The Metaverse: Critical and Postmodernist Approaches

Recently, Facebook announced its transition from a social media company to investing in virtual reality. In an hour-long video, Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of the Metaverse, an immersive virtual reality space set to be the next stage of social media. Essentially, the Metaverse is intended to be an explorable environment allowing people to partake in a series of virtual activities such as concerts and work meetings, and to purchase virtual items while interacting with their friends. The company is banking on this idea salvaging its damaged reputation and succeeding social media as it is known today. It hopes that the transition to VR-based social media will entrench its monopoly power without mediation from third parties and decrease public oversight over its activities. More importantly, this move seeks to make social media harder to log off from by embedding it in our surroundings.

Indeed, this project, like many discussions of social media and the internet, brings about a number of questions regarding societal implications. A variety of issues can be discussed if we look at social media and virtual reality, and Facebook more specifically, as a springboard. These include issues around tools of surveillance, questions around a business model driven by advertising, and deeper questions of an increased blurring between what is real and what is not. While the technologies in question may be new, the tools created by social theories have laid a solid groundwork that allows us to critique these phenomena. For instance, both Critical Theory and Postmodernism can be useful tools for examining and critiquing social phenomena. They both see these phenomena as embedded in and reflective of systems of power and domination, namely Capitalism. While the age of Big Tech came many years after these theorists, their insights can provide a useful lens by which to critique it. Thus, this paper will attempt to explore some of these issues through the lens of various critical and postmodern theorists: Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and Baudrillard.

As stated above, Facebook’s move toward the creation of a Metaverse raises a series of issues and questions around it. Firstly, there are questions of surveillance that arise around social media, and especially virtual reality. These are issues that have plagued companies like Facebook for years, and will likely exacerbate with these new technologies . In many ways, social media surveillance is an extension of the logics of the “carceral society” aptly described by Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish. He argues that this logic expands into a wide range of “institutions of supervision or constraint…discrete surveillance and insistent coercion” (Foucault 1975). Essentially, Foucault argues that the logic of the prison has moved beyond incarceration into all aspects of society. Essentially, this means that all sorts of institutions across society have internalized the logic and practices of the prison. As such, the carceral mentality has succeeded in making “the power to punish natural and legitimate, in lowering the threshold of tolerance to penalty” (Foucault 1975) We see this clearly in the “capture of the body and its perpetual observation” that are so firmly embedded into the “texture” of society (ibid.).

Similarly, and more specifically, the logics of surveillance replicating the “police model” (Foucault 1975) have also come to increasingly define our society. The sciences and other forms of knowledge have drawn from the prison to create a praxis of “domination-observation” aimed at keeping the masses docile through practices of surveillance (ibid.). In many ways, surveillance by social media companies can be seen as a culmination of these creeping panoptic logics that Foucault aptly describes by essentially ensuring everyone is surveilled. Even further, the Metaverse and virtual/augmented reality, by blurring the line between online and offline, might make it tougher to escape online surveillance by making it tougher to even log off. Thus it is worth asking if VR-based social media will act as a permanent panopticon, a virtual prison where users’ every move is constantly being watched.

Secondly, it is also worth looking into the Metaverse as a business decision within the context of Facebook’s larger model. Facebook, after all, is a private company operating under Capitalism. Yet, they are not selling a commodity in the traditional sense of the word. They are an advertising platform. In many ways, social media platforms are part of a wider “culture industry” described by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. They argue that advertising has become the “elixir of life” of most cultural production (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944), including mass media such as films, newspapers, and the radio. In this context, advertisers rely on the culture industry, not to sell products, but to increase their power. Thus, ads become not a means but an end in itself (ibid).

Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the mid-20th Century was seeing a technical and economic merger of “advertising and the culture industry” whereby mass media became increasingly marked by repetition and homogeneity (ibid). An exacerbated version of this can be seen in the logic behind social media, which exists solely as a vehicle for advertising. Companies like Facebook operate primarily on the basis of selling users’ data to advertisers who then use the data to display targeted ads to these same users as they scroll endlessly through a feed of homogenous posts.

Within the context of the culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that mass media captures the viewer’s attention in order to advertise to them. All products of the culture industry seek to overpower users “conceived as distracted or resistant” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944). This view shows striking parallels with the way social media works, and how the more extreme, permanently-online Metaverse will likely operate in practice. Therefore, in this view, social media-driven virtual reality can be interpreted as a form of mindless amusement aimed at pacifying the masses, at a larger scale than the 20th Century Mass Media described by Horkheimer and Adorno. It is the culmination of the culture industry’s worst impulses whereby “the most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified” to the point where “anything peculiar to them survives only in abstraction” (ibid).

Finally, philosophical questions also arise from this. Namely, does the online and, especially, virtual reality like the metaverse inherently transform our relationship to reality? In the purest sense of the term, the Metaverse is a simulation of reality, something which Baudrillard talked about extensively. In Simulacra and Simulations, Baudrillard reflects on a world where the boundaries between what is real and what is false appear completely blurred. Simulated realities have become reality itself in this view. And once reality has melded with the simulation, it can no longer be said to be real, but is now “hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1983). He uses the example of a map in a Borges novel that was so realistic that it embodied reality itself yet he argues that it is not just abstractions that become a simulation in contemporary society, but that reality itself is increasingly becoming a simulation of itself. In other words, we increasingly inhabit “the desert of the real itself” (ibid.). Thus, reality itself is erased and replaced through “an operation to deter every real process by its operational double” which is “a perfect descriptive machine, which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (ibid.). Whilst Baudrillard did not intend it as such, this is a highly accurate description of what the internet is becoming, and especially what virtual reality might offer.

More precisely, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse can be called a sort of virtual Disneyland, or a simulated space providing an escape from reality. Yet, like his description of Disneyland, Baudrillard might argue that the Metaverse, and indeed, much of social media, serves the purpose of acting like a “deterrence machine,” or something that is “presented as imaginary to make us think the rest is real” (Baudrillard 1983). Thus, the Metaverse, much like Disneyland, can help aid wider strategies “of the real, neo-real, and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence” (ibid.).

In conclusion, we can see that social theories of the past can be a helpful lens with which to analyze our present and, indeed, our future. While none of these authors lived to see the age of social media or its likely future evolution into virtual and augmented reality, they surely would have a lot to say about these developments. The rise of Big Tech and the direction it is taking perhaps represents the culmination of a series of worrying trends that these authors identified and foresaw decades ago. Firstly, the carceral logics of surveillance are embedded into social media. We are constantly being watched by Facebook every time we log on, and this will only get worse with the Metaverse. Secondly, social media represents a culmination of the fusion between advertising and entertainment, which results in society being homogenized and increasingly dehumanized. Thirdly, virtual reality is part of a wider trend where the line between the virtual and the real are being blurred. Overall, the social harms of companies like Facebook risk being exacerbated by the move to new platforms that are more immersive and perhaps harder to regulate.