needs has taken on such a central role in the life of consumers that it has displaced any other cultural, intellectual, or political reality.” As Michael Greenberg notes when interpreting Debord, “we are all of us, de-individualized actors – objects, really – in an ongoing spectacle staged by advertisers and corporate molders of desire.” Again, Debord: “The spectacle is the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society.” And again, Greenberg:
The dictatorship works so well because we participate in it while believing we are free, coaxed by a barrage of pop songs, magazine and newspaper articles, movies, advertisements, and television shows that flatter our uniqueness, our illusory will to choose. We have surrendered ourselves to the spectacle, the theory goes, striking poses, playing roles, adapting personae, drifting further and further from our true selves and even from the ability to recognize that such a self might exist. As a result, we feel depressed, unmotivated, hollow, and, since we live so deeply inside the spectacle, we experience this feeling as a personal failure, thus, discounting our true selves even further.25
This certainly explains both the attraction and addiction to social networks, as well as the causes of increasing loneliness and isolation. It also points to the causes underpinning herd mentality, which will only increase with the advent of the metaverse. As noted by David Auerbach, the metaverse will effectively steal your personal identity:
The result will be the monetisation of identity, something already visible in the burgeoning industries of paying for instruction on how to be patriotic, how to be anti-racist, how to be Christian, how to be eco-conscious. The metaverse seeks to make money off of less-loaded aspects of identity by fostering intra-group solidarity through purchases. As sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto.”26
Auerbach goes on to argue that “Offline life will not be more “real” than the metaverse, merely less affirming. There will be even less need to congregate with those who disagree with you in the slightest if, by going online, one can not only exchange words with identically-minded individuals, but can gain all the reassuring benefits of human interaction with them.”27
This becomes particularly disturbing when the argument is pushed further. As Auerbach claims, there’s an additional cost to pay:
The price of group homogeneity in any regard (ideological, cultural, demographic) is a far greater rejection of deviation. Urbanisation and immigration may have caused melting-pot tendencies in the last century, but the metaverse offers previously unthinkable possibilities for undoing the heterogeneity of modern life, separating us out into monocultural strata in which every hobbyist subculture, every sub-Marxist movement, and every sexual fetish can easily find mutual affirmation. Individuality will dissolve into the unified mindset of one’s chosen monocultures. Once having joined a stratum, members will naturally play down their differences in favour of their commonalities, to the point that they forget those differences.
The result will not be a melting-pot but a disconnected patchwork. Conformity will no longer be a meaningful concept because we will be able to conform to anything. You can pick whatever social norms you’d like to follow, but having chosen them you will follow them to the utmost. No group will feel big enough to be confident of its dominance; each group will police its boundaries rigidly, forming a kaleidoscope of what anthropologist Mary Douglas defined as latent groups. Each will feel threatened by some number of others, just as the Left and the Right are both equally convinced today that the other is winning.28
The fact of the matter is: most virtual realities are highly unregulated marketplaces, and the metaverse will most certainly be more so unless something is done.
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