This was published 7 months ago
Opinion
Who’s afraid of the metaverse? A reality Christmas might be scarier, but I’ll brave it
Cherie Gilmour
Freelance writerMy gym has a virtual running course on the screen of the treadmill. I can embrace the virtual outdoors with a fresh virtual breeze and virtual trees waving in the virtual wind. I can even connect with a virtual community and make virtual jogging friends.
I stare at the screen, watching the lush green rainforests of the Te Araroa Trail swoosh past as I listen to the dull mechanical thud of my feet on the treadmill in the climate-controlled gym. The people next to me jog, absorbed by their own scenes.
Apple’s virtual gym.
When the entire Pacific country of Tuvalu announced it would be “uploading” itself online, as a way of raising awareness of it succumbing to climate change, it got people talking. The underlying message seemed clear: This is not what we want. Do something.
While Mark Zuckerberg dreams up the metaverse (with somewhat mixed results), we are on the verge of diving into online worlds like never before. As Steve Rose wrote in The Guardian: “Zuckerberg’s newfound metaverse obsession could be seen as a pre-emptive virtual land grab for what is generally agreed to be the future of the internet.”
We’re already walking around like zombies, with heads glued to screens. Everything is perfectly tailored to our preferences: playlists, newsfeeds, shopping and pictures. We’re all addicted; how are we meant to teach our kids to regulate their usage? Look at the parents suing the makers of Fortnite because their kids won’t attend to their basic hygiene.
And now we have AI-generated pictures from programs such as Midjourney that can make an image of anything we can imagine with written prompts. (A cyclops drinking tea in a bowling hat? A shark dancing with Olivia Newton-John?) It recently spat out the horror of Loab, an AI-generated “character” scraped from the darkest corners of the internet, reminding us that artificial intelligence certainly doesn’t have a soul.
Jack Clark, former policy director of Open AI, thinks we’re all moving towards “highly individualised, choose-your-own adventure islands”. He coined the phrase “reality collapse” and says everyone will “lose a further grip on any sense of a shared reality”.
I really like reality. All my best memories are here. I like communicating with a human face. I enjoy unexpected chats with strangers at the supermarket or the neighbours loitering outside their house.
But reality can be super boring compared with the wonders of these artificially created worlds beyond worlds. If you’ve tried a VR headset, you can attest to this.
It’s difficult to articulate why it’s important to be physically present with other people, but we know it is, especially after COVID lockdowns. Why didn’t Zoom Friday night drinks carry on beyond lockdowns?
Two Christmases ago, my husband, daughter and I were locked down. We gaffa-taped an iPad to a chair at the dinner table and Zoomed family near and far. It was like some multi-headed guest. You couldn’t make eye contact with anyone or read the body language of your uncle who’s on his fifth cab sav or whack your dad on the shoulder for making an off-colour joke or hug your niece.
This Christmas, most of us can travel again to be with each other in person. We know that seeing each other through a screen isn’t enough.
As Pope Francis said at Mass in North Macedonia, “We fed ourselves on dreams of splendour and grandeur, and ended up consuming distraction, insularity and solitude. We gorged ourselves on networking and lost the taste of fraternity.”
I’m going to thoroughly embrace being physically present with family this Christmas. I might even try jogging outside.
Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.
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