last week, I just had to talk to him to see what his thoughts were, to see what his opinions were, and so we could dig into kind of every aspect of what Facebook imagines the future of the internet to be, and to illustrate why it's a terrible idea. It's a long episode, so I'm gonna keep this introduction brief, but we get into so many aspects of the metaverse, from the presentation itself and what Facebook seems to be trying to present it as, to the science fiction origins of the metaverse concept, the growing group of companies and venture capitalists and influencers who are trying to get in on this concept early on. And we even talk about Dune at the very end to see if maybe this could finally get people to turn against the increasing encroachment of digital technologies on our lives. So I was so happy to welcome Brian back onto the show again. I always love chatting with him, and I think you're really going to like this episode. Brian is the author of the One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone, and we talked about that back in September on episode 78. And he's also the author of the forthcoming book, Blood in the Machine, that comes out next year. Before we get into it, just a quick note that if you do want a Tech Won't Save Us t-shirt before the new year, like for the holidays or anything like that, you can place orders now and they need to be in by November 14th. And so no pressure, but just want to let listeners know that if you want one before the holidays, you just need to order by then. So you'll receive it in time, and you can find a link to do that in the show notes. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about that at HarbingerMedia Network.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and make sure to share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues you think would learn from it. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode of Tech Won's Save Us, is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making the show every single week. So if you like the show, if you feel like you learn from it and you haven't become a supporter yet, hit pause really quickly, go over to patreon.com/slash tech won't save us, where you can join supporters like Adil from New York City and Lorenzo from Cambridge by making a monthly contribution so you and everyone else who listens can keep enjoying these fantastic interviews every single week. So with that said, enjoy my conversation with Brian Merchant because I certainly did. Brian, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us once again.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me, Paris, once again. Um I guess if I come on again, you're just gonna have to make me a co-host at this point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so. I think so.
SPEAKER_02Okay, good.
SPEAKER_01It looks like it's headed in that direction, right?
SPEAKER_02Well, I hope everyone's not tired of me.
SPEAKER_01I don't think so. You know, you bring such great insights. I think I think they would they're gonna want to hear what you have to say.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's kind of you to say. I certainly have a lot to uh say or yell about the the metaverse. So all right.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's dig into it then. You know, naturally, what I want to talk to you about today is the metaverse, this idea that you know, Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg put forward last week, but you know, it's it's much bigger than that. Um, it has a much longer history than that. Um, but I wanted to start with the Facebook presentation, uh, with Zuckerberg's kind of outlining of this idea of the metaverse. So, what did you make of the Facebook Connect um event? And, you know, I guess if you could also give us a general idea of what this metaverse is actually supposed to be.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, that event, I don't know. It it didn't look like a whole lot of people were watching it, which is just gives you an idea of sort of the the cultural gravity that Facebook has compared to something like Apple, where Apple has an event, even if it's the same sized event, the same low expectations for the product or whatever, it's trending on Twitter. People are tweeting about you can follow it on live blogs. Uh Facebook, it seemed like they put the tracker on there, and I don't know, at times it was less than 20,000 people watching this thing live. Um, and for good reason, it was just, I mean, a train wreck by all counts. It was pretty mercilessly mocked, and rightfully so. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a pitch man. Like, even Jeff Bezos has some awkward uh, you know, ness to his presentations, but at least he has this weird Lex Luther vibe that you kind of like, okay, this guy's maybe from the future. Steve Jobs was obviously kind of a talented sort of pitch man. Mark Zuckerberg just I can't that I, you know, he just has so much power that nobody's gonna say no to him. The event, for any of those who didn't watch it, was basically him in this. I don't know if it's supposed to be his house or if it was his house. It's this weird sort of Creighton Barrel minimalist styled house where he's just like greeting you robotically and walking through his house and then taking you to the metaverse and saying, like, oh, this is and then there's tables in there with some of his team members. None of it really like made any sense as just on the basic level of a presentation. But the important part is he's throwing to all these virtual and augmented reality experiences that are going to form the basis of his much Bollywood metaverse, which is still very sort of nebulous and ambiguous as to what it actually is, other than these virtual experiences, which have been on the docket for a decade or more in some of these cases. So there's really nothing new there other than Facebook is doing it and doing it forcefully. And everybody understands that Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars. He's the announcement was $10 billion this year, 10,000 people working only on the metaverse, um, which is as best we understand it, this connected virtual world. All he said is Facebook wants to make it an embodied internet where you're you know walking around a virtual space instead of reading it on a screen, and you enter different experiences or different 3D environments to play games or to work. If we got the metaverse that they showed today, we would get this like schizophrenic, like half-functional, like it just wouldn't make any sense. You'd have cartoony second life-esque work environments on one hand, and then you'd kind of like be fencing with a virtual sword on the other. But one thing the presentation made very clear was that they don't know themselves how they're gonna do this because you know the goggles disappear in one situation, and then they're on in another, and then it's like, oh, here's a professional fencer that's gonna teach you how to fence, and it's like, but how? Like, how are you actually going to be embody like he's outside in this one with a virtual so and but you're not seeing the apparatus that's gonna give you the power to do that in that experience, whereas in other ones you do put on the goggle, it it was clearly very half-baked. And whether or not this was on track before the latest round of scandals, it sure seems like it was sort of rushed out as a parry against all of the Facebook papers, all of the this sort of criticism, and you know, it's mounting. It still kind of feels like it's impossible to dent Facebook's armor in a meaningful way, uh, in terms of like actually slowing down user growth or getting a meaningful delete Facebook movement going or anything, but it is mounting. Like Facebook is publicly perceived as gross and as old and as stale, boring. Um, so this, in addition to all that criticism, felt like a time to sort of try to trumpet loudly that Facebook is more than that, it is broader ambitions, grander ambitions, that forget about this stuff, the new shinier future is just beyond the horizon. And one of the interesting things is that like Wall Street, it's obviously always a schizophrenic indicator itself, but didn't seem to have taken the bait. It kind of said, like, mmm, all the I was looking at how CNBC sort of treated the initial reactions, and and it looks like shares are down, this was not greeted enthusiastically. There was a quote that I saw somebody even said that this could be a potential risk of capital destruction, like Bank of America said, which is really interesting. Um, and I I'll stop rambling too long here. But in the piece that I wrote for The Atlantic, sort of collecting some of some of this, these criticisms, one thing I likened it to was BP, how BP said, you know, we're not gonna do this anymore, we're not gonna do oil anymore, we're gonna go beyond petroleum. So they actually changed their name to Beyond Petroleum, and we're gonna they were gonna be all about clean energy, all about you know, investing in clean tech, which kind of feels like probably one of the best analogies here, not Google, not Altria, but but BP just to distract more from the core business. But of course, over the next 10 years, BP maybe made a few investments in turbines and solar panels, but never seriously deviated from its core business for all of the reasons that any major businesses doing capitalism in the modern era do not, which is that oil is profitable, clean tech was less so. Facebook's core business is this is the news feed and and and its social network. You can already see the writing on the wall when analysts at Bank of America are going, like, you're gonna risk capital destruction if you sink too much money into this. Obviously, Facebook makes a hundred billion dollars a year. It can take a swing like this, ten billion dollars a year, even not that much. If it never builds anything resembling the metaverse, it's probably worth it to the company as a diversionary tactic alone. So, yeah, those are my initial thoughts and reactions to this whole sort of metaverse focus and meta rebranding that Facebook is doing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I think that gives us a really good kind of entry into this, right? And and a good kind of initial way to think about what's going on here. And just a few points on what you were saying, you know, um, with Facebook, not only is it like old and increasingly feeling dated, but um with the changes that recently came from Apple in particular, the Financial Times reported the other day that some of these major advertising-based platforms lost $10 billion just as a result of that change to iOS. Um, and you know, Facebook was obviously the major one there. Obviously, it's not going to kill their business, but there's a reorientation that has to happen to take that uh into account. And I think, you know, for anyone who's listening who saw videos of the Facebook kind of announcement that happened last week, you know, none of the things that they showed, or or very few of them, there was a few near the end that was kind of showing what they're actually doing right now. But all of these kind of videos and demonstrations that they were showing off are not uh an actual reflection of anything that's actually working, right? It's all just a demo that's put together for people to look at. And as you say, like a lot of it looked not that great anyway. Like, and as you know, one of the things that stood out to me was how there are some times when like it shows people wearing the headsets in these demonstrations, but then there are others where like they're playing chess in the park and playing like ping pong or tennis or something in the park, and nobody's wearing these goggles, but they're playing against someone virtual. And it's like, so how does this actually work? Like it doesn't make any sense because the idea is that sometimes you're in virtual environments, but other times um like the real world becomes a virtual environment as well through augmented reality, and then like so you're constantly kind of surrounded by this digital environment, whether you're in the virtual world or the real world, you know, if we really draw a distinction there. So yeah, I thought it was really interesting seeing what was going on with those things.
SPEAKER_02Right. And that's been the nut to crack forever, is that both of those are kind of different poles of the same sort of tendency of tech industry imagination, which is VR, you kind of have to put on these huge goggles. You're at home or some other sort of isolated environment where you can sit down and do this, and that really limits how it can scale or its applicability to wider use. So it's VR is basically for gaming. Um, and there's some niche uses for industrial design or whatever. Um, and same with augmented reality, which has been even less of a thing. You know, Google famously took its swing with Google Glass some 10 years ago, and it was A, not very useful to folks, um, and B sort of was so awkward in the physical environment that it sort of got laughed down. Um, and you know, glass holes was the common pejorative that took root and it kind of banished that that technology from the public sphere.
SPEAKER_01Good example of like how these tech billionaires have a very like bad idea of something that's actually going to resonate with the wider public that they actually thought something like Google Glass was gonna catch on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I it's funny you say that because I think that applies to the metaverse in general. You know, I write in both my Atlantic piece and the and the and the Vice piece that the metaverse is kind of like the product, at least one of the major ingredients is just Zuckerberg and his ilk's ego, kind of just to say, like, I want to make the metaverse real because I thought it was cool when I was a teenager or a young man, and like this was this is my opportunity to do some like heroic capitalism, you know, to do like Bezos is making his rocket ships and Musk is doing SpaceX and saving the world with electric cars. Like, I have this lame, you know, social media network that is curdling in the eyes of the public. Like, here's my thing. And time and again, and it's not just Zuckerberg, it's the guys from Roblox and Fortnite, I mean Epic Games, they're always talking about the metaverse and how it's going to be the future. And it really just keys into this same sort of toxic dynamic of sort of, you know, male founder ego, sort of this heroic thing that makes it very appealing. Um, and they're not often asking whether the broader public wants this. They're operating under the assumption that it does, that everybody is like them and that they're sort of making the world in its image. And another interesting story that I that I saw arise over the weekend was what I think it was CNBC, and they found that this communications between an Oculus executive, uh Jason Rubin and Mark Andreessen, with the subject line, the metaverse. So this is three years ago in 2018, and I I quote, he wrote, We believe the right way to break through consumer indifference to VR is to deliver what they expect and want from the medium, the metaverse. So they're assuming it's like the first slide of this 50-page document that everybody wants the metaverse, not just people like them who sort of grew up in these fantasy worlds thinking cyberpunk was cool, playing SimCity, playing Sims or Second Life or whatever. It's a very sort of specific sort of cultural form to want to export, to bank so much money on. And it's not a new thing that they've been trying to do it either. You know, David Carp has a great piece uh about VR uh technology being, you know, the rich white kid of technology where it's given chance after chance after chance and it fails over and over, but it seems to fail upwardly uh because they never tire of advancing this specific vision. Um and I think the sense is now it's it's treated as common knowledge in Silicon Valley or common wisdom that technologies take a long time to gestate. And then once they've been around for a couple decades, they become ripe and they're ready to go out in the world, just like you know, it took a long time with the iPhone and smartphones, and it took a long time with various software platforms, and they kind of assume that since it's been a while, VR's time is here. And David's point in that piece is that, like, well, is it like have the conditions really changed? Maybe people just don't want it, or maybe beyond its niche use, which people really can enjoy. And that's another truism of Silicon Valley's, you know, modern mindset is that it's not enough for just like a few million people or tens of million people to just enjoy something and make something for them and like make a healthy product. It has to be blown up onto this epic scale. It has to, it has to scale globally, otherwise, it's not a worthy idea. You know, I see this time and again, and whether it's a publishing platform or a VR experience or whatever. It's it can't just be functional and provide utility to a small group of people or provide immense enjoyment to to you know just even millions. It has to be able to be squeezed for maximum profit. And we're watching that in action with right now. We're watching this process. All of Silicon Valley seems to be kind of coming around to it'll be interesting to see if after a little bit of backlash, if there are holdouts, because so far it's Microsoft and Facebook, and they're kind of saying, yes, we're all in on the metaverse. And those are incidentally the two sort of most culturally reviled, or maybe reviled as harsh for Microsoft. I don't know if anybody has strong feelings about Microsoft anymore. It's just kind of the enterprise tech company. Um I don't know what's gonna happen. I think to see it really take root, you would need a Google or an Apple or an Amazon to sort of stake out its its claim. Otherwise, the metaverse may be a huge diversion that makes some waves now and provides some use for Facebook right now, but ultimately just kind of stumbles. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I think what you're saying there though, like it brings to mind how Apple is supposedly working on AR glasses. You know, we'll see if anything ever comes of it, but that could potentially contribute to it in a significant way. But you know, what you're saying about VR constantly kind of seeming to have its moment and then it never arrives reminds me, you know, very recently of how we were all expected to have 3D TVs, and then that just kind of disappeared because you know the companies finally realized people just didn't want a 3D TV, like it wasn't a workable thing. Yeah. But I think I think like the broader point of what you're making there, I think you know, there are a few things that I want to dig into further. I want to come back to, you know, the other companies that are working on this and kind of the broader idea that exists around it and return to the science fiction point that you made there for just a minute, because you know, you wrote about this in your vice piece, but I'm interested in kind of the impact on science fiction on the thinking about what this metaverse should should look like. You know, after the Facebook event, a ton of people, you know, were posting on Twitter and really wanted you to know that the term metaverse came from um Neil Stevenson's 1992 book, Snow Crash. But comparisons have also been made to The Matrix, to episodes of Black Mirror, to Ready Player One. And, you know, Ready Player One, the book was actually something that Mark Zuckerberg gave out to um Oculus employees to kind of give them an idea of this is something that he, you know, was interested in. This was the vision that he kind of liked. So, what does the focus on these science fictional kind of representations of what a metaverse could be inform us about how Mark Zuckerberg and these tech companies are thinking about what it should actually be and what it should look like?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, there's a there's a couple of things that are really important to underline there. And that is so, unlike you know, a space opera or something where there's sort of this inherent danger that is supplied to the plot in space travel or other world travel, in science fiction, it quickly became then the metaverse or an online landscape that you're embodied in or whatever, has to be a dangerous place, right? So all of these worlds, it's really important to note, are just almost cartoonishly dystopian. Like I flag the part of Snow Crash in the scene setting. Before we get to the metaverse, we understand that the world that our protagonist, who is sort of cheekily named Hero Protagonist, who is, by the way, a gig worker. He is a pizza delivery man, but in this again, world where like the dystopian elements are supercharged, so it's like Stevenson is kind of playing with it. He's cranking up Cyberpunk to 11. This is still considered like peak cyberpunk, but he's obviously kind of pushing at the boundaries of what's kind of silly about it and winking a little bit at it while also sort of clearly enjoying some of the elements too, or or they clearly resonate with him. Uh, but so yeah, he's a he's a gig worker who delivers pizza, and you know, if you fail to deliver your pizza, your punishment can be death, uh, because it's such an extreme portrayal of this hyper capitalist future world, and they live in this world where there's massive inequality. And let me just read a little piece of it here of like early, early on in Snow Crash. So, hero protagonist and Vitali Cherinoble, which is another of his goofy names, roommates are chilling out at their home, a spacious 20 by 30 in a U store in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab floor, corridor. Steel walls separating it from the neighboring units, and this is a mark of distinction and luxury, a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few rays at times like this when the sun is setting over LAX. Uh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there are worse places to live. There are much worse places to live right here in this U store it. So they live in a storage facility because the world is so shitty that they literally can only afford to live with a roommate in a 20x30 U store it, and they have it lucky, it's implied. These are slum housing 5x10s and 10x10s, where tribes persons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of cocoa leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets. So like real dystopian stuff. And we can we can fast forward to the bit where what do they do in this corrugated steel-walled living unit they plug into the metaverse? Um, and when they're there, you know, they are again transported into this digital world. Um, so Hero's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the metaverse. Hero spends a lot of time in the metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-store it. So it's very clearly an escape. It necessitates a lot of plot elements, you know, that the real world is absolutely miserable and it gives you this built-in sort of Wild Westy sense. But it is also like, you can imagine it without too much, if if all the current trajectories, again, this is sort of on the heels of the Reagan Thatcherite 80s, where all these trends of sort of inequality sci-fi writers looked at them, they looked at them projected into the future, and people wonder why so many of them kind of got it right. And it's like, well, it was pretty clear to see that the engines of inequality and disaster were already being, you know, primed, if not in full swing. So you're getting this vision uh that's that's really dystopian, disastrous. And that is a crucial part of why the metaverse works. And it's really interesting to see all these founders just embrace that formulation and say, like, this is great. Everybody's gonna want to be in the metaverse, uh, everybody's gonna want to hang out there. We want this embodied internet. And it's like in the book, the reason why you want to spend time in a shittier version of reality is that reality is even worse. It's hell. And none of them have grasped the irony inherent in saying, like, we're gonna build this for you, like so you can enjoy it. You need this right now. And by the way, like, income inequality is higher than it ever has been. The world is on fire because of climate change and all these other disasters that we are continuing to help precipitate by running the servers that make this all possible. By the way, if we were to make a metaverse, it would be this huge load in in terms of energy expenditure and you know, all the same trends. They're just fine putting the pedal down, basically. And I've seen some interesting pushback, like, well, of course, like this will, you know, resonate with with founder people, but the fact that they don't recognize the full body or the full context when they're putting it into play, and they're just embracing this one element of it, which is the cool part that gives them the capacity to be the hero in the world of their own design, is very telling to me. And the second part I'll just touch on really quickly is that the metaverse in itself sucks. It's a haven of crime and decrepitude, and like what do people do in the metaverse? They have virtual sex, there's erotica, there's like weird psychedelic experiences that do sound kind of fun. They elevate you beyond space and time. Sure, great. But then there's like real estate plays, people are just like building property. There is corruption, there's the mass murder rooms. Honestly, like people have to watch their backs in the metaverse, otherwise, they get robbed, or they, you know, it's not a great place. It's maybe exciting to be the one hero of if you're an expert digital swords fighter, like hero protagonist is, and you're a hacker, then yeah, maybe it's fun for you, but it sounds like for most people it's not. There are people that get addicted to the metaverse, and they in the real world they're reduced to these like cowering, sort of sickly shells of people who shake back and forth. And it seems like a pretty prescient predictor of people addicted to screen time and what would happen if we actually got this metaverse. People would literally be sort of shell-shocked by using it too much. So, again, the metaverse itself, not a great model for building your tech product to emulate.
SPEAKER_01And, you know, I think what you're describing there, you're focusing mainly on Neil Stevens's book, Snow Crash, but really, in a lot of these other representations of these virtual worlds, you know, Matrix is obviously not by choice. Um, but you know, when you're looking at Black Mirror, when you're looking at Ready Player One, like the environments that are depicted are still incredibly dystopian.
SPEAKER_02Ready Player One's the same, exactly the same. It's the same thing. People jack into the metaverse that's called the Oasis to escape the slums that they live in. It's basically the same construct. You know, he just made it a little more Spielbergian. Same with Matrix. You're you're enslaved. You're now you're a literally a vessel for I mean, doesn't make sense really, but and that's been pointed out aloud. Yeah, but you're being harvested for energy while you're enjoying the Matrix.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, I I rewatched The Matrix recently, and there's this scene, I not in the first one, I think in the second one, where Morpheus is like, you know, the Matrix is designed to turn you into this, and he holds up a battery. And I was like, well, the metaverse is the same, except like it's just cash. They want to turn you into cash, like they want to make money from you. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02It is, and they're not shy about that either. I mean, if you look at this sort of Ur text, I know you've you've read it too for sort of what the potential of the metaverse can be for investors by a VC called Matthew Ball. And this is last year it was published, and he, you know, really sort of does what Mark Andreessen did for his whole sort of software's eating the world manifesto that was run in the Wall Street Journal and on his his own blog and generated a lot of excitement, especially in Valley Circles, and sort of guided the next decade sort of of investment. I think he's seeking to do the same thing in this text, which is what the metaverse is, and it he kind of ticks off what it would take to build it, what it would look like, the opportunities. And it is like clearly sort of written into the fabric of this idea, is that it's just like more potential for transactions and for consumer participation. I mean, that's clearly what it is. It's just we are already looking at our screens a lot, but even that pales into comparison uh to the potential of having glasses or virtual glasses or goggles overlaid on your eyes all the time. You can be either, you know, viewing advertisements or purchasing goods or making transactions or performing work 24-7, which I I reread the ball piece this morning, and what leapt out at me this time and didn't quite as much the first time was that, and I quote, more broadly, the metaverse stands to alter how we allocate and monetize modern resources. For centuries, developed economies have transformed as the scarcity of labor and real estate waxed and waned. Under the metaverse, would be laborers who choose to live outside cities will be able to participate in the high value economy via virtual labor. The subtext is all the time, anytime from anywhere, you have access to an infinite labor pool that is similarly sort of compressed in the same ways. And I can't believe that this is the example he uses because, you know, if you notice like Facebook's big demo, the first one that they unveiled for their metaverse view, even before the rebranding and everything, was Workplace Horizons. And I laughed out loud when I saw the demo. It was so shitty. It was like 15-year-old graphics, and you're in a conference room, and you are all just sort of, I guess, doing work for companies like Facebook. It's such a short-sighted, comically unappealing vision for what this could be used. I can't believe they led with it. Maybe it was the only thing that really worked because they did all have their avatars, but I cannot imagine a single person viewing that and saying, yes, this is the future. I don't want to be in a physical conference room. I want my conference room to be virtual and it's okay with me as long as my colleagues look like cartoon robots. Uh, but that's what they led with. So they're all thinking about work, about maybe how they can make this appealing, both to sell more stuff and to get more people to sort of work perpetually. And in this essay, Ball literally uses this example. I'm gonna I'm gonna read it again. Um, as more consumer spending shifts to virtual goods, why are we buying more virtual goods? Services and experiences, we'll also see further shifts in where we live, the infrastructure that's built, and who performs which tasks. Consider, for example, gold farming. Not long after in-game trade economies emerged, many players, often employed by a larger company and typically in lower income countries, would spend a workday collecting digital resources for sale inside or outside the game. These sales were typically to higher-income players in the West. This is the model that you want to blow up to scale. This is the model you want to perpetuate. This is the future. More gold farming. I mean, I remember this too. I had a friend who played World of Warcraft, and I think maybe that was around some of the earlier use cases for that. And you need gold in World of Warcraft, and you can mine for gold. And, you know, the players in rich countries like Europe and the US would sometimes realize that you could basically obtain this gold and you could trade for it. And then in less developed countries, they realized that they could they could mine this gold, they could just and then sell it to the rich players who didn't want to spend the time like mining it themselves. So it created this hierarchy where there were people in this game who were not playing the game, but they were working. And Matthew Ball is saying, let's replicate this and let's blow it out to not just games, but to everywhere. Look, we have the potential for menial labor, menial virtual labor that I cannot imagine more pointless labor. You know, David Graber's bullshit jobs. What is a better example or example of a bullshit job that does nothing to sort of improve conditions or supply any actual material want than virtually clicking a button so that you get more virtual commodity that's only applicable in this one virtual economy? The assumption has been always that, like, oh, as we eliminate jobs out of necessity from whether it's via software automation or warehouse automation, that they'll find new manifestations in the virtual world. There'll be services, there'll be software jobs that we haven't even dreamed of. And if this is what the answer is, if this is what we're gonna tra, if we are gonna transfer over, I which I don't think we are. I think it's absurd to think that I mean, I don't know. Maybe I maybe I'll maybe I'll end up eating my words, but this is actually the vision, right? Is to perpetuate these vast inequalities in the metaverse, like in this utopian world that you want to bring into being, you say, well, it'll give people jobs, they can click here and gold farm. And he does say in the next sentence, like, well, it'll probably be more dynamic than that. So there's, you know, there's more potential. But the point is, is that that these disparities will be sort of enshrined and transported over to this virtual world in the way that they're imagining it. They're not even imagining it any better or more egalitarian or more. They're just imagining that all of these same deep flaws and deep miseries and deep problems with our current economy will just simply be replicated and it will be to the benefit of prospective investors and people of the metaverse inclination.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, right? You take the technology and you just lay it on top of existing social relations and just, you know, let it go, let it do its thing. That's it. But the ball piece is so fascinating because it gives you the insight into, you know, what the business case is for it. Whereas you won't hear that so much in Zuckerberg's kind of presentation, even though he'll still talk about the virtual goods, but he'll reframe it around like, you know, this is something that creators are going to have a ton of opportunity to create new goods and virtual experiences and things like that, right? And I think one of the important things, or a couple of the important things with the Ball essay, you know, notably Ball also pushes back on the comparison to Neil Stevens' snow crash and the dystopian kind of narratives around the metaverse. But, you know, you have, as you were talking about, the kind of discussion about labor and virtual labor in these environments. And, you know, I think one of the things that always needs to be recognized there is how opening uh these kind of global labor opportunities, as they're talking about, is really like subtext or kind of a way to um more flowery describe outsourcing, right? To relocate jobs to places where they can be done at lower pay. And what always comes to mind when I think about that is Alex Rivera's film, uh Sleep Dealer, where he's literally kind of showing uh this labor happening in Mexico uh in these kind of like giant factories. Of course, in in his kind of portrayal of it, they're literally controlling robots. But I think what we would see in the metaverse is you know, you're doing this in a kind of digital form. You don't need to control um a robot, but you can just you know tap into the metaverse and then and then be a worker. And then, you know, as we've seen with a number of these tech companies outsourcing more jobs, you know, using more contract work, it allows them to pay less money for the kind of work that they're getting done. You know, Uber notably earlier in the pandemic outsourced a bunch of engineering jobs to India. Um and then, you know, you didn't hear a whole lot about that after. Um, but I think the other important thing there, at least that stands out to me, is how there's a real focus on gaming, right? How uh Roblox and Fortnite in particular, in Matthew Ball's kind of illustration of the metaverse, um, this is really what it comes from. Like this is kind of like the proto-metaverse is Fortnite and and Roblox and their kind of creation of these digital environments, the purchasing of all of these virtual goods. And now this needs to be kind of cemented across the whole of the internet, and everyone needs to participate in it because this is a massive opportunity for companies, you know, like Epic, but Facebook and many others, to make a lot of money by kind of entrenching this and forcing us all into it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it is uh absolutely true that that's I mean, he makes the mention that they're folding in conf concerts and like dropping trailers in Fortnite, and it is becoming sort of a more multidimensional thing. But again, that also illustrates sort of the extent of their imagination, and in that's in each of these books, which are sort of narratives, again, pretty simple heroes' journey through the metaverse to stop a bad guy or to solve a fetch quest. Um, they're they're basically games themselves. And that's why, you know, the Fortnite guy and the Roblox guy are saying, like, yeah, the metaverse, but it might be fine for a game, but the whole proposition of the metaverse is that like when you're done with the game, you step out of the game into another virtual environment, you have other things to do, you're gonna want to stand around, you know, talking to the people you played the game with or doing something else. And it is really only under the weight of all of this hype and all of these sort of narratives that that even seems viable. And again, that goes back to that sort of dystopian framework, providing the necessity for why these people are in the metaverse all the time, because it's written into this assumption that we want to do more than play games in here. I don't like I don't know that anybody who wants longer embodied Zoom calls and then to play the game and then to go to a bot, like where you're never leaving this space, it's uncomfortable. Like physical life for most of us is nice. Like it's good to go out and talk and to have a conversation face to face. Again, that's a feeding into what's inspiring a lot of these founders. Like, they don't see that a lot of them. I mean, it's maybe speculation to a little bit, but you look at look look at how Zuckerberg sort of conducts himself in these interviews and in these keynote speeches. Like, I think it's safe to say that the world would be a nicer place for Mark Zuckerberg if he could have an avatar all the time and wheedle his way through 3D spaces where he wasn't criticized or he wasn't socially awkward or he wasn't anything like that.
SPEAKER_01Well, it brings to mind I re-watched uh Ready Player One after the demonstration, and there's a scene in it where Halliday, who was like the inventor of um the oasis, like the metaverse like environment there, and he says that he always had trouble like socializing in the real world, and so he created this virtual world where it was easier for him. And I was like, this is Mark Zuckerberg.
SPEAKER_02Like, yeah, right. And then and then now all of you have to live in it. Like I made this world because I couldn't figure out how to talk to people. And that's not, you know, a knock against you know social anxiety or anything like that, but projecting the solution to that anxiety and making it a one size fits all for your billions of users, and your projected more than that, billions of, you know, it is its own brand of hubris. Um, and it's a stunning thing in Ready Player One is that you're supposed to sort of treat that character with compassion and even admiration, like, oh wow, you built this amazing thing. And it like the origins are never really interrogated. It's never like, well, what role did he have? I mean, the Oasis is the biggest sort of shared virtual world and it made him immeasurably rich and he hoarded all that wealth. It's never like this was a horrible thing. Like, what is the depths of sort of his malfeasance here? What else happened that you know he like what role did it play in actually cultivating the dystopia that everybody's living in? Like, if people weren't in the oasis all of the time, would maybe folks have had more incentive to solve some of the problems or to sort of seize his wealth or something, you know, like would with this huge opiate that like would have given Aldous Huxley a coronary, like would it have been different if it wasn't sort of over everybody's eyes?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, uh he literally has like $500 billion or something like that, whereas the main character is like living in a skyscraper of trailers. Like, you know, it's just wild.
SPEAKER_02It is, and it's like, and when he wins or whatever at the end, it's supposed to be this like oh touching moment, like, oh, he's like bequeathing it unto you, and it's like, wow, like now you get to be the tech titan. Like everybody's vying for, I mean, it is, it's such like a useful and pretty neat sort of parable of of modern capitalism. When you've like everybody gets to play this game that diverts them from the crises that are uh going on around them for a chance, maybe, just maybe, one out of the millions of people playing this game, the tens of millions, the billions of people will get to be the awful tech titan themselves. That's your victory, that's what you get. You get to assert your rules, you get to be the one doing the domineering. It's gross. And I do think that it's great that some of the blinders are falling away, and it's a little, you know, 10 years. The difference between the with the treatment that like Elon Musk or someone like that gets in the press, Elon's Halo has somewhat managed to stay on. He's got his fans, but a lot of people are kind of waking up and seeing that's partly why we're seeing so much backlash to this metaverse. Um, that and everybody hates Facebook.
SPEAKER_01So but it's fascinating in the ready player one because at the end it's positioned as like this really kind of um hopeful ending, and it's really just that instead of being one guy who owns it, he's gonna rule it with his four friends, and they turn it off two days a week. So people need to go into the real world of metaphor.
SPEAKER_00It's like what it's just not positive, right?
SPEAKER_01But I do want to kind of expand on what you're saying because you know, you're talking about um you were talking about Matthew Ball, you know, this venture capitalist who is really pushing this idea of the metaverse. And you know, Epic's founders, the Roblox guys are all in on it. Um, you know, Microsoft is getting in on it, uh, Facebook as well. There seems to be this coalescing around this idea. And in the Atlantic piece that you wrote, you argued that, you know, it just seems like Silicon Valley needs something new now. They need something new to put all their capital behind. During the uh pandemic, you know, we've seen all of this attention on like cryptocurrencies and web three and NFTs and all this stuff. Like it's it just seems like there's so much money and it just needs somewhere to go. And it seems like the metaverse presents this like perfect opportunity to, you know, just kind of throw all this money at it and hope that this is the next big thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, it is a big investment vehicle. And Silicon Valley absolutely needs, uh, as I said in the piece, more than just a product or something that's gonna get people excited. It needs a whole new framework, it needs an ecosystem. Apps 10 plus years ago, the app and the sort of Uber for X ecosystem provided that for a long time, and that was kind of what meshed with Andreessen's software eating the world kind of manifesto. But now, like, and again, Silicon Valley, one thing I didn't mention in the piece that just before I forget, I want to say is that it needs a new idea because it needs you to not spend too much time realizing how many of its old ones have crashed and burned. You know, the last 10 years were marked by sort of Uber for X, you know, Internet of Things, big data. Own sort of raft of buzzwords that were all tied into this whole vision of like integrating more and more of software with more and more everyday practice. And, you know, smart cities, the which is kind of part and parcel with big data, you don't hear those terms that much anymore because a lot of them proved extremely dubious. You know, there was a lot of really sort of you know extractive opportunistic startups that threw those terms out there, took the money and crashed and burned, and to no major demonstrable benefit to society. Silicon Valley doesn't want you to say, like, well, was Uber a good thing actually that we had this whole raft of Uber for Xs? Uh, and most of them have failed because it turns out that the only way that they work is if you can exploit labor enough. And if it turns out you can't, then maybe you fail. Even now we're kind of seeing the limits of sort of the too big to fail unicorn swath Uber and Lyft, and they're having to like jack up the prices and at least respond in some ways to the backlash and the uprising of their own drivers. And you know, they've emerged victorious so far in in they had Prop 22 and all that, but this whole construct has proven we haven't seen a profit yet. It's been 10 years. Like the VCs are looking at that, going like, well, maybe that didn't really work out. It's time to move on. We need a new vessel for capital investment. And the metaverse provides that in droves. So there's a reason that they want so desperately. You know, when when you establish a framework and you have a giant like Facebook saying, like, I'm going to provide the backbone for this. You can kind of see the pieces of the ecosystem lurching into being. All of these startups come out of the woodwork saying, like, well, we're gonna, I'm gonna be a metaverse company. People like Matthew Ball say, like, I'm the metaverse, you know, soothsayer. I'm gonna like predict the future. And they all start trying to glom onto each other. And right now, Silicon Valley, it's true. They have more money than they know what to do with. I think I quoted at least one VC in that that like the amount of money that is sort of liquid right now is is unprecedented. Like, it's more than when the bubbles burst in the past. That is, as you mentioned, NFTs. Investors like that to a certain extent, but I think they're finding pretty quickly that it's hard for that to have the scalability element. Like it's incomprehensible to most people. Um, I I like mentioned it to my parents over the weekend, and they had literally never even heard of it. It's just not on radars, and you can try to try to explain like why you would try to sell like a pixelated image of like a cyborg ape for a million dollars to somebody, and it it's not gonna be like a mass consumer product. Yet, I mean, they may find a way to try to push it further and further, but well, you decorate your metaverse home space with them, right? Right. I mean, the thing is you could tell a lot also by the elements that are sort of attracted to it, and like there are sort of the NFT and cryptocurrency folks are kind of trying to say, like, well, this will undergird the economy of the metaverse, and it's for some people it's huge red flags. For others, it's like, yo, this is the the new frontier. So, yeah, it's imperative, I think, for Silicon Valley to find something that excites people. I do think the next few months or year or so will be a really telling time. Again, like Wall Street kind of reacted negatively to this big metaverse pitch. I think people are kind of laughing at it more than being excited by it. Uh, so it really matters whether or not an idea can attract enough cultural capital uh for it to become like a viable investment vehicle. Uber provided that, right? Like Uber, it was kind of before we had the widely positioned critical eye. There were people doing great stuff on Uber early on, but it was sort of people using it, you know, in cities. It was like, oh, Uber, I've got Uber, do you have Uber? Oh no, yeah, you let's take an Uber. It got that cultural appeal widely sort of entrenched before folks really got a good idea of what it entailed. I think people are a little more attuned to sort of the criticism of sort of how Silicon Valley operates. We're a little more skeptical, especially of like Facebook right now, which is why maybe it's almost a blessing that Facebook is the one that tried to do the metaverse. It could help sync the whole apparatus. And I think now it's also, I just want to make a quick caveat. Um, my friend Tim Mon made a good counterpoint when we were when we were talking about this online at one point. And it's not that all of this is bad, like there are really cool things you can do in VR. Like VR can provide really interesting spaces. Like it has been a really interesting space for folks in the queer community, he pointed out, that have been using VR for years in really interesting ways. It's just what you want to avoid, and even augmented reality, maybe there's some fun ways to do that. What you want to avoid is this huge corporate first land grab where you sort of enclose a virtual where you do a big digital enclosure before you even have a chance to try to build something like democratically or interestingly or in moderation, you know? Um, so I do think that there are interesting, maybe this is verboten on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, but I think that there is room for there to be interesting virtual and augmented experiences and ideas and experimentation. I just think everything we know about the last 20 years of how the internet has developed, you have to fight tooth and nail this approach to building anything resembling a metaverse or a 3D embodied immersive digital experience if you don't trash it outright. This is not the way. This is not the way handing, I don't think there's an ever been a more obvious statement than handing Facebook the keys to building the metaverse is the worst idea that we could possibly pursue at this point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I I think that's a good point though, like, you know, drawing on what Tim said, because, you know, I feel like this is kind of one of the things that we see a lot with some of the this community that is generally kind of critical of what the major tech companies are doing, but are somewhat open to like web three stuff in a weird way, kind of argue. And this is not to criticize Tim, I'll I'll make this point in a better way, but to say that Web3 and the metaverse offer opportunities as long as Facebook doesn't control it or something like this. And I feel like I agree that I think that there are really cool things that can be done with VR and with AR and you know, with the web and whatnot. But, you know, considering the environment that we live in where these companies have so much power that just can't exist. And unless the corporate power is addressed, like they're always going to take it over and turn it into something like utterly disgusting and serving their ends. And, you know, that that is not primarily dominated by these more experimental strains and things like that. And I think that you see that with what Facebook is trying to do with the metaverse, because there was this conversation with Nick Clegg in the presentation where Zuckerberg and Clegg are essentially saying, you know, the metaverse is a few years down the line. So this gives us an opportunity to create a regulatory framework preemptively. And effectively what I read that is saying is, you know, we are going to work to create this regulatory framework. So our idea of what the metaverse is becomes the idea for like how this works, right? And so the idea isn't like to kind of embrace the metaverse, I think, but to really push back against everything that they're trying to do. Because if there is a positive implementation of VR and whatnot, it never comes if Facebook has like, or or any of these major tech companies has anything to do with it.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah. So I think I think a good way to approach this moving forward is that you you oppose the concept of the of the metaverse, because the metaverse has been embraced, it has been colonized by corporate interests. It is, you just say the metaverse is a no-go because there already are great, like interesting spaces in VR and alone. It's just that they sort of they exist, and a lot of times they've been claimed, right? Like because we don't have a very free and open web where it's super easy to do this, a lot of times you might find, like, even on Facebook, like there are cool Facebook groups where people meet and still to this day, you know, do in. I mean, do we want that to be how it has to be? No, absolutely not. But these pockets, they have to be considered and and sort of addressed within the context that they arose. And I think it would be wrong to say, like, no, you can't do that anymore. Like, your space is has to be taken away because it's part of it's part of this drive to the metaverse. It's all in how we sort of look at what Facebook and and the and the bigger companies are doing, because again, it's 20 years probably there's been cool VR spaces. It's how do we how do we give those voice in a way that they're not also colonized by Facebook? How do we, you know, I think so? I think it's one thing to say, like, by all means, like I think we gotta oppose the metaverse. Um, at least, you know, that's my feeling the way things are going. Um, it's almost comical in that Matthew Ball piece, how it's like, well, it's gotta be interoperable because it's gonna be a really tough, challenging thing for for people to figure out. Like, no, it's it's just not going to be. It's just gonna be Facebook's sandbox. And if Google wants to build a piece of it too, maybe they'll build it too, and nobody will talk to each other within those silos, just like they don't now. You're either on Twitter or you're on Facebook, or you're in your inbox, you're or you're Googling. You're not doing all of these things at the same time. These companies have not been able to cooperate at all with each other in any mode of interoperability for the last 20 years. Why on earth would they begin now uh if they really saw this as like viable real estate? So, yeah, I mean, I think the whole project has to be, you know, how do you A, stop the metaverse, B, turn back this huge corporate platform first mode of navigating the internet? And how do you really get these independent spaces that have flourished despite all that, or in spite of it, or almost some of them are even almost sort of little pockets of resistance to to these dominant trends? How do you elevate those? How do you say, like, look, there is still good in the internet, or there is it's possible for there to be good in the internet? You know, how do you give those pockets the the space and the and the power that that they need to flourish?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think to make my point a little better, I think my concern is when we see people kind of use how you know, say cryptocurrencies or VR can be used by a marginalized group in a positive way, and argue that the whole technology needs to be like defended, even when the vast majority of it then is used in a terrible way by these major corporations. Yeah. I think that's more the concerning element of it.
SPEAKER_02Well, I yeah, that's and that's the same with sort of like the I guess social media in general. Like, name a platform right now that has not been caught colonized by dubious, too terrible arbiters or you know, owners. It's a huge project that those of us interested in sort of a a more egalitarian and open and democratic internet face is how do you turn back the tide? So that's true, you know, of every space that has been colonized by corporate digital interests at this point. Um I think it's a fair point. I do think that it becomes really difficult because how do you, you know, how do you walk that line? Like, I mean, you obviously you don't want to shut down spaces. There are so many spaces on the internet that have become really important to marginalized groups, and just not talking about that is is not an option either. But I agree with your point that you can't allow the fact that there is some good sort of company like Facebook carte blanche. I mean, it feeds also into the to the point, just watch that connect thing, and it's like so cringy how almost that like they like clearly like really they had a diversity consultant. It was foregrounded by, I mean, I think that'll be an interesting conversation to your point. Like, is it unethical for somebody of like the trans community to sort of cheerlead for Facebook as it makes this you know to be participating in a video like that, as it sort of makes the case that like the metaverse will be all inclusive and you know it'll have LGBTQ spaces and trans spaces and you know, you know, black spaces? And it was like that was really the message you're supposed to get from the iconography. And like, what do we know about Facebook now? Like, it's absolutely not. I mean, again, sometimes in spite of their horrible governance policies, groups manage to manage to thrive and form you know important bonds. But by and large, like Facebook is a hostile environment, and if you imagine that transposed onto the metaverse, things only only get worse. So, yeah, your your your point is well taken, but it's one of those things that the in execution, like, I don't really know the best way to carry that out.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Now, I know we're running long. I have one final question for you that is a bit of a detour, but I think also relates to what we were just talking about. So, since Facebook's kind of metaverse presentation uh the other day, I've heard a number of people kind of comparing the metaverse, you know, as we were talking about how it kind of usually exists in this dystopian environment to what Karl Marx described when he said religion is the opium of the people, right? The idea that the metaverse is this kind of thing that provides um uh leisure and uh kind of an illusion to escape the suffering of now. And so we we retreat into it or or we might retreat into it uh to kind of ignore the terribleness of the conditions that we're in and not try to push back against them. But at the same time, listeners will know that Dune came out recently in the cinemas. You know, maybe they went and saw it. What they might not know is that you are a big Dune head, um, and you recently hosted a series with Motherboard on kind of the themes of Dune. And so in the Dune universe, there was a war against the machines that kind of destroyed computers, you know, before the story of Dune that we see in the movies, and that kind of set their society on a different path, not necessarily a great path, yeah, you know, I think we could argue, but still a different path. And so I'm wondering, you know, when you look at the metaverse, when you look at this increasing push for us to spend more and more of our lives behind screens, you know, we saw during the pandemic that it was incredibly profitable for these companies that we spent more time on screens. And, you know, people are very open about the fact that the metaverse is a desire for us to live more of our lives, you know, behind screens, right? So do you think that the metaverse might actually act as this opium of the people as you know, things get worse? This is just a place for us to retreat and try to forget about the problems of every day. Or do you think that this increasing push to try to spend more and more time, you know, in these digital environments in front of our screens, et cetera, et cetera, might eventually push people to say, you know, fuck all this. I'm done with these computers. Let's destroy it, let's have our own uh But Larian jihad, I believe it's called. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh expert segue. Way to wrap in a topical element in the way only a seasoned and uh expert uh podcast host can do. So kudos there. Thank you. Um I so it's really hard for me to say because again, the metaverse looks so shitty. Like, I think to the extent that people escape into games or you know, that they do on their PS5s or whatever, already kind of exhibiting this tendency. I don't know. I I think it'll just be an extension of that in Dune. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, his intervention, is a really interesting one. I mean, it was clearly sort of uh born out of this knee-jerk reaction to technology. It wasn't something that he was as interested in as sort of the ecological elements or the sort of indigenous elements that he was drawing from, but he had strong opinions about where technology was going. And the Butlerian jihad you mentioned, which is the crucial part of the uh Dune lore that's left out of the movies, is basically we get AI in the not so distant future from when he was imagining humans to be when he was writing. So we're we get AI, they run amok, they basically enslave humanity, and there has to be this thing called the Butlerian jihad, where they rise up against these machines. After a long struggle, they emerge victorious and banish machines. You can't use thinking machines, you can still use vehicles, but in Dune, you're using spice. It's every vehicle, instead of like using a computer to plot a course, you have to take a psychoactive drug called spice. Again, this isn't really laid out in the movie, but it's the lore of the book. Experienced guild navigators, they're called, can use the spice to open up sort of the maps of space-time, and they can plot their course and do faster than light travel. Uh, just like in the movie, you see those guys that roll their eyes up when they're talking. Those are called mentats, and they're basically human computers who also use spice to sort of access this sort of computer-like knowledge. Um, but the message is pretty clear. It's that computers are going to lead to our near extinction. Get rid of them, get rid of them as fast as you can. AI was sort of the worst. Like that was the fear, that was the boogeyman there. Um, it was AI and the nuclear threat were kind of twinned in a way. That's the other looming threat in the Dune universe that isn't mentioned. Everybody has atomic power, but they're all very careful of it, so that no one's shooting laser beams, so they don't accidentally set off a nuclear-powered spacesuit or something. So it's a really interesting time for this movie to come out and sort of issue, like at its core, is this full-scale rejection of technology. I don't know that it will resonate in that way with audiences today. I don't know that the metaverse. I just think that people will think the metaverse is lame. I don't know if that's enough for a Butlerian jihad. I think that I think that people are just gonna laugh at Mark Zuckerberg. Um, I mean, I think it we might need one if the metaverse were to be able to sort of be conjured into being. And I mentioned this in my Atlantic piece, and it is a possibility that there's just so much sheer capital, sheer interest in this right now, that it's not worth ruling out completely. I think we do have to be vigilant. I think we do have to be aware of what the companies are doing. And if we see another one of the tech giants kind of sign on and signal that they're gonna figure out a way to do this, then I do think we should start being concerned. Um, because again, the thing that is even more alarming than sort of the consolidation of power that we've seen with the last wave of tech companies coming up, uh, is that the way that this would get built, that I see it, is if, yeah, Google and Facebook and Amazon all decided that yes, this is worth doing. And then instead of being an open web, at least on the foundation that they have kind of colonized, there are still other spaces. Uh, you know, it's crucial to the internet that they're all out there. The way that I see this being built now at this point would be them agreeing to build it themselves together and building the protocols, and it would be just ruthlessly sort of corporate. The rules would be completely, you know, determined by whatever board meetings or agreements that they had. It would not even have sort of a democratic foundation on which uh to collapse. It would be this very corporate model from the get-go.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. You know, I think my interest in it was just, you know, seeing how the tech companies and the tech industry has kind of transformed the way that we live and what our ideas about what is kind of acceptable technologically over the past couple of decades. Like, do we do we ever reach that breaking point where people just say, like, no, like this is too much? You're trying to force too much of this on me. Like, there needs to be kind of a real world, like things need to get better. There can't just always be more technology, you know, and naturally thinking about the Luddites as well, which I know you have a book coming out about next year.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think where we see the most inflection points are around labor. So if it was clear from the onset that this was uh an exploitative, sort of clearly like it's like, okay, sign up for the metaverse. Who wants to be the first in the gold mines? Like, then then, like, yeah, I do think, but as long as it's like positioned as an entertainment and video gaming system, I have a hard time seeing people like really kind of organizing and and breaking. Because look, I mean, Uber is another good model, like when it became clear the extent to which Uber was was an exploitative employer and refused to grant any benefits or even allow them to allow its own workforce to be uh considered employees, it became much more a sort of a ripe site of resistance. The metaverse, you don't really ever see much resistance against you know more computing or more gaming or more capacity, more technological capacity. And again, same with the Luddites, like their complaint was not with the nature of the technology itself, it was being how it was deployed by capital and how capital was using it to make their lives miserable. So I think if that becomes clear enough in the metaverse, then it would almost certainly be another point of resistance. But I don't see people going like too much VR, like I I'm I'm uh, you know, I'm gonna smash the servers that are trying to give me this terribly shitty workforce horizons or workplace horizons virtual working experience. I mean, maybe that would be worth smashing. That was pretty, pretty bad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you know, I take your point naturally. And, you know, we can see that with surveillance as well, right? How that how that has been recast as convenience, and now we all have rings and everything. Well, I don't have them, but a lot of people have them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I wish people would smash rings more. I wish, I mean, that's one of the most uh awful sort of technological deployments and infringements on sort of the fabric of of civic and social life that we've seen. And yeah, they're not getting smashed. As much as one would hope. So and I think surveillance is is another area, you know, like sort of Huxleyan uh or Marx Marxist opiate of the people, sort of it's just awfully hard to sort of get folks to organize around around smashing something like that. And you know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it maybe it does get oppressive enough, but again, that that those technologies I I would be interested to see a survey of of where of where and when Rings Ring has been most directly opposed, because it's certainly worth worth opposing, but usually when you have you know oppressive police officers right on right on the street, you have you know that node point of resistance to fight first, maybe. Um, and maybe that's true of of these other platforms we're talking about. But when it gets in the way of work, when it gets in the way of your well-being, um maybe, maybe there'll be a metaverse uprising. Maybe we can all be our own hero protagonists in it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, ready player one for the real world for all uh whatever that guy's name was.
SPEAKER_02But instead of shaking his hand at the end, you smash the machine and you'd build something better. Distribute the money equally to the people so they don't have to live in mobile home uh skyscrapers or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Well, Brian, I kept you a bit long. Um, you know, I think we covered the metaverse in in really great detail so people have a good critical understanding of it. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time.
SPEAKER_02Always a pleasure, Paris. Always a pleasure.
SPEAKER_01Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone, and of the forthcoming book Blood in the Machine. You can follow him on Twitter at BCMerchant, you can follow me at ParisMarks, and you can follow the show at TechWon't Save Us. Tech Won's Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at Harbinger Media Network.com. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.