The Metaverse as the new frontier of capitalism
By: Connected World
Tags: Simulation, Technology, Metaverse, Baudrillard, Capitalism

Baudrillard’s work from1981, Simulacra and Simulation is premonitory in many ways. It is contemporaneous in the most insightful form — as it notices the first signs of our ever-increasing fictional world and describes it on its totality. Another work that is premonitory, without using any word, is the 2002 film Naqoyqatsi of Godfrey Reggio (with music from the giant Phillip Glass). Using only images, animations and music, this film shows the non-stop shift from a material world to one of bits and bytes, zeros and ones, immaterial matter — the real turned non-real — as the negatives of cities and nature transposed into data.

How to make sense of the times we live? If everything in 1981 already seemed a complete simulacrum to Baudrillard — (power, money, politics, TV, pornography, means of production and even the idea of nuclear annihilation), 2021 has elevated the simulacrum to new heights. Our means to escape it are ever more reduced. There is no space for dissidents — on the sense of a possible system that goes back to the real instead of continuing the illusions. Pointing out the fictional nature of our whole society is possible, but it changes nothing. Two of the biggest bestsellers of the 2010 decade, Sapiens and Homodeus from Yuval Noah Harari clearly point out all our historic collective fictions. It is as if we are slightly aware of our condition — but changing it is impossible. As many said, our current trajectory is much less of an Orwellian 1984 type of domination but more of a Brave New World Huxley one. People are ‘happy’ and not even aware of any domination — the system triumphs over the individual when the individual loses the capacity to imagine other possibilities out of it — nothing is worth fighting anymore.

2021 is opening up the new frontier of capitalism — why only market and sell things on the real/material world if many other virtual ones are possible to be exploited? This was already possible in a fringe (soon to be the main) sector of capitalism — gaming. A growing number of people, majority men — same as the metaverse proponents, already spend vast sums on in-game purchases. In 1971, money lost any left connection to the real (the end of Bretton Woods System). In the 2010 decade, the crypto currencies gained the world. When it seemed that money (and the ‘things’ it can buy) could not get any more fictional, the internet transformed it into a “simulation of a simulacrum”, if updating Baudrillard is even possible.

Nevertheless, money and gaming are only the first of being completely pushed into a new all encompassing ‘reality’ of its own. Our ever more complex societies seem doomed to a common collective future where the real and the fictional are one — from our joint consciousness to the most basic bodily sensations. 2021 also popularized the Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) — private property transferred to virtual reality. If on a first level a photo or film keep certain relation to the real, a NFT is a second level of dematerialization of our world and perceived ‘reality’. It simulates, in a virtual world (per se already a simulacrum), the simulacrum of an image/photo/video — and, as if magically, it acquires ‘value’ and it is deemed proprietary.

So we get to the Metaverse — since a few months ago, it is not anymore a fiction or dystopian view presented in sci-fi books or films. It is openly THE next frontier of capitalism. Facebook (now naturally called Meta) was the first to be vocal about it, as it is desperate to keep its relevance. Besides Facebook/Meta, the whole system has fast enough noticed that the material world is too small for their ambitions. If capitalism main drive is continuous growth — how to keep growth happening in a material world — by definition, scarce? The internet, gig economy and never ending governmental quantitative easing’s have kept the system afloat since the financial crisis of 2008. Now, the technology is catching up to make the impossible possible — eternal growth.

From now on, our history might be separate into two — one of the virtual, where all possibilities are abundant, and one of the abandoned ‘real’, where pain and scarcity still exists. The future decade’s pressures are more and more on the deterioration of what is left of the real world — climate change, pandemics, automation of work, decreasing populations (first in the West, then in the rest of the world), and scarce resources. The work that produces material things were/are the first to be automated — first in agriculture, then manufacturing and now finally services. In such a decadent material world, continuous growth would not be possible anymore — but with virtual ones, duplicates — perfected forms of our real realm — eternal growth is not only possible, but in essence, the norm.

However, how would this metaverse be? We all had to laugh when we saw the ridiculous avatar of Mark Zuckerberg introducing the concept to the World. This is probably the version 0.1 of this next frontier. If we think a bit more, we already have the whole world mapped by satellite pictures, Google Street view, 3D maps of cities (over and underground), all human knowledge and trillions of pictures/videos willingly uploaded by the public. Naqoyqatsi poetically shows all this flow of data being transferred from the real to the virtual. The Metaverse would be the organizational platform of all this flow of data — the internet does it in some sense, but does not integrate it sufficiently. Today, there are multiple AIs doing some work with this data. In a fully developed metaverse, this virtual reality will become reality — or an ‘ameliorated’ problem free version of it.

It would not be surprising if still on this decade we have ways to evade our real bodies and live in a ‘simulated simulacrum of reality’. The logic of capital unequivocally leads to this virtual world, where growth is still possible. Soon enough, many of us will have a VR headset, with special glasses and headphones. It will permit us to go to the museum or cinema from our beds or sofas — in a 3D simulation. After it, new appliances will come by — a treadmill so you can safely walk in the metaverse from inside your home. Why would you go for a walk around the block if you can put your glasses on and walk with your friends on a simulated New York City, or Rio de Janeiro, if you want a tropical experience with a bit of a thrill? All while seeing some advertisements of products to buy in the virtual and ‘real’ worlds.

That is just the beginning… One that we can still imagine and deem as highly possible. But the more data there is, the more the virtual realm can grow and replace the material one. Data is the immaterial flow of this non-stop capitalistic drive — the end goal, in a sense that not even capital ever was. There is never enough data. More and more will be produced, processed and stored. The capabilities are more or less there — super fast internet (5G), increasing data centers, quantum computing, health trackers on human bodies, machine-brain interfaces, internet of things… The goal is for the AI to know how to reproduce material things in a virtual setting — it will replicate a fridge or a microwave by the ways of the data the ‘real’ appliance transmits. Moreover, this metaverse will be updated to know exactly our body sensations — our heart rates, blood pressure and breathing when walking or having sex. Then the texture, smell and taste of food. Perhaps even the feeling of a warm sunrise in a tropical beach. The more we transmit, the more it can render the virtual as real. In no time, it can reverse engineer those sensations. Soon many would not want all the burdens of dressing up to go outside in an ever more unpredictable climate. From the comfort of home, we can ‘enjoy’ all there is to enjoy. And even have the best orgasm of our lives — free of contact to another one and the risky air or bodily fluids contaminated with a new pandemic pathogen.

Pandemic — who would have imagined its consequences and the level of alienation it brought us? The COVID-19 pandemic probably accelerated this ‘metaversing’ of reality in many years. Overnight, being distant was a demonstration of love and communal fraternity. Office work, already immaterial and immeasurable, became ever more ethereal. The home became our offices — time and place for work and for anything else became one and only. We fear engaging with other human beings, so the communal aspects of our lives moved even more online. It is no surprise that the metaverse was announced in 2021 — it comes as a savior for all anxieties of an unsafe and contaminated world. It will simulate life, and it will market itself as the ‘happy and fun’ ‘life’ (Zuckerberg is already trying it) — if the outside world is dangerous and unclean, the metaverse is its opposite — the Promised Land: free of all adversity, viruses, bad feelings, pain or even death…

Since we humans started to organize labor outside the limits of mere survival (since we stopped being hunter-gatherers), we have been moving to an ever more ‘fictional’ world. It seems as if intelligence, language and an organized society natural path are toward living its own joint fictions. Any economic system is a fiction in this sense — it only exists because we humans imagine it. At some point, the fiction seems to have its own life — it lives and multiply not because of its actors — it is more than the sum of its parts, it is a total new entity on itself. Capitalism has been such for a couple of centuries. We now reach a level that all the incentives, a word that economists love, are towards perpetuating growth at all costs. It does not matter whether a big part of this growth is also a fiction — return on investments made with money created overnight by a central bank to avoid a new crisis. As long as we believe, we shall be redeemed by the duality of capital/data.

If not Facebook, any other would step in to build the metaverse — actually, it will be a multitude of actors doing so. The economy wants to make the metaverse possible — and it wants people to engage with it endlessly, making our social media feeds become entirely our social media lives. If all the mighty of human intelligence and the incipient artificial intelligent is to make growth a normality — more productivity, more resources, more people (it has been such for millennia until now) — duplicating our material world in the immaterial realm is the way forward. An immaterial realm that is monetized, in a similar way to our material one. Why one would own only real estate in our decadent material world if we can buy a perfected version of it in the Metaverse? Not to talk that real state in this world depreciates — in the Metaverse, it can only perfect itself with never ending updates. Rents can be charged, ads can be shown, consumption can continue unbothered on ever more ‘simulated simulacrum’ of experiences. Baudrillard’s Hyperreal giving place to a Hyper-unreal, a Hyper-unreal that only exists because we believe.

With work in the ‘real’ world being more automated, meaning shorter working days attainable in the next decades, one would turn to the metaverse for ‘producing’, for entertainment and to escape the ‘real’ — devoid of the material boundaries and its suffering. Baudrillard would say that we already do it for decades with our TVs. In the metaverse, it will be the complete triumph of the simulated — maybe many will even sleep plugged in the metaverse, so to have a minimum interaction with this ‘real’ realm and its problems.

This is the first of two essays on capitalism, metaverse and the idea of living in a simulation. On the next one, I will explore more the consequences of the metaverse on the very philosophical question of ‘are we a simulation’? If we are ever to produce conscience in a virtual setting (an AI that reaches intelligence levels comparable to a human) — this duplication of consciousness would be only possible through immense flows of data — something that only a metaverse constantly fed by billions of humans could assemble.