https://www.roughtype.com/?p=9020 Look at the excerpts from this interview with Marc Andreessen, who, though a famous technological venture capitalist pioneer, is ironically only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the underlying network of figures involved.
Look at this. Instead of cynically coping, really look at the implications it sets out. Even if the vision outlined somehow fails, at least understand what the ideology possessed by some of the most influential members of society actually looks like. What they really believe and desire. It's like an inverted futurism, because at least futurism was populistic–this is anything but. If these people fail in one instance, their power doesn't suddenly vanish. They will continue trying and envisioning until their ideology is blotted out. That's what really matters. Look at the ideological implications of their ambitions and beliefs. And make no mistake, in their techno-fetishism, these people are unabashedly unipolar and unabashedly neo-neo-colonialist. In their narrow, hyper-modern perspective, the less 'technical' a society is, the more directly subhuman it must be.
So. the metaverse really is a posthuman vision defined under the predicate of Silicon Valley's neo-Darwinian/Malthusian assumption that people's natural inequality lends itself to a state of reality which, in itself, cannot possibly be improved.
This could just be written off as an edgy reactionary ideological tripe, but the problem is… this view is heralded by the most financially powerful and influential figures in the world, and we, the masses, can do so little to stop it, enthralled under the helm of Capital's demands.
This anti-human, anti-egalitarian, neoreactionary ugly bald fuck really pretty much is just explicitly saying, 'yes you will live in a pod, eat bugs, and like it–there is no alternative, you are naturally where you deserve to be, and this is reflective of where you can only ever be, by virtue of your innate inability.'
If you are doubting that this is the future, cynically assuming that the metaverse is just going to be some failed venture, then you really aren't paying attention. Look at the present economic state of things already, look at the ultra-corporate monopoly of Amazon etc. and the increasingly divorced housing market, the precarious gig-economy and lack of sustainable career prospects for everyone who isn't an already established tech-bro or doctor. Look at the ever-increasing degree of financial inequality between everyday people vs. the PMC vs. the fact that, despite this, Capital's artificial graphs go UP, not down. You think that for some reason things can't proceed further down this path? Things ARE going to get worse, they are going to further affirm like this; we're already practically living in techno-feudalism. There's little practical reason, especially accounting for the power these overlords have, to assume no further techno-social accentuation and economic stratification. You think this won't eventually subsume everything, becoming as implicitly mandatory for employment as cellphones or cars? Look how unabridged the once distant gap between offline and the real-world already is in terms of cultural engagement. The internet is a part of life which even the poorest of us can't ignore. The metaverse will aspire towards that same scale of necessity.
The stakes really were always just a Landian, cyberpunk vision of posthumanism posed against the potential substance of the real world; no luddite appeal is needed to recognize the issue, only an undying insistence that in the material world there is something worth fighting for, the idea that the possibility of our earthly improvement is, as Marx wrote in the theses on Feuerbach, something we can make in our image. Marxism understands that the distinction between reality and virtuality is false; that our own nature, as found in the nature of the real world, is primarily up to us, at least in terms of historicity. Virtual life, after all, derives as none other than a part of nature already, never really being 'transcendent', still belonging to materiality proper. But with such a widening disparity between the masses and those above, how can this Marxian premise ever be actualized? This isn't the 1800s anymore, 1st world revolution isn't possible by the barrel of some peasantrys' guns.
Things are really fucked, if you look behind the scenes. I hate to sound Eugene-post'ish, but like… the eugenic ideals of those on top are rearing their fangs as blatantly as ever here, and people still aren't concerned? I don't think, like Eugene does, that everything is somehow eugenics. But to pretend at this point like some of the most powerful people in the entire world don't explicitly endorse and orient, and act according to a worldview which is built around these principles AT LEAST PARTIALLY, is preposterously naive.