Digital Babylon won’t fall

The metaverse is at once a “lazy rebranding of the same old social networks”, and yet also an “attempt to enslave humanity”. This is a familiar place for new technology to find itself. Simultaneously nothing-special and the-harbinger-of-evil.

There’s some truth to the accusation that there’s no new ideas here. Since inception, the internet has taken over every form of communication in turn. People point to Snow Crash as the originator of the actual word ‘metaverse’, but the idea of an all encompassing virtual world, as well as vivid depictions of many of the pitfalls, goes back at least to True Names by Vernor Vinge, (published 3 years before Neuromancer).

But — timing is the thing — in 2022, the case for a life lived entirely online is ever-present (for better or for worse). Everywhere you look, there’s evidence for explicit rejection of IRL. Digital friends, digital family, digital work, digital currency, digital love.

There’s a meme that’s as old as agriculture: Babylon. The archetype of the city; an escape from the drudgery of provincial life on the farm. Babylon - a cosmopolitan playground where you can lose your identity, a meeting place of the world, where trade is everything. In one telling, the internet has always been a project to raise Babylon’s walls anew.

There’s a Western Christian tradition that casts Babylon as the archetypal Empire — the emblem of trade and licentiousness, which must be resisted in all her forms. The Tower of Babel was an affront to God in its uniting of all people’s under a language. There’s only one true reality, Heaven. If this Earth is illusion, then Mark’s metaverse is illusion within an illusion: sin squared. I see much anti-Facebook feeling as heir to anti-Imperial Christian sentiment. The sin is that of building a secular monument for humanity.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “The broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken, and her high gates shall be burned with fire; and the people shall labor in vain, and the folk in the fire; and they shall be weary.”

— Jeremiah 51:58

In truth, culture spreads. If a technology helps people connect, it will be used for that. Information wants to be free, as in speech if not in beer. Governments may try to destroy the new Towers of Babel as usurpers to their own, God-mandated empires, but the internet is made to route around bad nodes in the graph. Expect more connections, more bandwidth, more behaviour online.