Workers of The Metaverse, Unite!
During my foray into grad school, one of my favorite professors asked me to write my own manifesto as an assignment. His only instructions were to include a call to action and to "be bombastic." This is a reading of said assignment. My goal here was to put forward the idea that virtual worlds like the Metaverse are not only unnecessary but actively distract us from actual revolutionary activity. In attempting to explain this idea, the reasoning led me to conclude this idea can be expanded to larger illusions in society that keep us from fully understanding where we stand.
Workers of The Metaverse, Unite!
A Plea for Digital Dialecticism
By Casey Franco, 2021
Is it any wonder that billionaires should attempt to escape our shared reality at any cost? Whether through a spacecraft or a virtual headset, their reasoning seemingly remains the same: guillotines only function on Earth. Their open willingness to depart our planet should be seen as tantamount to a guilty plea towards those they’ve robbed of resources. Their frantic flights a renouncement of the responsibility imposed and implied by our faux-meritocracy. We must see the false worlds they peddle as propaganda and reject the idea that the one they’ve ravished, the one we share, is a lost cause. We must realize the boundlessness of our reality. We must awaken before these new, digital pacifiers turn to ash in our mouths and their peddlers vanish into obscure dimensions.
Recently, I’ve had three unfortunate experiences that have forced my hand here today: one impersonal, one deeply personal, and one made personal by proxy. Through these experiences, I have come to see the false promises and malicious ideologies behind these new virtual commodities. Commodities themselves that embody the false “true world theories” Nietzsche so famously vilified. Yet, before they are explored, we must first establish and quantify reality as it has come to be understood in this moment. Without a consideration for the world we inhabit, what possible criticism could be levied against a false reality? This is a task, made as such by our hegemonic status quo, easier done than said. Once, dear reader, you understand the two frames you’ve been taught to see the world through are actually one, you gain the ability to see through deception. And I know, dear reader, that you are not one of the deceivers. They’ve made it painfully obvious through their actions that they detest reading. By meditating on our world, you are engaging in a revolutionary act. An act I will delve further into after a brief metaphysical detour.
We must, first and foremost, break through an illusion that has held us prisoner since Homo Sapiens awoke from their evolutionary slumber. Namely, that our inner-narratives, our waking dreams, our pattern seeking run amuck, what we now have come to call “consciousness” is, in fact, not a transcendent force from an alternative dimension with properties beyond understanding. We must look to the truths espoused by Spinoza in his Ethics. The external world and the one we envision within our minds are actually one and the same. We must forego the Yin and Yang for a new symbol of unity: a singular, encircled point. Mind is nature and nature is mind. We must exchange the mysticism and lethargy of our dualistic idealism with the certainty and proactivity of a monist materialism so as to more explicitly recognize the strides we have made in our philosophies and sciences by monism’s post-enlightenment adoption there within. We can bicker over how we categorize, quantize, and define the most basic elements of our reality (atoms, quarks, pixels), but we must assume that whatever this Substance may be, it is of a singular nature. It is this Substance which is the proverbial sand to the lenses of our minds; through which we perceive a refracted and chromatic world. As Spinoza - that rebellious, Cartesian lens-crafter - would himself insist, the prism, the sand of its glass, the flowing light rays and their photons, are all of an identical substance; be our ever-changing and “modern” frame of reference for this substance sub-atomic or electromagnetic, it is singular all the same whether expressed through its Attributes of light or prism or glass or sand or observer.
When we dream, our visions may compound and transcend the corporeal restraints of our bodies, but they arise from and are driven by material means. The mind and nature are one and we must violently refuse any malicious narrative which stands to gain from our believing otherwise. Why violently? Because in the assumption that your dreams are immaterial, your power to shape your destiny is castrated. When a dualist view of life is accepted, one may be more willing to knowingly accept a poisoned-chalice when an alternative is possible because, in dualism, one’s desires are descendant, not ascendant. They exist wholly in the world of dreams, intangible, ever unable to manifest instead of arising from the physical, remaining always within it, and attaining physical attributes we consider “dreamlike.”
What we want and what is given to us exist within the same plane. Our imagined realities are shaped by our physical realities. While this detour may appear esoteric, its relevance shall become clear in time.
Our bodies are shaped by our material circumstances. Our dreams arise from our bodies. Our dreams inspire our bodies to act. Our actions shape our circumstances. The ideal arises from the material. The material is shaped by the ideal. I dwell on this topic because it is a deceptively difficult one to grasp at first. The relationship between material and ideal is dialectical. This is to say that these two dimensions of reality do not run parallel, unintersecting. Both intersect, interplay, each repeatedly giving birth and giving way to the other, elevating one another from a singular shared substance. This is Dialectical Materialism and if you are a peddler of a “new world,” it is the most dangerous idea in the universe.
Allow these ideas to marinate while I return to the three experiences which have forced by hand today. I will begin with the least personal.
At the time of writing it is November, 2021. I believe this date shall become more valuable as time passes from this moment. Within the last week, the media within my home country of the United States has been enraptured, by design, with yet another neoliberal, pan-capitalist smokescreen. Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of Facebook, has rebranded his institution as “Meta” and set forth a vision for the “Metaverse.” The Metaverse is proposed to be a shared virtual space of “limitless potential.” Meta envisions consumers adorning their virtual headsets and escaping into a dreamlike alternative reality where distance means nothing and, from the depths of one’s mind, reality can be “materialized.” To see this as an “innovation” is laughable, insulting, and only possible through a dualist view of reality.
One does not enter the Metaverse by way of exiting the universe. Even if one was able to perfectly mimic all sensory input or, through something like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, fully transport one’s mind to the Metaverse, one would still exist as electromagnetic data within the halls of Meta’s server farm. There are no alternate, virtual, or idealistic realities. There is only one, singular, substantive reality. Virtual reality appears independent and fundamentally different from reality because of the same tired dualistic illusion. In our philosophies and sciences, Monism is now common knowledge, the unconscious assumption that is taken for granted, but in our culture and our economics, a new Digital Dualism has taken form and taken hold of our minds.
When I take up my controllers and paint an image within a virtual space, I create data which is stored and abstracted to mimic my perceptions of the non-virtual world. The painting is code. The code is binary. “Binary” is electromagnetic instructions for micro-transistors which are relayed through connected technologies and rendered through pixels. The simulacra of the painting appears transcendent of the physical, but it is made of the same electromagnetic, subatomic phenomena that - like the prism and its light - makes up the virtual painting, the headset that displays it, and the user that wears the headset.
When I turn on a virtual lamp in the Metaverse, it requires real electricity to illuminate. Understanding this false dichotomy is the gateway to a Digital Monism. The simulated lamp requires the same energy grid as a physical lamp I purchase from a store and all of the complicated socioeconomic and political ramifications of the creation of that energy grid.
If too bright, the simulated lamp will hurt one’s eyes the same as a physical lamp. Just as in real life, one reaches to turn a lamp off to protect one’s eyes, the bright virtual lamp drives one to do the same. Virtual simulacra can serve as a catalyst for real action in the same way a dream can inspire you to change reality. This is a self-evident Digital Dialecticism and through it, we see that the real affects the virtual and equally the virtual affects the real like interactions of dreams and the bodies that create them. The implication of this realization is that ideals held within reality hold equally true for a virtual space and vice versa. “Thou shalt not covet” remains axiomatically valid to those who accept the virtue, despite their plane of existence. This facet of Digital Dialecticism will become more important as I continue.
This brings me to my second experience. One made personal through the elated descriptions of a close friend. I now must describe two more virtual platforms, the first of which is called “Star Atlas.” Star Atlas seeks to apply blockchain technologies to objects within a space-themed virtual platform where the in-game currencies and commodities are Non-Fungible Tokens disguised as gems. As an aside, if you are one of the many confused by NFT and blockchain technology, the singular driving idea is the ability to assign virtual objects a serial number, recorded in a privately owned digital ledger, so they may be treated more like physical objects. This basic concept remains the same whether the virtual commodity in question is currency or artwork. In StarAtlas, players are encouraged to meta-game and devise micro-economies to outwit fellow players into parting with their gems. Due to the uniqueness of the gems and their controlled artificial scarcity within the wholly invented platform, the gems can have real-life value. Through gem-to-dollar exchange value, these goods and services do not end where Star Atlas does. Like gamers who trade their real-world means of subsistence for virtual currency or Redditers who hoard virtual karma for its affect on their real-world clout, Digital Dialecticism allows for a view of value that travels in both directions. Simulated currencies function only insofar as they are widely accepted and seen as valuable through their exchange value, the same as tangible currency. Here again, we arrive at the same logical implication which is hard to accept due to our Digital Dualist hegemony. Failures within a virtual space, just as virtues within a virtual space, are and should be seen as failures or virtues applicable to a singular underlying system which encompasses both dimensions. For example…
Say, in your real life, you were short on rent and employment. You turn to a virtual, private security job advertised by a player with millions of gems within Star Atlas. This player, through their conversion of real dollars to virtual gems, has made themselves quite wealthy in-game. You offer your services to them. You agree to protect them from marauders or space pirates while they conduct their business. In exchange, they will give you a cut of their earnings. So with your protection, they set off. Thanks to your labor, they are able to generate exceedingly more value from their usual activities. However, at the end of your working period, whether accidentally or purposefully, you’re paid substantially less than the value your labor has generated for them. You protest! This amount is not enough to trade for rent money and the immense value of this player’s newly acquired gems would’ve been impossible without your help. You’re, at this point, called a radical. You’re told you don’t understand basic space-economics. You’re told the player has taken a substantially greater risk than you and therefore must be allowed to dictate the terms of the transaction. Say you then coordinated with this player’s other hired security to coordinate the withholding of your services until better pay was remitted. It may then become more financially feasible for this player to simply hire other players, for the previous low fee, to grief you and his former security guards until you give up the fight. In the long run, this temporary cost of aggression towards you is cheaper than the long term costs of giving you a greater cut of the gems. Say your coordination of the security forces was a success and the player began to sense that their gems were in danger. One can imagine they would simply remove their headset and flee, with their wealth intact, to another dimension.
You would likely prefer to explore the open world for yourself; discovering purpose and following it at-will. Yet, the material circumstances of the real world have coerced you into virtual action and deceptions within the virtual world have meant material ruin for you in real life. Through Digital Dialecticism, we see the same virtues would hold true regardless of existential plane.
The second platform is called “Decentraland.” A virtual free market for virtual estates and virtual goods. Since the entire virtual world is built on blockchain technology, everything within it is unique like real life objects given serial numbers. It’s in many ways the same concept as Star Atlas, but with more emphasis on creation and ownership instead of commerce. As my friend excitedly explained to me, for a fee, one can own a piece of virtual land in a shared virtual space. You can buy virtual land. Construct a virtual house. Hang virtual art. All unique to you; just like real life. I say again to emphasize the irony, just like in real life. If one were clever enough, one could buy a plot, construct an office, hire employees, pay them cryptocurrency wages, even sell billboard space on the exterior walls of the building, all within Decentraland. It so perfectly mimics the real world, one begins to wonder what its appeal is.
The terror here, for me, is the putting forth of these ideas as if they are built on a new and separate reality. There is nothing fundamentally new about Decentraland or behaviors within virtual reality at large. Undergirding every one of your actions in a digital space is an inescapable tie to the economics of the real world that enables it.
Presumably, free speech would also be advertised as protected in Decentraland. This is granted by the laws of the country and state its company’s headquarters resides in rather than some assumed digital sovereignty. Just as in real life, even “free” speech must necessarily be regulated. For example, presumably, one could not call for violence within the Metaverse because calls for violence are not protected by the US Bill of Rights. Here again we see the inescapability of the real world. The major difference here is the added layer of private control overseeing your communication. Not only must your speech abide by national anti-hate speech laws, but also must conform to the communication protocols written by Decentraland. They may say your speech is free, but still have full and complete power your ability to exercise that freedom. The real world equivalent would be your national government providing you with freedom of speech, while also also retaining the ability to remove your tongue at the snap of a finger or pluck your words from the air before they reach your intended audience. What use is freedom of speech when the ground you walk on is controlled by someone else?
The validity of private property is a fundamental assumption to the creation of Decentraland. There are public spaces, but to create, one must own. To own, one must pay or be titled. To accept the status quo within the virtual landscape is to also accept the real life status quo that allows the virtual world to be hosted by the material world.
Now, through Digital Dialecticism, we clearly see two important, but troubling realizations: critiques of an unjust virtual system must hold true for the same systems in real life and virtual egalitarian systems hold no immediate bearing on the material worlds that host them (save for material action inspired through virtual simulacra). Who in their right mind would pay to be a serf, Digital or actual?
These new virtual spaces, through the veil of Digital Dualism, seek to convince the public they stand for new, limitless egalitarian principles in a controlled virtual space while retaining all the same profit motives of reality. Information is more easily replicated than physical material. This attribute of information allows virtual spaces to appear more boundless in their potentialities. Snap your fingers and a virtual banquet appears, but alas we cannot eat information. What a boon this is for those who would stand to profit off dissenters exhausting their revolutionary energy within a platform so much more easily manipulated than real life.
To sell property within Decentraland should make anyone who has ever played a video game sick to their stomach. Just as a price tag cannot (yet) be put on air, it is impossible to sell something that is not scarce. Virtual land can be infinitely created and distributed. Enough space could be easily provided for every player to realize their own creative dreams within the game, but you cannot sell what is freely given by reality (virtual or otherwise) so these spaces must be made to appear artificially limited. We look at this situation and the solution is abundantly clear. Virtual land is not something to be hoarded for profit. One inherently needs access to a spatial dimension to play the game. Virtual land should not be seen as a commodity. Selling access to virtual land simply puts a toll on a necessary aspect of interacting with the platform. Through Digital Dialecticism, we can say the same for reality.
We are temporal and spatial beings (as brilliantly put forth by Martin Heidegger). To move through time, we require space just as the same holds true for the inverse. To say, for any reason, that another being lacks a prerequisite (money, a certain skin color, etc.) to access space (land) is to prevent that being from a necessary part of existence. The one who doles out said space therefore has a coercive authority over the one who lacks space. If we are to then say, the virtual world should therefore provide space to all players, would the same not hold true for reality?
Digital Dualism makes it possible for us to believe something can be true of one reality and at the same time, not the other. Our hegemony tells us it’s perfectly fine to coerce action through manufactured need when it’s done in material reality, but in a virtual space, to us, this logic simply creates a game we’d rather not play with no further implications. The game of life is one that cannot be solved by simply saying “if you don’t like the rules, don’t play the game.” In a virtual world, perhaps one could literally pull oneself up by their own bootstraps, but only if the owner of the platform allows it.
Why is this paper dedicated to the “workers” of the Metaverse and not simply the people? Because so long as you do not own the platform, your presence as a virtual being in those spaces is creating value for someone else. These new virtual worlds reduce us to purely economic beings. Tools for algorithmic learning, advertising, and commerce that need only be given a virtual sandbox to be placated. Existence within a virtual space is labor and the value of that labor is kept from you. These spaces have been constructed to pacify with defanged idealism while they vampirically commercialize our very existence.
The profit motive, fueled by industrialization, wrapped around the globe in search of new colonial markets to extract value from. As it now presses against the edges of our physical world it risks suffocation and must create new worlds so it may continue its expansion. The new world is now charted on a neural map. As the wells of human spacial extraction run dry, the profit motives turn to the temporal wells. Your life has been reduced to labor and they now come for your leisure, manufacturing markets of attention and being. You have a data body as well as a physical body. Whether through a headset or a handheld portal, when you enter into their new digital realms you provide them a glimpse into your mind’s terrain. They take note of the resources to be extracted there within and revise their imperial strategy so that the next time the portal is opened, they may dig their tendrils in ever deeper.
My purpose here is to empower and enrage the would-be janitors of the virtual offices of Decentraland, sufferers of wage theft within Star Atlas, and the starving artists of the Metaverse. What I believe you will find in these new imagined worlds will be failings indicative of larger failings within a singular reality. Once one sheds the rose-tinted glasses of Digital Dualism, the promises of new worlds begin to appear rightfully hollow.
I conclude by way of my personal experience. We are potentially on the tail end of a global pandemic. A pandemic brought on by a virus, the lowliest of creatures, that shattered the collective illusion of safety of our constructed reality. There is no greater modern example of a false reality being shattered than the floundering of capitalism at hands of this non-sentient, non-human, harbinger of nature’s indifferent, universal, chaotic cruelty. It has called into question ancient assumptions of commodity, exchange, and merit. Our intricate supply chains functioned poetically as such: chains. Chains that bound our courses of action for arbitrary reasons meant to preserve artificial scarcity so as not to disenfranchise those who benefitted from the status quo. If COVID was class-conscious (or accepted bribes), there would’ve been no lockdowns, no “essential workers,” no “new normal.” Simply those who could afford to stay healthy and those who could not. Because COVID was indifferent to the commas in one’s bank account, for a brief moment, we were allowed to peer through the illusion of our virtual meritocracy. The essential bones that structure our world were laid bare. I must assume the soul Nietzsche laughed or wept as we discovered once again the withered corpse of God and the idol of bodily health that took its place. No amount of CEO spouted “rise and grind” snake-oil could do for you what a single trained clinician, truck driver, or warehouse worker could: change your life.
I am one of the lucky few. My labor is digital, informational. I could stay inside while continuing to work and afford the means to stay alive. Others were not so fortunate. Why? I do not believe there is fundamentally any difference between me and my fellow man. Systems constructed to say otherwise have always had a secret motive for doing so. Merit is an idealistic illusion meant to mask suffering deemed necessary by our chosen economic system. We all deserve life. We all deserve land. We all deserve the ability to leisurely explore the limits of what this life has to offer us. There is no “luck,” there is only material circumstance and the ideologies that skew those circumstances. The idealistic fantasies that entitle us to another’s coerced suffering on our behalf and force us to suffer for others above us must be disbelieved in like a child who chooses not to believe in ghosts.
Despite their “good fortune,” this new class of remote proletariat suffers a stale, universal alienation digitally amplified. My partner recently asked me if I would care to “go out to work” one morning instead of our usual working from home. I wandered outside with my laptop in hand only to find there was not a single space I could exist where I myself would not be patronized and commodified. Even simply seeking peace as I spent my precious little time on earth creating value for someone else, proved impossible. No neighbor would house me without purchase, no bench would provide me rest without question, no trees would provide me nourishment without public scorn or state intervention.
Is this what our lives have become? Are we, as humans, simply born to serve as biological training devices for privately owned algorithms? Is our very existence, the sum total of our actions, really so simple that it can be expressed in lines of code or numbers in a bank statement? Are we digital chattel, neo-Heideggerian “standing cyber-reserves?” These new worlds say they will allow us to create or work from anywhere. Rather, what they mean to say is that we now must create and work from everywhere. Our new struggles are the same eternal struggles with a cyberpunk theme.
This section may sound tangential, but I do not believe it is. The more you meditate on these ideas, the more I hope you will see that to fight to exit the Matrix is not enough. For once you have escaped the clutches of a cruel digital reality, you will awaken to find yourself within a cruel physical reality. It is my purpose here to call on you to retain your values. If you despise pay-to-win schemes and would like to see them done away with, you should start at the source.
I sit here, now, writing merely streets away from where Marx wrote his Capital and Manifesto two centuries ago and the same contradictions within our society are still causing it to teeter. There are universal struggles being illuminated ironically by the very initiatives meant to shield them from us. We are deserving of the fruits of our labor no matter the space we are in. We require space to exist and should have so without coercive labor. The essential worker, the remote worker, and the billionaire share a universal lack. The satiation of that lack is as equally absent in our devised virtual worlds as it is in our modern material world. We must not be sold a false bill of goods. We will not allow ourselves to be harvested so a few may excessively escape these universal needs. We will not be hypnotized into fighting for their virtual worlds.
To the virtual workers of the Universe I say, unite! Billionaires are not gods, they are men, like us, condemned to rebel against entropy through labor like Sisyphus and his boulder. They do not get to escape the world ravished through the systems that created them. Their intricate coercive superstructures must be shown to be hollow! We must pull down their rockets, unplug their headsets, remove our fingers from their terminals, force them to reckon with the world they’ve plundered. The world we all equally inhabit. They cannot be allowed to hide behind false realities any longer. Their virtual realities, like their corporations, are specters which we must disbelieve. Shed your Digital Duality! Do not be sold a poisoned chalice or a blank virtual world to build anew. Our singular reality spins on and there is still work to be done! Do not let your dreams die a slow death lived out in meaningless pixels, bring them into reality! Just as the virtual realm is boundless, so it is for the physical realm. Life can be what we make it. Let us quarrel over the divvying up of other worlds and planets when the needs of the people on Earth are satisfied. Do not settle for running old mazes for the promise of new virtual cheese. Seize the means of simulation! We are not data. We are men! So here I say, fight, oh virtual workers of the Metaverse and beyond! For you have been given but one reality, one life, one interface, one shackled body, and you have nothing to lose but your useless blockchains.