THE METAVERSE

MAYBE YOU SAW where Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook guy, shared his vision for his company.

“I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social-media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.”

In a Facebook earnings call last week, Mark Zuckerberg outlined the future of his company. The vision he put forth wasn’t based on advertising, which provides the bulk of Facebook’s current profits, or on an increase in the over-all size of the social network, which already has nearly three billion monthly active users. Instead, Zuckerberg said that his goal is for Facebook to help build the “metaverse,” a Silicon Valley buzzword that has become an obsession for anyone trying to predict, and thus profit from, the next decade of technology.

It was a remarkable pivot in messaging for the social-media giant, especially given the fact that the exact meaning of the metaverse, and what it portends for digital life, is far from clear. In the earnings call, Zuckerberg offered his own definition. The metaverse is “a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces,” he said. It’s “an embodied Internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at. We believe that this is going to be the successor to the mobile Internet.”

—Chayka, Kyle. (2021, August). “Facebook Wants Us to Live in the Metaverse: What does that even mean?” The New Yorker, August 5, 2021.

Show of hands: who wants to live in Zuckerberg’s metaverse?

Sometimes I get the feeling maybe we already do. After all, it seems to be the place where we get our news, have our conversations, where opinions are defended, attacked and rationalized, where theories perpetuate, where stands are taken, where we choose whether the dress is blue or gold, where we tell our “friends” Happy Birthday, where we learn that people have entered or left a relationship, where we decide—as if we must—whether we would eliminate: Starbucks®, Whole Foods®, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Pumpkin Spice deodorant.

I’m not complaining. Where else can I brag on my brilliant, beautiful GrandKids and get instant “Likes” for doing so? I do enjoy visiting Facebook from time to time, but I don’t want to live inside its virtual environment; a metaverse.

What are the alternatives? Where does community happen these days? Let’s pretend COVID in all of its varieties goes away. Would we, could we, hang out?

Before we met in digital spaces, before cheeseburgers and chips and french onion dip and ice cold bottles of pop were bad for us, before mosquitoes and ticks carried life-threatening diseases, back when kids could play in the street or along the banks of the Arkansas River, before we became addicted to air-conditioning, we would gather almost every Saturday evening in the summers of the 50s and 60s. Dads would grill burgers and hotdogs and smoke pipes or cigars. Moms would visit in the kitchen, preparing platters of burger fixin’s, bowls of potato salad, and cutting pies. Don’t judge. There was no intent to subject anyone to a predefined cultural role. It was just the way it happened and everyone seemed happy.

It wasn’t just a tableau from a Norman Rockwell painting: it really happended that way. In backyards everywhere—people gathered. Then, the only phones hung on a wall in the kitchen or sat on an end table in the living room. No one had one in their pocket. We were just present. Living and breathing and storytelling and laughing.

About the time the fireflies were in full spectacle, someone would say, “Well, it’s getting late.” Goodbyes were said and we would go home to polish our penny loafers for Sunday School the next morning. Then to bed.

Back then, church was a communal place for us. Koinonia was more than just a fancy word. The fellowship of the little churches we attended over the years was a beautiful as that word. Sure it had a spirituality to it, but a simplicity too. A fellowship time would be called to enjoy just-harvested ice cold watermelons; and another for homemade, hand-churned ice cream. Let’s see the metaverse replicate that. Well, because scripture itself warns against remembering the good old days better than they were, I’ll move on.

I’m trying to be careful to not judge the metaverse idea too quickly. I have sought to understand it. For starters I tried to grasp the concept of metaverse: is it a spin on universe. What is the “verse” in uni or meta? Meta-anything is one of those things like post-modern and bespoke, that for me have become convoluted with use, misuse and overuse.

If “a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces,” sounds as repulsive to you as it does to me, what are our options, other than a 50s style backyard BBQ (not that there’s anything wrong with that), where can we “be present with people”. Maybe I’m making too much of this, but as an extreme introvert, I ponder carefully who I want to be with and in what kind of setting.

Here are some real environments that come to mind. (Admittedly, I’m romanticizing the idea a bit.) A place like the bar on “Cheers” sounds good because:

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name

This may sound like a contradiction to my thesis about shunning the virtual for the real by imagining a TV set as an ideal environment, but you know what I mean. It may also sound like a contradiction to compare this to an online pub of sorts; but, since early in the pandemic, I have been meeting every Sunday night with a group of guys in a Zoom meeting we call The Quarantine Tavern. We’re in Oklahoma, Texas, Atlanta and Nashville, but we’ve made it work almost as if we were sitting together at a table in a real tavern, maybe one like this one, The Stubbing Wharf, “…located in a beautiful position between the Rochdale Canal and the River Calder, on the A646 just to the west of Hebden Bridge in the Upper Calder Valley, UK.”

I heard an interview with the assistant manager. She was asked what makes a great pub. “Good traditional pub food and a good selection of ales. You need to be accepting of muddy boots and muddy paw prints. You need service that keeps people smilin’. It’s like a community.”

While I’m in the midst of throwing shade on the very idea of Facebook as a communal catalyst let me suggest you “visit” The Stubbing Wharf on The FB. [click here to visit their page]

Sometimes, these days, our community is in a campground with other traveling friends. We gather in the evening to visit. Sometimes the air is filled with the fragrance of a nice campfire. Sometimes the air is filled with the fragrance of Deep Woods OFF®. We’ve discovered that even with COVID, camping is possible and delightful.

There was a time when we would gather with young artists—one of my favorite communities. Collaborative creativity is such a high sensory experience. Maybe that’s one of the keys, one of the things that will always give real, in-person community the edge. Only there can you have the sights, sounds, the tastes and smells, and of course the touch.

So, when the pandemic finally loosens its grip on our collective throat, what do you say? Let’s meet up: eat good food, drink good drinks, have good music, the sounds of kids playing, maybe some horseshoes, cornhole, bocce ball. Absolutely no phones (except for using the camera app), no red hats (unless it has a St. Louis Cardinals logo on it), no blue hats (unless it has an L.A. Dodgers logo on it). Let’s talk of good times and blessings. Let’s hear good stories. Let’s laugh and maybe cry a little.

That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to take My Amazing Missus to Roxy’s Ice Cream Social now for some homemade ice cream.