There is, however, a more disconcerting – if not sinister – possibility: the totally immersive simulation proposed by companies like Meta. As noted by Jemima Kelly: “What Meta is selling, here, is the idea that it doesn’t matter if your real life is awful, because for just $299 you can escape the drudgery and live in a fantasy. What it doesn’t point out, of course, is that the more time you spend in the virtual world, the less you will inevitably have for people in the physical one — or for doing other things that might benefit your non-avatar self, such as working, sleeping, exercising, procreating or even disconnecting from technology.”20
This is, of course, the hope for a company like Meta, which is built around mining data gleaned from constantly observing individual actions and interactions on their platforms. What the metaverse will bring to such an enterprise is a nearly unlimited expansion of such opportunities. Instead of being bound by the constraints of the social network, where data stems from interactions people have directly with others or engage indirectly through voyeurism, individuals – through their avatars – can take on an infinite number of identities, purchase an almost unlimited number of cheap items (real estate, clothes, etc.), and engage in fantasies that are unavailable or actions that are not allowed through present online systems. By observing these actions and gleaning data from such activity, Meta will be able to further inform advertisers about hidden interests and drivers of particular actors who will then be better positioned to sell them products.
This is also why Meta and others want to go further in their attempt to make the simulation more immersive. Zuckerberg recently announced that, together with Carnegie Mellon scientists, artificial intelligence researchers at Meta have created ReSkin, “a deformable plastic “skin” less than 3 mm thick,” which “can detect forces down to 0.1 newtons from objects that are less than 1 mm in size.” As Zuckerberg stated: “This brings us one step closer to realistic virtual objects and physical interactions in the metaverse.”21 Speculation has already started that, in order to make the experience more real for avatars themselves, it will soon be the case that feelings and emotions will also be available for sale.
Why? Because “pupil movements, body poses and nose scrunching are among the flickers of human expression that Meta wants to harvest in building its metaverse, according to an analysis of dozens of patents recently granted to Facebook’s parent company.”22 A review of patent applications by the Financial Times revealed that “Meta has patented multiple technologies that wield users’ biometric data in order to help power what the user sees and ensure their digital avatars are animated realistically.”23 One of the patents goes specifically to creating 3D avatars based on user photos that would include incorporation of the previously mentioned ReSkin. “Meta aims to be able to simulate you down to every skin pore, every strand of hair, every micromovement,” said Noelle Martin, a legal reformer who has spent more than a year researching Meta’s human-monitoring ambitions with the University of Western Australia. “The objective is to create 3D replicas of people, places and things so hyper-realistic and tactile that they’re indistinguishable from what’s real, and then to intermediate any range of services . . . in truth, they’re undertaking a global human cloning programme.”24
Through such aspirations, the metaverse might just have provided further insight into the notion of false consciousness. False consciousness arises when the mind re-imposes the façade of one dimensionality, when it tricks itself into believing that there is no difference between itself and the object, or the reality of mind and the reality of the external world. It does this by imposing what it perceives to be the common link between the two realms.
Guy Debord, the Marxist founder of the Situationist Movement, has provided a contemporary example of this process, arguing “the obsession with commodities and manufactured products [that] takes aim at our self-image rather than our actual material
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