The Simulation is Now: A Critique of the Metaverse via Baudrillard’s Simulation

The future and nature of the Internet have been in discussion since its inception and via very theoretical lens. Some we continue to circle back to over and over even as the Internet evolves and mutates. The theories of Jean Baudrillard in regards to simulacra, simulation, hyperreality and later integral reality are used in the discussion of the Internet often and for fairly obvious reasons. The save button icon is a floppy disk and now there is an entire generation who has never held, one let alone knows what it is. As Mark Nunes noted back in 1995 we already used the terms of the “real” world to discuss the Internet, “the information superhighway”, we “go” places online, etc. It seems every year as some new app, site or social media platform is birthed from the silicon chaos of Web 2.0 that reality becomes less real.The internet is the space of absolute simulation — unless you ask those who are trying to spearhead the Metaverse, a concept of what Web 3.0 will look like.

The Second Coming of Tron

The Metaverse. The future of human society. Among its most ardent champions, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, claims the Metaverse is “already here.” Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicts that in “the next two or three years, … most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids to the metaverse.” Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has doubled down on the idea of the Metaverse so intensely that he has renamed his company, Facebook. Zuckerberg says a “lot of [the Metaverse] will become mainstream in the next five to 10 years.” Others like Epic Game’s CEO Tim Sweeney and Nvidia’s CEO Jenson Huang are more cautious and avoid giving any timeline for this transformation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tencent Senior Vice President Steven Ma, agree that immersive computing is “the future.”

But what is the thing they all claim to see? Defining the Metaverse is problematic because there is malleability to the definition. The term was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash, a post-cyberpunk novel that takes place in a virtual reality-based internet. There is generally very little overlap outside the broadest strokes between the all the various definitions, and with the addition of cryptocurrency and NFT enthusiasts, the concept has warped further. The version of the Metaverse that people like Zuckerberg seem to see has the direction Web 3.0 will take appears to take inspiration from Snow Crash and similar media such as The Matrix series, Sword Art Online, and Ready Player One. While sometimes “the Metaverse” with the additional caveat of “proto” and “semi,” the term gets used when gesturing at existing 3D multi-player/user virtual world like Roblox and Minecraft. The future they claim is coming is one where the computer screen is not needed to play those games, you will simply be able to put something one, log in, and do seemingly anything you can think of in a virtual setting.

Matthew Ball, in his book How the Metaverse Will Revolutionize Everything, describes the Metaverse as follows:

Here, then, is what I mean when I write and speak about the Metaverse: “A massively scaled and interoperable network of real- time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.” (Internal quotations in original.)

The 3D, real-time rendered hyper-immersive aspect of the Metaverse is one of the most integral and agreed upon elements. Without it even Ball himself admits that “[A]lthough virtual worlds come in many dimensions, ‘3D’ is a critical specification for the Metaverse. Without 3D, we might as well be describing the current internet.”

When Zuckerberg talks about the future and his goals for the Metaverse, he includes such things as being able to have meetings or “hang outs” in a full virtual location. He wants to be able to go to a concert halfway across the world via VR and then attend the virtual afterparty in Meta’s Horizon Worlds or find AR art installations in the real world. Some will talk about shopping in a Metaverse Walmart or ordering food at a Virtual McDonald’s and somehow obtaining your meal in real life. Some like Theologian Ryan Bolger envision the Metaverse as a space so accurate to real life that “[autonomous] cars interact with the map, not physical reality per se—to conduct their actual driving.”

For those like Bolger, the goal is to create a second plane of existence that is a perfect replica of the world as we know it and to explore what that means for ontology. For people like Zuckerberg, the goal is to make something that transcends our world and ideally profit him. Many people side with Zuckerberg’s version of the Metaverse, despite how nebulous that version is and no clear idea when it might come about. Even so, there are those who believe with an intense and abiding clarity in a far-reaching and radical future.

I hope to help you understand what’s required to realize the Metaverse, why entire generations will eventually move to and live inside it, and how it will forever alter our daily lives, our work, and how we think. In my view, the collective value of these changes will be in the tens of trillions of dollars. (Ball, 2022)

Relating the internet to the works of Baudrillard is not novel and even Ball thinks about the Metaverse with an eye towards Baudrillard— specifically his concept of hyperreality i.e., a world in which reality and simulation are so similar and intertwined that there is no true difference. — and boldly stated that:

Though many find this idea frightening, Baudrillard argued that what mattered was where individuals would derive more meaning and value—and speculated it would be in the simulated world. (Ball, 2022)

To these people the Metaverse is not just the future of the internet it is the future of the human race. And it is coming. Eventually.

The Wheel is already Virtual.

Science fiction and science fact have overlapped many times and teach us it is unwise to casually dismiss concepts about the future, even if seemingly fantastical.

The reality of the Metaverse, as described by its prophets, is that while it is vague today and signals its future in tentative gestures at media like the film, Ready Player One, for self-identification, its achievement will require a massive effort to work as the Metaverse faithful say it would. An effort which requires things like mass adoption and affordability of technology to stand a chance.

Even as the reality of the Metaverse stumbles over its grand vision it ignores practical facts. Virtual reality via VR goggles is deeply physically uncomfortable for many. As many Metaverse critics such as Horizon Worlds and Decentraland point out, virtual reality goggles can make people nauseous. As YouTube based documentarian, Dan Olson, best known for his documentary on NFTs Line Goes Up— The Problem with NFTs which resulted in him being interviewed by NPR as an expert on this space puts it in a follow up documentary, The Future is a Dead Mall — Decentraland and the Metaverse:

[…] the tech runs up against a pretty big barrier which is the human body. The inner ear really doesn’t like moving without actually moving, which means every VR application is a series of compromises between the immersive potential of VR and what the body will tolerate. (Olson, 2023)

The demos and sales pitches for the type of Metaverse Zuckerberg advocates shows a man walking blissfully to his desk, coffee in hand, sit and slip on what looks like normal reading glasses. Suddenly, holographic screens and a transparent backdrop of a sleek communal office wink into existence and we are seeing a Metaverse’d future. Even Zuckerberg has admitted that this fantasy will not happen any time soon, assuming it is even possible. But as Ball says, “without 3D, we might as well be describing the current internet”. So they continue to say that this utopian (for the billionaires who would control it, dystopian for those of us forced to transplant our lives into it) future is coming just around an immersive 3D VR corner with an experience so good that when you go to the virtual mall you are all but astrally projecting in front of Auntie Anne’s pretzels.

However, I contend that the glossy hyperreality that these people clamor for, and Baudrillard describes, is already here. The hyper-fixation on virtual worlds where one can look like Mario, buy digital land, hold holographic meetings a la Star Wars and other illusions distracts from the reality that we have already destroyed and consumed our “reality” in all the ways that truly matter. While I anticipate VR technology will only continue to get better and eventually something we will finally call the “era of Web 3.0” will arrive, the world is now hyperreal, we do not need the 3D VR dependent Web 3.0 of the Metaverse to achieve it.

To those who have spent much time on Web 2.0, the Metaverse offers nothing that is interesting or is better in any meaningful way than what actually exists. Zuckerberg waxes poetically about working or learning in the Metaverse. He has yet to show that anyone finds this any more appealing than attending a meeting or class over Zoom. As many have pointed out, VRChat and similar immersive virtual reality social games already exist and have done so for years. And the vast majority do what Horizon Worlds, Meta’s current Metaverse flagship, claims to be revolutionizing at superior levels with superior numbers of users.

It is hard to pretend that the things that exist now as Web 2.0 are not already hyperreal. As of 2022, 16% of Americans believes in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which started in the /pol section of 4chan and now lives on 8chan. There are influencers for nearly everything, all flattened by the nature of what they are, and the medium into advertisement. Family bloggers have adopted special needs children from overseas as content for their media output only to give that child away. You can watch a man die —real or fictional— with distressing ease online. With ARGs (alternate reality game) like Under The Surface (2021) you can explore via various sites and platforms the life and experiences of a fictional Swedish musician Axel Lundén. Or would you like to get emails from your old friend Johnathan Harker as he travels to Transylvania to talk to one of his firm’s clients?

Some people argue that Web 2.0 lacks the immersion of the prophesied Web 3.0 and say that what makes the simulation a success is its perfect literal overlap with the underlying physical reality. Even so, that lack of 3D immersion appears not to have stopped people from believing that something on WEB 2.0 was real nor has it stopped anyone from becoming addicted. Pizzagate did not require total immersion in a 3d projection. Nor did it stop Tim Guest from expressing the feeling in his journalistic/anthropological account of his experiences within Second Life that “as I walked the grey streets of London, I daydreamed about Second Life. I longed for escape.” It is already possible to make a simulation that obliterates reality so completely that you no longer exist outside of it. In 2022, a popular Minecraft YouTuber named Dream revealed his face to his audience (and the internet at large) and was met with intense backlash. In 2023, he put the mask back on. The simulation of Dream that lives on the internet is the one people want, the one that matters. “Dream the Man,” has ceased to exist in society’s eyes and “Dream the Logo” is the entity recognized as “real.”

One of the biggest examples of this is the NPC trend that has appeared on TikTok. An NPC is a non-playable character. The term originates from video games to indicate any model that is not a Player Character. NPCs are most prominent in RPG’s (roleplaying games) and MMORPG’s (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) where they function as local color and quest/information givers. Many NPC’s function in a loop, traveling between places, repeating actions and repeating lines endlessly. An NPC streamer on TikTok is a real person who pretends to be one of these characters. They bob up and down gently in the way that many older actual NPC’s did as they recite a few pre-selected lines of dialogue in a slightly lifeless yet still emotive voice. Each line relates to an emoji which can be gifted to a streamer. Each emoji represents the amount of real money that has been gifted to the streamer by viewers. For example, Pinkydoll is perhaps the most famous NPC streamer currently. When someone gifts Pinkydoll an ice cream cone, she mimics the action of licking one and says: “Ice cream so good.” She will do that same action and say that same line for as many times as there are ice cream cones that have been sent. Which can be many. Pinkydoll has estimated her earnings from this kind of stream at $7,000 dollars in just one stream alone.

But there is more to investigate here than just how much is this woman making, rather the more important question is “what about this has engaged us”? This is hyperreality. A world build to simulate ours now simulated by real people, actively making themselves less real in the doing. We do not need Pinkydoll to be an immersive 3D hologram in front of us for this to function. We already control her actions as if she is a game character. She has already flattened herself into the form of the advertisement. We do not gain any new immersion or power from this additional VR experience, save perhaps a few new angles from which to view her.

Baudrillard spoke to hyperreality in terms of the Hypermarket and how it has subsumed the market and the city center to become the nucleus of suburban sprawl. The Hypermarket is not a commodity nor a sign and instead is representative of a whole lifestyle. It dictates the actions of everyone in its environment from shoppers to employees to urban planners. The Metaverse claims it will allow you to go to the Hypermarket from the comfort of your own home via VR and blithely wander the shelves putting virtual simulacra of your groceries into a virtual cart. However, when one watches things like Comedian and Commentary Youtuber, Danny Gonzalez’ video showing and discussing Walmart’s leaked Metaverse promotional demo then experiencing the flaccid reality of their Roblox based Walmart world, we see just how nonsensical an idea it is. As Dan Olson points out:

These so-called metaverse offerings are virtual spaces only insofar as they are painted to resemble a store. We already tried this 25 years ago, and discarded it because it turns out the human brain can shop from a list of items or a grid of photos far better than it can from an imagemap photo of a display case.” (Olson, 2023)

And Olson is not wrong on more levels than just this. When you look at the future Walmart wanted to propose, it is obvious why Instacart is successful as a website and app. Instacart has already begun to consume the hyperreality of the Hypermarket. Earlier this week, I used Instacart to buy groceries. I put a list of food I wanted to purchase using Instacart and projecting my will onto a third-person shopper who experienced the concept of shopping for us. They were my avatar and there was no need to fight with awkward controls nor in-store annoyances. The Hypermarket has reached an even higher level of consolidation from “ones that interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them, and the answer is included in the question. Thus all the messages in the media function in a similar fashion: neither information nor communication, but referendum, perpetual test, circular response, verification of the code.”(Baudrillard 1981)

Astronaut One: We’re The Simulation? Astronaut Two: Always Have Been

“There is no longer a staging of the commodity: there is only its obscene and empty form. And advertising is the illustration of this saturated and empty form.” (Baudrillard, 1981) — If the Metaverse is anything it is this. It is the obscene and empty form of the internet. Dan Olson calls the Metaverse “an empty mall” and when one explores anything calling itself a fabled “Metaverse” or the component pars of that poorly prophesied future, you feel that reality yourself. They are large and they are empty— of people, of purpose, even more so than the already increasingly hollow Web 2.0. Baudrillard and Olson both stand in vast spaces of commerce — the Forum des Halles and Decentraland — and see them for what they are — the “sarcophagus of the commodity”.

Web 2.0 is already a map covering our world in a perfect one to one. It is already subsuming and obliterating us. The simulation is already reality or near enough in all the ways that matter, especially now in a post-covid world. There are already live events, concerts and experiences in the virtual spaces we have today. Everything these prophets of the empty mall exclaim is coming is already here. I do not need to look into the dead eyes of a virtual Mark Zuckerberg as he tries to convince me to give him my money and data via the poorly built and nausea inducing Horizon Worlds in some post-rapture e-future that will never come. I can just download TikTok and give my money to Pinkydoll as she pretends to be an NPC and get the exact same results this instant.

References

Ball, M. (2022). The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything. National Geographic Books.

Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press.

Bolger, R. K. (2021). Finding Wholes in the Metaverse: Posthuman Mystics as Agents of Evolutionary Contextualization. Religions 12: 768. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel12090768

Danny Gonzalez. (2022, November 22) I Tried Walmart's Terrifying Metaverse Experience [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sh2Ib3DklI

Dan Olson/Folding Ideas. (2023, March 26) The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Eddy Burback. (2022, February 15) The Metaverse is So Stupid [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7-vKKsGKo

Jarvis Johnson. (2023, August 1) I Spent A Week Alone In The Metaverse [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW64FiB0ITg

Lee Barron; Living with the Virtual: Baudrillard, Integral Reality, and Second Life. Cultural Politics 1 November 2011; 7 (3): 391–408. doi: https://doi.org/10.2752/175174311X13069348235295

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-sNSjS8cq0

Meta. (2021, October 18) The Metaverse and How We'll Build It Together -- Connect 2021 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8

Nunes, M. (1995). Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity. Style, 29(2), 314–327. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946283

RT Games. (2022, October 30) I Played Facebook's VR Metaverse so you don't have to [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqrFa6pWLA

Smith, R. G. (2010). The Baudrillard Dictionary. In Edinburgh University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748642915

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