Transcript “More Real Than Real: VR and the Metaverse with Lisa Messeri,” In the Weeds Podcast, Nicole Asquith
contact: asquith.intheweeds@gmail.com
Nicole Asquith: [00:00:00] Back in January, I listened to an episode of the New York times podcast The Daily on the metaverse. At the time, Microsoft had just announced that it was acquiring the gaming studio Activision Blizzard, which makes lucrative videos games like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft. The reason that this was worth paying attention to, The Daily told me, was that Microsoft saw this not only as a way to acquire more video games, but as a step towards establishing a foothold in the metaverse. That last bit I’m quoting from New York times journalist Kevin Roose. This acquisition came on the heels of the decision by Facebook to rename their parent company Meta, in reference to the metaverse, which of course had a lot of people asking What is the metaverse? (And we’ll get to that eventually…)
I left this episode of the daily intrigued and, I confess, troubled. It made me wonder how computer technology will shape our relationship to the world as it becomes, [00:01:00] or at least attempts to become, a digital double of the real world. What happens to our relationship to the natural world as it is increasingly not only mediated by technology but replicated by it? Of course, this is a question as old as Plato, but one that seems increasingly pertinent as the technology gets more and more sophisticated.
The first thing to do was to try to understand the technology that the metaverse, whatever it was, would depend on, namely VR or virtual reality. My guide in this endeavor is Lisa Messeri, an anthropologist of science and technology at Yale University. She’s just finished a book on virtual reality called [In] the Land of the Unreal. Before that, she wrote a book on planetary science called Placing Outer Space, in which she explores how scientists work with places – worlds – that they’ve never actually experienced. From real worlds that you’ve never been to I suppose it was a logical step to fictional [00:02:00] worlds that you experience without actually being there since they’re, you know, fictional
[Intro to In the Weeds]
Nicole Asquith: For listeners who are less familiar with this technology, let’s just try to define what VR is, to begin with..
Lisa Messeri: Absolutely. So virtual reality, you access it through a head mounted display. So a pair of goggles, which fit over your eyes and fully block out your vision, such that you’re completely immersed in a screen environment.
VR then kind of uses a lot of knowledge about how vision works to allow for a sense of complete immersion in [00:03:00] a virtual setting. So part of what makes VR a different media experience than just like staring at your phone in a close distance is when you move your head, also your body, those movements are being tracked, such that as you move around, you are exploring with your body the visual environment.
There’s a whole lot of caveats about different scales of what you can be immersed in the visual environment, but the most baseline definition of VR is that it completely encompasses your visual experience. Such that when you move your head, you have a feeling of agentually exploring the virtual environment in a way that static media, like phone or television, doesn’t allow you to do.
Is that, does that…
Nicole: Yeah, that helps. So, first of all, I want tell you that in preparation for this interview, just so that you know that I do my homework, over the past weekend, I took my 11-year old daughter and a friend of hers to do a VR experience [excellent] [00:04:00] and ,in this VR experience, they strap things around our ankles, our thighs, our waist, we had these gloves that we put on, and then, of course, the headset as well.
And what really struck me in terms of the experience of it, in terms of that feeling of the real, the virtually real, was, well, one moment in particular, where there was sort of a split between my kind of rational sense and my perceptual sense, which had to do with vertigo. So, so we spent some time in this room getting the straps on everything, so I was very familiar. I knew what the space looked like before we put on the headset. Then the story was a science fictiony story, where you go on a space ship, you go to a space station at one point, you take an elevator. And it really felt like we were going up in an elevator. And then we had to go across these narrow bridges that were suspended over a lot of space, sort of like a Star Wars kind of scene. And the [00:05:00] first time I did it, I had trouble crossing that bridge. The guy who was facilitating the experience literally had to hold my hand because of my fear of falling. And of course I knew that I wasn’t going to, and yet, I didn’t know, you know, there’s this kind of split cognition.
Right?. So I want to go back to you said that in VR, there’s a deeper understanding of how vision works. And that was making me think about, in graduate school, when I was studying phenomenology, I remember talking about photography and how photography works differently than how our actual perception works.
So I’m curious about how VR is closer to or mimics our actual visual experience.
Lisa: That’s so interesting. Before I answer that, can I ask what was the name of the experience? What was the venue?
Nicole: Um, hold on. I oh, it was called, I think it was called The Edge. It was in Croton, Croton on Hudson.
Actually. It was striking too, because [00:06:00] we were very close to the Hudson river, which is just a, a beautiful, yeah, it’s called the Edge VR. [Okay.] Which is just a very beautiful natural surrounding. So, right before and right after we had that experience, we were immersed in this beautiful natural setting. So it was interesting to have the contrast between the two of them. I will add also one of the comments that my daughter’s friend made afterwards was – she said this repeatedly – that after it happened, it was hard to believe that we were experiencing reality, you know, that reality felt less real.
Lisa: Yeah. I mean, that is, um, it’s so interesting to hear that claim from your daughter. I mean, that is something that gets passed around as kind of boosterism for VR. That it’s more real than reality. It’s hyper real, not in the sense of Baudrillard, but in the sense that it’s more real than reality. That is something that a lot of people use to describe their experience of VR.[00:07:00]
So, VR. You can trace many different histories of VR. It’s most common to trace it back to work by a computer… who would eventually become a computer graphics person. But this was before computer graphics. Um, instead it was, um, an engineer in the 1960s who built a head-mounted display, which was called the Sword of Damocles.
This is by the engineer Ivan Sutherland and first explored what it would mean to put digital overlay into one’s field of vision, such that you could actually kind of see, you know, kind of as the computer sees, right? This is, think about the 1960s. This was early days of computing, the vision of wearing a head-mounted display to engage with a virtual simulation then kind of ebbed and flowed over the decades that followed the 1960s and really reached a sense of maturity in the 1980s amongst other kind of communities.
There was some development of VR in the military, in the Air Force for flight simulators, but, then, at NASA, scientist Scott Fisher, who had [00:08:00] been trained at MIT’s media lab, actually initially interested in photography and stereoscopy, so 3d photography, that was his initial kind of interest, much more from an aesthetic, an artistic perspective, actually, then from an engineering or scientific perspective. At NASA, in the 1980s, he was kind of in the right place at the right time to combine a bunch of technologies that had been emerging around simulations to create the NASA view headset, which was considered to be the first VR headset, as we kind of know it today, one that fully fills your vision. I offered this story to say that what happened after the 1980s was there was a really rapid commercial push, like, oh, this is amazing. Can we get it into Nintendo? You know, can we get it into all these other things?
And that fell flat. It didn’t quite happen in the late eighties and nineties. And so you had all this technology without much of a purpose. And so it receded into the laboratory and it was in the laboratory at computer graphics departments and perceptual psychology departments where scientists and engineers really began to think about what [00:09:00] this visual experience is and what it means.
So in the nineties and the early two thousands, you get a real abundance of research on VR in particular, the phenomenology of VR, what VR is and what it means, and kind of coming from that, you get a lot of perceptual science work on why it is that it kind of quote unquote tricks us and one scientist whose work I really like, Mel Slater, he writes about VR as an illusion, not a delusion. Right? You don’t actually think that you’re going to fall, but you have the illusion that you will. And so he particularly talks about this place illusion and the presence illusion, and the plausibility illusion, which when combined makes VR feel real. And another VR innovator, Nonny de la Peña, who is a journalist and kind of was very interested in how VR could tell real stories in an immersive way, she also, kind of building on Slater’s research, offers this phrase of a duality of [00:10:00] presence, that what makes VR a unique experience to some extent is that, you know, you’re still in the physical world and yet you’re having this experience in the virtual world, which is very real and very impactful.
So that way of thinking about VR then becomes almost naturalized in the kind of current wave of VR commercialization, because a lot of the people who are pushing for VR commercialization don’t know this science, right. They’re not reading what’s, you know, coming out in the journal Presence or anything, but because there’s enough people who do know that and kind of have internalized it into just what VR is capable of, it comes to kind of spread much further beyond the laboratory work that had become really precise about what VR is and isn’t.
Nicole: That’s interesting. Yeah, I, I watched the Nonny de la Peña Ted Talk and at one point, she says, we can feel like we’re in two places at once. [00:11:00] I think that’s an accurate description. It sort of points both to the potential, I think, of VR and also what is in some ways troubling about it, right? In some ways, the idea of being in two places at once is an increasingly familiar phenomenon, right? Because we’re so familiar with our screens and, so, we live in this kind of fractured reality as it is with our smartphones. And so on. We also kind of have a sense of the risk, that maybe makes it harder to be present in a certain way or that sort of hovers in the background a little bit.
Lisa: Yeah, VR is very interestingly on both sides of this.
So, my book, which is titled In the Land of the Unreal, not yet published, kind of thinks a lot about how VR is, ironically, both this thing that affirms a fracturing of reality and that VR allows you to access other realities and you have to assume a split reality. And yet at the same time, its aspiration is to mend this fracture reality by [00:12:00] bringing us into other worlds, therefore giving us a sense of understanding and kind of knitting back together this fracture reality that VR, i the other sense, affirms. So I think there’s a lot of paradoxes. VR kind of sits in the middle, both affirming some kind of status quo, but then promising to be a way to surpass the negative aspects of that status quo.
Nicole:. Right. So maybe it would help to take a couple of examples.We already talked a little bit about Nonny de la Peña. She’s journalist as well as a filmmaker. And she created, as I understand it, the first VR experience that aired at the Sundance festival, which recreated, using avatars, a scene, was it in Los Angeles? Do you want to maybe describe that?
Lisa: Sure. So in 2012, at Sundance, premiered Hunger in Los Angeles, which was Nonny de la Peña’s first experiment with using VR to tell a journalistic story and the VR experience brought together live audio – so audio captured [00:13:00] at the scene outside of a food bank. And on that line, someone entered a diabetic coma, falls to the ground and, you know, a concerned community assembles around. And one of Nonny de la Peña’s research assistants was on the scene and had that audio recording in the laboratory at USC where Nonny de la Peña was a fellow at the time and where she would later get her PhD from.
They recreated to the best that they could the scene outside the food pantry in a virtual setting. So they went back and they, you know, created the buildings that would’ve been there, kind of a rough approximation of how many people were there. And then they used off the shelf, digital humans, but just like really low-fi graphics to populate it.
And so then the audio plays in the VR experience and your vision is filled with a digital recreation of what it might have looked like to have been there. So the user then is not, [00:14:00] you’re not a character in the scene. You’re observing the scene, you’re witnessing the scene and thus, you’re able to kind of walk around, because your body is fully tracked.
That’s the experience that you had at the Edge VR. And that was the experience that Nonny de la Peña used it. Where you have external trackers that can see where your body’s position is and feed it back into the computer. That’s running the VR experience. So this premiered at Sundance in the New Frontier part of the festival, which is where experimental cinema for several years had been curated by Shari Flilot and kind of the lore – I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even aware of VR at the time – but the lore was that it just made an incredible splash. It was such an immersive and visceral experience that it just really exploded the potential of VR, not as a game system, which is how I think a lot of people thought of it before then, but really VR as this powerful way of narrating, actual [00:15:00] experiences and events.
Nicole: Yeah. I confess when I heard De la Peña’s Ted talk, I was a little troubled by this notion that we need to experience these traumatic events in order to have a more empathetic relationship. So I was thinking about what’s happening in Ukraine. I was thinking, do we need to experience what it’s like to have the Russian bombs going on around us in our order to have empathy?
In some ways I feel like this also recreates arguments I’m sure that were surrounding television early on. And, on the one hand, we know, yes, these technologies can definitely make people aware in a visceral sense of what’s happening around the world. But on the other hand, then there’s also the potential for saturation, right? And being kind of numbed in some ways to these experiences. But the other person that you write about who makes this argument is Chris Milk, who is a VR filmmaker. One of the VR experiences that he made takes place in a Syrian [00:16:00] refugee camp. And one of the things I found interesting about that is that he’s very particular about his audience for this.
So he takes it to Davos, to this conference of billionaires, and has a number of people who really have the power to possibly enact change have these experiences. I thought that was an interesting notion too. Not only that VR could make one more empathetic, because one has this very visceral experience, which I think is, I don’t know, possibly up for debate, but also that it could be this targeted, that the audience matters as well.
Lisa: Yeah. So I mean, this whole history around how VR became associated with empathy is very carefully unpacked in my book, which again, no one can read right now, but I promise you it’s there. So, in 2015, there were two Ted Talks that were given on VR that I know of. One was by Chris Milk called VR as the Ultimate Empathy Machine.
And one by Nonny de la Peña. [00:17:00] Milk’s Ted talk was delivered a few months earlier than de la Peña’s on the Ted main stage. De la Peña’s was delivered on the Ted women’s stage. I will note that we’re recording this on the International Day of the Woman. So it’s important to point this out because how did Chris Milk learn about VR and its potential to tell stories?
From Nonny de la Peña after Sundance and her premier of Hunger in LA, everyone was very excited about it. If they didn’t see the experience at Sundance, then at USC in LA, people would show up to De la Peña’s lab, where she was again, working with VR innovators who had actually done the NASA VR headset. So all that skill and technology had migrated down to Los Angeles.
And you had this perfect storm of mixing the technological know-how with the storytelling know-how of Los Angeles. That’s one of the really important things to understand about why VR emerged at this time. And two important things come out of that lab. One is Chris Milk comes in, sees this and says, wow, this is cool and really blows up the idea [00:18:00] – which is not his idea, nor is it even necessarily, De la Peña’s idea that was already coming from the psychology labs, including someone like Jeremy Bailenson’s lab up in Stanford, as well as Mel Slater’s lab in Barcelona. The other thing is you get one of Nonny de la Peña’s interns, Luckey Palmer, who would go on to found Oculus two years after helping de la Peña scrap together the technology necessary to take the experience to Sundance. So out of de la Peña’s desire to tell a VR story, you get two men who make a huge amount of money off of VR and make it seem as if they are the progenitors.
So I want to make that point very clear, which is that in my own story and understanding of VR, there’s a lot of heroes. There’s a lot of people to center on. I find it very important to center de la Peña’s work. It could get left out, right? in the way that we often see happen in history.
Now, because Milk had that main stage Ted talk, it blew up. He was the person [00:19:00] I heard on the radio in 2015 that compelled me to dive into VR. And a lot of academics I think heard this and those of us who particularly are used to thinking a little bit skeptically about technology, especially when it’s this claim that technology is going to save humanity, you know, we all kind of perked up a little bit and were like, oh, really? You’re telling me this technology is going to make empathetic humans. I don’t believe you. So there was a whole rush to investigate these claims of empathy. And you can see tons of scholarship that come out around 2017, 2018, given how long this takes, from people like Lisa Nakamura, Sherry Turkle, Grant Fuller, media study scholars who are like, no. What these empathy claims really are, are problematically, racially charged. And my own interest in VR started with deep skepticism about empathy claims because that’s a technological fix to a social problem. And we just know at this point in history that [00:20:00] is never going to work. So your concern is spot on. All these academics had similar concerns when they first heard this claims as well.
So then you get the point of, okay, so where are we now? So you have several years of scholars really trying to understand where this empathy claim comes from and why, if we go back to the example of this being for Davos and a Davos audience, and your concern about why is it that we feel that you need to actually experience the trauma to be responsive and wanting to fix the trauma. Right? That’s a really, almost a dystopian notion of humanity that the only way we’ll ever care about a cause is if we feel it deeply ourselves. That’s not actually a very good world to live in.
And in fact, a book by Paul Bloom came out around the same time called Against Empathy, where he kind of argued that if what we really want is a better world, empathy’s not actually going get it to us, [00:21:00] since empathy operates at a small scale. It’s me having empathy for you. It’s a one to one engagement. He argues instead for something called rational compassion. And that is much more measured and logical way of approaching how humanitarian causes ought to be meted out. There’s not really an answer so much here, but mostly to say that the concern that you have and others have for is empathy actually what we need to do and what other traumas might come from the kind of empathetic experiences that VR offers that’s kind of being worked out and it’s even being worked out within the VR community. By the time I got to LA, in 2018, to do immersive field work, empathy was already something that people were skeptical of within the VR community. Not so much that they didn’t think VR could be good, but they felt that the empathy machine had received too much like buzz.
And it was just no longer as effective as a marketing term. It had kind of been stripped of the excitement [00:22:00] that it once had. So the empathy conversation is still there, but I would say it’s kind of a little bit on the back burner, especially of late.
Nicole: Yeah. Well, we all know that Hollywood and Silicon valley like to claim that they’re saving the world.
So in some sense, maybe that’s not entirely surprising. Are there other uses of VR that you’ve come across that you found interesting?
Lisa: Um, tons, tons of uses. Um, my focus was on VR… like I kind of very purposely excluded gaming from my study since that’s a whole other literature, you know, game studies.
So I was very much focused on VR that was imagined as being for good, right? VR for good was another thing that was being circulated at the time, in the same way we have AI for good, blockchain for good. Again, as you just pointed out, Silicon valley and Hollywood both love to think that they are making the world a better place.
And these became nice little totems to walk around. So, in addition to these kind of [00:23:00] journalistic empathy experiences, there have been a lot of endeavors to use VR for training, for workforce training, right? So this is a lot less glamorous, but, there’s a company that emerged from Stanford, from a psychology lab at Stanford called Strivr, and it first started, they’ve used VR to train the Stanford football team to create a simulator for the quarterback effectively to experience the onrush of people and how to maybe increase the reaction time. That was a proof of concept. They went to commercialize this kind of training experience and do very like bespoke trainings for different corporations. And one of their companies is Walmart. I remember hearing a while ago about a Black Friday experience for Walmart workers, such that they too can experience the onslaught of customers in advance of their first in person experience of Black Friday.
Again, this gets quite dystopic.
Nicole: Interesting. It is kind of like being the quarterback. [00:24:00] It
Lisa: Exactly. So VR as workforce training, VR as any kind of like simulation in which doing it physically is either prohibitively expensive or dangerous to other humans or a little bit, you know, challenging is always used, right?
It’s why it began kind of in flight simulators. It’s been used a lot in surgery simulators. So for medical training and one of the companies that I worked with called Embodied Labs used VR as a way to support professional caregivers who worked with the aging population. And it is in the kind of realm of these empathy experiences. But instead of the audience being this privileged Davos community, here, the audience was imagined as marginalized care workers. And how do you use technology to support them in their challenging work? And I find that to be really interesting to think about in that it kind of skirts some of the critiques raised by the empathy machine, but that was a company that I felt [00:25:00] found a really interesting case in which these experiences could really assist a community in need.
Nicole: So I want to steer us a bit towards environmental questions. You know, the topic of my podcast is how culture shapes our relationship to the natural world, and so, of course, the hovering question for me is how are these experiences oing to help or hinder our relationship to the natural world. And I’m sure that some are concerned, and I confess, I share this concern, at least to some degree, about the idea that this will further separate us from a direct experience of the natural world. And there are these dystopian fictions, you know, Ready One comes to mind, for instance, or even The Matrix, in which virtual reality really cuts us off almost altogether from our direct experience of the natural world.
I was wondering if you have encountered interesting arguments pro or con or in [00:26:00] between on that issue?
Lisa: For sure. So it’s a little bit what I was saying before, how VR often sits at the middle of paradoxes, where it has recognized a problem and both is part of that problem and yet offers itself as its solution.
So when thinking particularly about the environment, a whole lot of the experiences in this first wave in 2015, 2016, were about what do we empathy for? We don’t only need empathy for other people. We need empathy for the environment. So there’s one experience that circulated so widely, probably one of the best known VR experiences. If you went to any fancy conference in like 2016, between 2016 and 2018, but I’m talking again about Davos, about the World Bank, like all those places, then you might have been able to experience Tree VR.
So Tree VR is an experience in which you put on a VR headset, you’re fully tracked. You begin as seedling. You grow into a fully-fledged tree. Along the way, you feel the breeze on your [00:27:00] face. You feel the warmth of the sun, but then you start to smell smoke. And you realize that the forest around you is on fire. And basically after your full life is a tree, you get burned out in an act of deforestation. And you come out of it, and the person who’s running it gives you a seed and says, take the seed with you and plant it.
That’s an imagination of VR as something that can make us really understand in a palpable way, the devastation of something like deforestation and one can be just as skeptical as we are before with the empathy experiences of being another human that can we really understand what it’s like to be a tree and is understanding what it’s like to be a tree actually going to solve some of these really dire environmental problems?
Because again, it puts it down to a scale of one to one. I can be empathetic for that tree outside my window, but what does it mean to be empathetic for the environment, for the planet? Right? You get this scaler problem. Which was actually what my first book to some extent was [00:28:00] thinking about. Like, what does it mean to care on the scale of the planetary?
We think of care as an intimate act. Is care something that can scale up? And it gets very complicated to begin to think through that. So that’s on the one side. So I saw all sorts of experiences in 2018 that were about environmental concern. There was Tree, there was an experience that was a fundraising for a wildlife passage over one of the LA highways to allow for the large cats, the large wild cats to get from one of side of their habitat to another. So that was an idea of like, let’s just make this exciting and make people care about it and get donations kind of on and on, as well as some that were just like, you know, awesome. Like look at how awesome the Amazon is. Look at how awesome Everest is. So then you get into this other kind of genre, which is there’s all these fragile ecosystems that people really want to go to. They want to go to the Great Barrier Reef. They want to climb Everest. What if VR could make it feel like you did [00:29:00] that maybe then you wouldn’t want to go?
So that’s really playing up VR’s capacity to be more than real. If I virtually do the Great Barrier Reef, maybe that has satiated my desire to do it in real life. There’s no evidence here that that’s the case, but that’s some of the logic that underpins some of that, that allows, again, VR to be seen as good.
This is a good technology because it can help preserve. It has been used a little bit in that regard, say in archeology programs, where ,within archeology, there’s a concern of, if you want to train students in how to be an archeologist, usually have to take him to sites. And every time you take a new person to a site, the site degrades in some way.
So a bunch of programs have taken LIDAR scans, these high definition, 3d scans of archeological sites, and then used that in the classroom to train students on what it’s like to be at a site. You know, how do you take in the surrounding? So again, that’s a way in which VR is being leveraged as some kind of conservation.
So then this loops [00:30:00] all around to then this other set of concerns, which is when asked, at a conference I attended, for the panelists to say, what was an outcome of VR they were nervous about… because it happened to be, there was a lot of environmentalists who were talking about their environmental VR projects. They all expressed a concern that it might not allow for the full understanding of what being in the natural world means. So it goes back to that claim is diving it… [Nicole: laughter, sorry] So, so it’s, it’s fraught, right? If VR is more real than real then to be confronted by the awesomeness of nature in VR ought to be the same as being confronted by it in real life. And that’s what all those environmental conservation experiences are kind of built upon. At the same time, there is the same concern mounted. If kids are spending all their time in VR, they’re never going to go out and experience the wonders of the natural world. So VR is both the solution and the problem.
Nicole: Yeah. I mean, [00:31:00] that last point that you make, I think resonates particularly now that we’re maybe – knock on wood – coming out of the pandemic. I have two kids, 11 and 13. You know, for those of us who have children, the pandemic has been a time of retreat. And a lot of that retreat has ended up being in screens in some form or, or another. And so, you know, there’s definitely anxiety that goes along with that. Another thing I thought about listening to you, which strikes me as interesting, is I feel like all of this raises questions about how we understand human’s relationship to the natural world, to other living things. The idea that it would be better for the world if we were to experience things virtually suggests, you know, justifiably, that we’re a big problem, right? right. That you don’t want humans to have a direct engagement with the natural world. And there are a lot of implications, I think, that come from thinking that way.
I want to talk, [00:32:00] also about the metaverse. And I know, when we corresponded, you had some caveats about what is understood by the metaverse, but one of the things that has popularized this notion is Mark Zuckerberg’s video in which he announced that the parent company was going to change its name to Meta.
And he, interestingly, at one point makes an environmental argument as well, which is basically that if, for instance, as part of the metaverse, people would increasingly have virtual experiences of work, of being in the office, that that will mean less cars on the road, less of an environmental impact.Which is interesting if for no other reason then that Facebook feels the need to make an environmental argument. But let’s start simply. So can you help us understand what the metaverse is? And I know that this is a problematic question.
Lisa: Sure. No. Happily. So, by and large at this moment, I consider the metaverse to be a branding [00:33:00] strategy.
There has been, again, many years of investment, not only in virtual reality technology, but also augmented reality AR and this larger scope of what might be called immersive technologies and all of these immersive technologies. What they’re striving for is a spatial experience of digital worlds. So right now, when we access a web browser, if we just go to Google or even Facebook, and scroll the feed, that’s not a spatial experience. That’s a two dimensional experience. And the imagination is: what would be better than the internet? A 3d internet. And that becomes why it’s being set up as the successor to the internet, because maybe in this conglomeration of spatial technologies and the ability to process digital information quicker than ever thanks to the 5g network, maybe we’re finally at a time that evolves past the screen, past the two dimensions [00:34:00] into the three dimensions. And this can be narrated as some kind of inevitable human evolution, cause humans are spatial creatures and shouldn’t we want our digital technologies to be some loose spatial, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a lot of justifications for this, that appeal to again, grandiose ideas.
So the metaverse sits at the center of these imaginaries. One can argue that metaverses have existed for quite a while, actually. Online, Second Life is a great example. The Sims are a great example.
Nicole: Can you describe what Second Life is? Because not everybody might be familiar with that.
Lisa: Yeah. So Second Life, which I think was founded in 2003, was a virtual world. And that’s the term for all these kind of similar programs. Fortnite is a virtual world. I think Minecraft would be considered a virtual world, the Sims. In Second Life you created an avatar. That’s kind of also central to the metaverse experience is that you have a digital embodiment [00:35:00] in a virtual world and with that digital embodiment, you then navigate through space.
So Second Life you would access it through a web browser. You would log on to Second Life. You would be your character. You would move around the world and other people would be populating the world as well. And you could chat with them. You could build a house in Second Life, which again is a metaverse and you could create a business in second Life. You could learn how to program different skins and different clothes. And you could sell that for the Linden dollars, which was the currency of Second Life. And Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist, wrote a whole ethnography of Second Life – I believe it was published in 2008 – called Coming of Age in Second Life in which he looked into the sociology of this virtual world. And very much said that what’s happening here is not virtual. It’s real, right? These are real social connections and people who might feel isolated in the physical world find meaning in the digital world. And this is something that anthropologists and sociologists ought to care about because it’s real social behavior being carried out online in a network space.
So when the metaverse is being invoked today, [00:36:00] especially when a big tech company like Facebook, now Meta, talks about metaverse, what they’re really imagining is a future, a networked future in which the same avatar you have over in Google’s metaverse, you have in Microsoft’s metaverse, you have in Epic Games’ metaverse. You’re kind of porting your same digital self through all these places in the same way that when you navigate a web browser, like if you open up Chrome, you are accessing all these different webpages through the name browser.
That’s part of the vision of what comes next is that you don’t just open up the app for Second Life, the app for Fortnite. You enter the metaverse and you navigate to Second Life, and then you navigate to Fortnite. You navigate to Amazon, you do your shopping, you go to work, right. It literally is this kind of digital double of the world as we have it.
And that’s the vision of the metaverse that was in Snow Crash, which is where the [00:37:00] metaverse as a word was formed, which is a 1992 fiction by Neal Stephenson. And it’s dystopian. Metaverse is where people escape to because the world is awful and it has reached migratory disaster. It reached climate disaster. And the only saving grace to some extent is the metaverse. But even the metaverse is like kind of bad because it’s hyper commercial. And also the vision you get in Ready Player One, which you mentioned before, which is again, climate catastrophe has ruined the world. And so how do people find meaning? They retreat into the metaverse and the battle in Ready Player One is against a company like Facebook owning the metaverse. The idea is to keep it free and democratized for the people. And so there’s so much irony there because when people would join Oculus, after Facebook acquired it, they would all be given Ready Player One as like mandatory reading of the future they’re building toward and to build toward the metaverse to me, kind of already accepts some kind of social and climate catastrophe for which the [00:38:00] metaverse is seen as this necessary solution. So as you can tell, as I continue to talk about this, I get very worked out by the metaverse imaginary because it feels like it just gives up. It gives into a whole bunch of meta narratives that have been circulating in society for decades, if not longer. And just kind of says, well, we might as well just give into it. And I think we just need different imaginaries of our futures and not the one that was offered to us in the nineties.
Nicole: Well, I mean, the reason Facebook and, and Microsoft and other companies want us to give into it as well is because there’s a lot of money at stake.
Lisa: Of course, yes. This is all about if the.com boom made the most recent set of billionaires. Everyone wants to know how they can either still be billionaires on the other side of the next thing, or those who are newer entrants want to get in on the billionaire bubble this time around.
Nicole: I get a glimpse into this again from my kids, because they occasionally want to be able to spend real money on virtual items. I mean, things that, you know, [00:39:00] seem pretty silly to some of us older people. My husband’s pretty good about making jokes about, I don’t know, Pink Panther boots or whatever it is that you can buy, you know, virtually.
I’m curious to talk about avatars a little bit too. When we did our virtual experience, one of the things that we got to do was choose our avatar, and my daughter chose this yellow and black avatar, which she immediately pointed out, you know, it was hot. You know, she’s 11. So she’s just starting to go through puberty. She doesn’t have a, a woman’s body yet. But her avatar did as did her friend’s. And she was very amused by this. She kept trying to grab her friend’s avatar’s boobs, which it turns out you can’t do.
But I think the avatar is an important part of this. I mean, there are just so many things – for instance, one of the things that gets touted is the ability [00:40:00] to have different skin tones and to sort of be racially sensitive. And so in that sense, there’s supposed to be a kind of realism to it. But, on the other hand, you know, you can be a lot hotter and wear skimpy clothing and things like that. So I don’t know. I wonder if you have thoughts on that?
Lisa: Yeah. This is yet another paradox. You know, you don’t need an avatar hard to be in VR, so it’s not exclusive VR, but this is just another paradox at the center of it, which is, again, part of what a lot of the technology being invested in is striving towards realism.
So I just got a new iPhone and I noticed that in my memoji setting, it can take a scan of my face and create hyper-realistic memoji. So I don’t have to worry about guessing what my eye shape is, and there’s actually no way to unlock my iPhone other than the passcode, except for a face scan. So the first thing that happened when I got my new iPhone, without even thinking, cause I was at the Apple Store and I wasn’t really attending to it, I let my face be scanned.
I tried very hard not to give away [00:41:00] my physiometric data online. And in order to open my phone, it was demanding that I do that. And all of that is very important to one vision of the metaverse, which is that, eventually, we will all have these digital doubles. And so I’ll look like me and you’ll be able to see my expression and it will be just as if we are in real life. Without, like really pausing with the irony of like, maybe just maybe just meet up in real life? Like that would be fun too? Um, but then the other flip side is that there’s all these other virtual world metaverses, if you will, like VR Chat and Alt Space, in which you can be embodied as an alien and as a Wolf and a furry, there’s a whole big furry community over there.
And so it’s this complete bifurcation. What is the avatar? Is it a hyper realistic version of ourselves or is it where we can play with our notion of bodily identity? This is something that, again, Tom Boellstorff and his ethnography of Second Life talks about quite a bit, how [00:42:00] there is a possibility of being fluid with your identity and if maybe you’re queer or questioning, it allows you to see what romance with different genders is like, or it allows you to put on a different gender and kind of play those different roles.
There’s a whole element of role playing that in many ways as seen as incredibly psychologically beneficial, but then there’s the flip side that comes back in again, which is if someone’s a bad actor in these spaces, it’s incredibly scary to think about. And this goes back to chat rooms in the 1990s, right?
When you logged into AOL and everyone asked age sex location, and you know, you just assume that this person is an 18-year-old, you know, male from Arizona. And not some, you know, 52-year-old person from who knows where. So the difficulty with so many of these endeavors is we assume good faith. Tech companies assume good faith on the part of their actors. They always claim astonishment when they find out that their technology [00:43:00] has been used in a way they hadn’t intended, when harassment occurs, which course it’s occurring all the time in these virtual spaces. I know this is not the question you asked, but this is just another part I feel quite passionately about – technology companies just have to stop playing naive and thinking that this thing that they allow for as a good can’t, in the very same way, be used to perpetrate harm. Like there’s just such a blindness towards the potential harm of these things being created that is so disingenuous to the past decade of experience in these virtual worlds.
So yeah, the avatar is a fraught site. It can both be a place of exploration. It could also be a place of deception. It could be a place of manifesting who you really are and reflecting the reality of you. It can be a place of reflecting aspirations and all of those can be good or bad. Right? It’s neutral in terms of how it will eventually get used.
Nicole: I mean, if I have the choice between being myself and being [00:44:00] a Wolf, I’m definitely going be a Wolf. Just putting that out there.
Lisa: I’ve, you know, there’s been a number of applications where I’ve had to make an avatar. I am just, maybe it’s a lack of creativity. I think at one point I gave myself purple skin and was just like, this doesn’t feel like me. I reverted back to, um, but also I was playing around with Facebook’s. Metas horizons, which is their first attempt at a virtual world. And you have to make an avatar as the first thing. And you can only make a photo-realistic avatar in Facebook. They’ve always been all about it’s your real identity online, right? That was part of actually what was novel about Facebook is you were you. And that was very much in distinction to a bunch of other social sites at the time. So you were you. And so they’re building that into their avatar system. So I was like, attempting to figure out what avatar looks like me. And at this point it’s still quite limited.
. There’s a whole lot of spectrum of skin and stuff. And I just like, I don’t know. I made my avatar and I’m just so dissatisfied with it that I don’t even want to be in Horizons because my avatar’s so bad. [00:45:00]
Nicole: Well, I mean, there’s, oh God, that brings me back to Facebook and the whole idea of being you seems fraught just from the get,go in Facebook, right?Because the temptation and inclination often is to curate some version of your life. Right? And so it becomes very rapidly problematic in that way. At one point you were saying where you’re talking about meaning virtually and the irony being that you could just mean in person . So I feel like we should make a plug for the Icelandverse. , and do you have any other similar videos or things to recommend?
Lisa: Yeah, I love that video. So after the metaverse, I don’t even know what it was… keynote presentation? keynote moment? in October of 2021, where Zuckerberg kind of did this such a tone,-deaf imagination of what the metaverse might be, the Iceland tourism board released their own pitch-perfect spoof down to someone who made himself quite pale [00:46:00] in order to look like Zuckerberg and presented with a robotic affectation of
the Icelandverse, and just kind of sold Iceland as a destination of reality. Come here and experience reality.
Gosh, I’m sure there are endless, endless spoofs and send ups and like so much play…. I mean, what’s. Right. Why is that? Why is the Icelandverse funny? It’s funny because it’s playing with our expectations of what reality is and what it means to replicate reality and the joy of a thing that’s real being made virtual and the virtual thing being made real again. [Right, right.]
It’s all about upsetting expectations. And one of the funniest things I saw pre-metaverse is actually after, if you recall, after the I forget when it was, in the 2020 election, if it was after the insurrection on January 6th or if it was before. At some point, Rudy Giuliani [00:47:00] made a press conference from the Four Seasons, but remember it ended up being like the Four Seasons Landscape…
[Yes, yes.] Um, thing. Okay. And he just had all those, like Trump Pence 2020 signs behind him. In alt space, which is a VR-accessible metaverse, a virtual world, someone – because you can create anything – created a fascimilie of the Four Seasons Landscaping venue, complete with the posters, the Trump Pence posters and a podium, and kind of tweeted it out, and all, all these people logged into Alt Space and arrived, and Alt Space is a place where, maybe it was VR Chat, I forget which one, where you can… there’s a lot of furries, so wolfs and, you know, kangaroos, it’s all very, cartoonlike, it’s very twee in that sense. And you can film. So someone was filming this like grand reveal of this virtual destination and people were just like dying. They were so excited.
They were running around in their little like furry avatars pointing out the detail to which the constructor and like the constructor was there [00:48:00] taking the photos and people kept coming up to him again, embodied as wolves or kangaroos or something, and be like, oh my God, how’d you do this long? How long did it take you?
And he was just like, kind of chuckling about it. And what was funny there, well, it was funny because it had already become a meme, but then it was also made real in this virtual space that you could then visit. So again, there’s so much joy and interest and excitement at all these ways in which the real and the virtual kind of overlap and turn back on itself. And even a very simple thing, like simply recreating a real place in the virtual still comes with excitement to it. Likewise, virtual places become real, right? Think about Disneyland. Think about the world of Harry Potter and this media saturated moment. I think we love it when media traverses where we expect to encounter it. So when the real gets virtual, when the virtual gets made real, there is this pleasure that comes from it. And I think understanding that pleasure is really necessary, particularly when trying to mount a critique on where this pleasure could, you know, [00:49:00] spill over into perversity or something. Yeah.
Nicole: That makes me think two things. One is I know nothing about this in the sense that I feel like I’m too old to really make any predictions or have any real opinion in, because when I hear about some of the things that happen online, I’m reminded of the fact that whatever’s going to happen with this is going to depend on a generation that has a kind of fluency in this.
But then at the same time, you know, talking about the pleasure, it makes me think about, I’ve always had this attraction to a certain kind of artifice. For me, for instance, theater is sometimes more appealing than movies because there is this kind of duality. I’m not sure that’s quite the right word, but where you have a suspension of disbelief because there’s a storytelling element, and yet you’re aware that it’s artificial, you know, you’re not completely duped. And, so, I wonder… [00:50:00] of course virtual reality is going try and become more and more real, which is one of the reasons I think that the Icelandverse thing is funny, right? It’s like if the goal is to become more and more real, then we know what does it best, right? Reality. But, at the same time, I think it’s interesting, you know, the appeal that this kind of back and forth that you’re describing has to human beings and what that says about us. I guess, as an anthropologist, that’s one of the questions that you must think about.
Lisa: Yeah. And I will say like, there’s a big asterisks and caveat. Right? I was very flip when I said, just go and be in real life. And for some people that’s actually very hard, right. So I do want to make that point that I, I think I presented a lot of my perspective from a very particularly ableist, you know, mindset where leaving the house is not a big ordeal, but for people who otherwise my, I find that challenging, there’s a real benefit that comes with this, and I just was, before logging on, I was scrolling through my own [00:51:00] little timeline and saw someone posting about how disability perspectives are being thought about in terms of VR games, because part of what’s interesting about VR is that it’s embodied, and what makes an experience unique, as you were saying, you know, strapping on the sensors, actually moving your body, that’s what makes it actually so much different than a video game. But there’s a lot of kind of ableism that then gets brought into it. So that just creates this really, you know, particular design challenge, but also, you know, I always have to be reminding myself of the assumptions that I’m making based on my experiences and how, what might seem redundant for me – like, I’ll just go to Iceland, – but for a whole lot of reasons, for a whole lot of people going to Iceland is an impossibility, not only because of ability reasons, but also because finances, because maybe Iceland would be a place for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel comfortable in. On and on and on. I mean, it’s part of what makes writing about VR, thinking about VR to be just so challenging because [00:52:00] there’s so many parts of it that do seem like a benefit for people, but it’s so heterogeneous as to who will benefit and how they will benefit.
At what point do we like do the cost benefit analysis, so to speak, and figure out, is there more harm than good emerging from these spaces? And those are going be very hard questions that I don’t really trust the big tech companies to answer in a responsible way. Cause most likely the answer will not be aligned with what yields the most profits
[music]
Nicole: Coming up, two episodes on mermaids, one with Christina Bacchilea and Marie Alohalani Brown about the wonderful Penguin Book of Mermaids that they co-edited and one with author Lydia Millet on her novel Mermaids in Paradise, which I recommend you read in advance. If you’d like to email me, [00:53:00] I’m at asquith.intheweeds@gmail.com. And please leave us a positive review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends to listen to In the Weeds.
Nicole: Okay. First impressions. What did you think?
Beatrice: It was pog.
Nicole: Delia, give me something better.
Delia: It was cool and um, it, um, when you walk out, it feels like you you’re not real anymore.
Beatrice: Mom, can I say something?
Nicole: Yeah.
Beatrice: I was obsessed with trying to grab Delia’s character’s fake boobs. All right. I’m done. Bye.