Silicon Valley has given up on reality - and now they want us all to use their terrible new alternative
- Facebook's virtual reality office is the dreary-looking beginnings of the "metaverse" - Silicon Valley's new buzzword.
- Recent investments into developing immersive digital spaces signal the Valley has given up on our shared reality.
- Zuckerberg and others have traded in real-world problems like climate change and inequality for their tasteless virtual world.
- Kelly Pendergrast is a writer, researcher, and media artist based in San Francisco.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
When Facebook revealed the first public glimpse of Horizon Workrooms last Thursday, it didn't look like the future I want.
Workrooms, currently in open beta, is Facebook's first attempt at a VR product for meetings. Facebook describes Workrooms as a "collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance." In other words, it's an immersive virtual conference room with digital avatars and graphic versions of the technology you'd expect from an online meeting like screenshare, smartboards, and document collaboration.
Screenshots from the recent press briefing show a virtual Workroom all too similar to the brick and mortar offices familiar to many of us - a wood veneer table arranged in the round, overhead fluorescents (or maybe energy-efficient LEDs), and dreary gray carpet. The avatars of the casually-dressed meeting attendees were seated in front of laptops, some looking engaged and others typing away distractedly. None of them had legs, but who needs legs in virtual reality?
To be fair, Workrooms is currently in beta. I can imagine that future versions might have more varied options for the workspace environment, or at least avatars that don't cut off abruptly at the waist. Still, I wasn't sold on this first glimpse of what Zuckerberg might be imagining when he talks glowingly of the "metaverse" he's planning to build out at Facebook. The company's focus on the metaverse is one more way that Silicon Valley leaders are more focused on abstract futures and pie-in-the-sky solutions - from space travel to the singularity - than the material conditions of our shared world today.
For most people, reality sucks
The "metaverse" is currently a hot buzzword with digital creators, venture capitalists, and investors looking to sign on to the next big thing. Depending on who you listen to, the metaverse is the virtual world described in Neal Stephenson's dystopian novel "Snow Crash", or "the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform." Zuckerberg is today's most visible metaverse booster, describing it as an "embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content - you are in it."
Let's get real for a second - the metaverse idea isn't anything new or interesting. It's a catchy sci-fi name for an interactive digital environment where people and companies can hang out, build apps, make money, and extract data. It is Second Life with portable IP, or Roblox with more meetings.
However, what is worth paying attention to is the recent massive glut of investment and interest in so-called metaverse companies and technology. This recent cash infusion and spate of think pieces are the symptom of something much more disturbing than any specific digital conference room: Some of the biggest brains and deepest pockets in Silicon Valley are giving up on our shared reality.
Well, not for themselves. Their reality is mostly just fine - plenty of money, flexible schedules, and ample opportunities for cultural enrichment. But for the rest of us plebs, tech CEOs and VCs can see that life is pretty hard. Marc Andreessen of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz calls this disconnect "reality privilege," paraphrasing an idea from technologist Beau Cronin. "Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people," Andreesen said earlier this year.
This sentiment isn't new - books like Jane McGonigal's "Reality is Broken" contrasted a disappointing "reality" with the exciting worlds of online back in 2011. While the privileged few "live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance" - as Andreessen puts it - everyone else has to deal with crappy jobs, crappy pay, and various overlapping environmental crises.
On this point, he's not wrong. While the looming threat of climate change is coming for us all - even those with escape bunkers or mountain retreats - all the advances of the modern world have done little to improve the lives of anyone sweating away in an Amazon warehouse or digging through piles of e-waste for scraps of precious metal. But to assume that the lives of everyday people are universally hopeless and miserable is its own kind of privilege. The distinction between "reality" and online space is a false one - it's all the same world, and we all have to live here.
While many in tech (including Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos) blame onerous state regulation and a fusty federal government for preventing innovation and corporate-facilitated "progress", a full acknowledgement of today's inequality should lead to a massive rethinking of how the economy is structured and how companies are regulated. This needs to include divestment from fossil fuels, investment in equitable infrastructure, and a massive reallocation of wealth away from billionaires and towards everyday people.
Of course, this isn't the future that Zuckerberg or Andreessen are working towards - why would they, when they benefit from the current inequality? Instead, they're dumping money and time into more immersive and all-encompassing digital spaces. Andreessen advocates for building online worlds that make life enjoyable for everyone, "no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in."
Tech's virtual "solution"
During last year's wildfire season, entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan tweeted that "as the physical world fails, the digital world offers a seeming workaround." Zuckerberg describes how he sees the metaverse helping solve inequality by "flattening out distance," making geography obsolete and allowing coders from Bogotá to have the same opportunity as someone in Palo Alto: Just teleport in!
The end goal of metaverse companies may indeed be to develop a rich, varied, immersive digital environment where people lacking "reality privilege" can find some pleasure and early investors can make a boat load of money. But the dreary contours of Facebook's new foray into "intense VR" for collaboration shows that even metaverse work spaces - where truly anything is possible - are likely to be grim, banal replicas of already-depressing physical work spaces, with added data extraction. Despite the hardships of COVID, endless Zoom meetings, and smoke-filled summer skies, the thought of wearing VR goggles to attend a morning standup meeting inside what might as well be Wolfenstein 3D leaves me cold.
If immersive virtual meetings are to be the future, there are other examples of collaborative digital environments that are far more interesting, surprising, and equitable than Facebook's Workrooms. Since the early 2000s, educators held college classes and built creative workspaces like UC Davis' Virtual Hallucination Site inside Second Life, "Linden Lab's 3D metaverse." During the peak of the pandemic last year, a group of artists and researchers from New York University collectively developed an open-source live, 3D virtual space for online gatherings inspired by an eccentric 1990s public access TV show.
There are myriad ways that people can build online workspaces - or playspaces - for themselves along parameters they choose, as a way to forge relationships and solidarity with their colleagues, friends, and strangers across the globe. VR and digital spaces are just as much a part of "reality" as anything else, and we need to ensure they aren't fully captured and exploited by the same companies that already mediate so much of our daily life.
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