The Political Implications of Digital Worlds

Socialism or VR barbarism? It's up to us.

"Socialism must be fought for, lest I have to pay a recurring fee to unlock the network port wired into my spinal column so that I can sell my brain runtime to mine Dogecoin for the Zuck's genderless CRISPR ubermensch nu-body." - someone somewhere on Reddit

Today’s left is in a dire position. We may have dreams and ideas, but find ourselves so lacking in power that communicating them sounds to many people like a small child telling grandiose stories from her life as the queen of butterfly planet, ruling from a castle on the moon in which she lives with her fairy partner (who also happens to be a zebra) and 20 cute dogs. Socialism, even on a global scale, used to be a realistic possibility, a force to be reckoned with, the great fear of capitalist powers. These days, the mere mention of it possibly existing within our lifetimes, or at all, has been degraded to an infantile fantasy. Nobody would think of warning people of the Red Scare anymore, unless they're a Republican using "the communists" as a rhetorical culture war scapegoat in discourses surrounding guns, immigration or trans people. What was once a threat to the existing global order, an inevitability in the eyes of socialists all around, has been turned into a slogan of been there, done that – “Socialism has been tried and it has failed”. People of varying degrees of political awareness repeat this without knowing much, if anything, about the history of the global economy. It is simply a given. A truth of humanity and nature that is accepted by most people who hear it. “Capitalism has a lot of faults, but it’s the best we can do” derives from the same premise. 

At the same time, we are witnessing the apparent deterioration of everything around us. The economy is tanking, the planet is melting, depression is peaking, and no matter how effective our productive machinery gets, the expected reduction in working hours has not been achieved, instead we have employers whining their way through press interviews, lamenting young people's unwillingness to embrace the grindset, to put in more working hours without receiving anything other than a back pat in return, and making plans to go back to the good old days of child labour if the zoomers continue to be bad at being wage slaves.

Instead of advocating for technologies that will bring us closer to a truly free society, today's techno-optimism seems to be taking the form of embracing digital advancements that have no other purpose than to keep us distracted from the absolute state of society today, and from any thoughts we might have about making meatspace a place worth living in. Sure, Facebook’s "Metaverse" itself is regularly being mocked to death, but this only happens because everything we've seen of it so far objectively blows - with the hours people are clocking in on social media, Replika, and VRchat, along with the surprisingly positive reception I've seen of the new Apple headset, there does seem to be quite a bit of demand for getting lost in screens.

Ask any American, and they’d say they prefer the flesh-and-blood world over the cyber world, but our daily screen time says otherwise. At the height of the pandemic, the average adult spent up to 19 hours a day staring at a screen of some kind, and we’re having trouble weening ourselves back to pre-2020 levels. Consumers logged a record 3.8 trillion hours on their phones last year and downloaded about 230 billion apps. Two-thirds of people in the U.S. check their phones nearly 160 times every day. “My day is about the transition from The Bad Screens to Good Ones,” a friend of mine said recently. (1)

The way I see it, people do not actually prefer the flesh-and-blood world. They would, however, prefer to prefer the flesh-and-blood world, because as humans we do find ourselves naturally compelled to connect with the material world around us, as well as the physical beings living within it. It is incredibly depressing to spend our working time looking at screens, our free time looking at screens, to chat with our Replikas before clapping the cheeks of our sex dolls, then going on to play video games and memescroll the rest of the night away. It is not a fulfilling existence, I'm sure most of us can agree to that – but it is the one we have.

For the Elons among us, escapist fantasies revolve around colonising other planets. For those of us who aren't delusional enough to believe that we'll be among those living in the space colony, we find escapism in online simulations of a potentially less depressing society: from within the ruins of the failures of the past, the tech-entrepreneurs are painting new dreams. The VR-verse is being portrayed as a completely clean slate of endless possibilities, a place in which magic exists and no restrictions apply when it comes to building the worlds we have always dreamed of.

They are filling the gap left by not only the failed left, but the conventional political spectrum entirely. People of all sorts of political conviction have been finding themselves disappointed and mistrustful of regular parties and politicians, and are therefore primed to being at least a little optimistically curious about what the digital universe might have in store, as long as it is being run by people who have had no part in politics up until now. Combine that with the neoliberal belief that meritocracy exists, and those who have managed to get rich must be smarter and better at doing life than the rest of us and deserve our trust and deference, and that every technological innovation is progressive and progression always good, and you have a perfect environment for techlords to play dungeon masters of the universe.

"I think we've had a cancer for a while. In terms of the veneration of wealth. Thinking people are smart just because they are rich. Thinking they know what our schools should be like just because they made money in hedge funds. Thinking that they have insight into how we should fight diseases just because they made a soft drink company." - Anand Giridharadas

It does make sense that many people would wish to fully immerse themselves in a video game, given the common conviction that reality is unlikely to be salvageable. VR technology promises to do exactly that, with bright claims of it being the One Weird Trick that finally eliminates all scarcity and ensures a beautiful and comfortable life for every single person: What if we could generate everything for everyone, anytime, at the click of a button? What if we no longer had any of the pains and construction sites of the “real world” to deal with? This VR selling point is promoted by those who believe that only pixels can save us from our dreadful physical reality.

Reality Privilege (or "I shat on everything, now get in my box")

Recently, I've come across a quote by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that purports that remaining attached to the physical world is an expression of "reality privilege", that those who lack enthusiasm about a possible future of melting into pixels are speaking from a comfortable existence that currently cannot be afforded to most people in the world - but it could be, if we give ourselves over to the machine.

When Soldo asks, “Are we too connected these days?,” Andreessen responds: “Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. … A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also all of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.” (2)

It is severely lacking in hingedness to claim that the real world has had its chance to get good for 5000 years and has completely failed - not only does it disregard the very real achievements we have made in the development of society and civilisation, the logical conclusion to such a belief, in my humble silly opinion, would not be to hyper-accelerate techno-capitalism, as this would be perpetuating and even intensifying the problems we already have instead of pursuing a proper solution. If people's wildly differing qualities of life, something that is baked into the capitalist system, are the issue, a screen-based, prettier version of the same system is unlikely to make things much better, and I'm sure people like Andreessen know this well enough. It is simply easier to sell people on your simulation pod and make them superficially happy by showing them AI-generated images of worlds that haven't been burned down by global warming than to take on responsibility for the struggles of the real world. Everything will be so much better in the pixel world, I promise! You'll see! (Source: trust me, bro.)

One thing that stood out to me is Andreessen's clear awareness that those who lack material wealth will have no say in what happens with the digital universe, what it looks like, how it operates, or whether or not they want to take part in it at all. He knows that the "reality privileged" are the only people with any power to have their voices on this potential future heard. As much as he seems to sincerely believe that the new world he wants to take part in creating will make life immeasurably better for the reality-disadvantaged, he also unambiguously recognises them as subordinates in his great plan, as people who will have no other choice but to go along with what he envisions. This to me sounds like a dictatorial expression of a god-complex and raises the important question: do we really want to be ruled by the wealthiest of tech entrepreneurs? What would this mean for us, as those who are not part of the ruling class, regardless of our individual level of "reality privilege"? 

However one might feel about this – I, personally, think it'd be a horrible idea and would encourage all of us to touch grass with as much revolutionary fervour as we can muster – it is clear that what the techlords are envisioning would be a brand of ultra-capitalism that Nick Land would be proud of.

On our journey into pixel world, we would be bringing the same preexisting conditions along with us, with the same contradictions left unresolved. It is misguided to believe that society, the economy, and life in general will be completely reset once we catapult it into virtuality, especially given the fact that we are going to be under the rule of capitalist techlords whose main driver is always going to be profit accumulation. It will be a continuation of the system we are currently living in, but on a whole new scale, coming in the form of paywalls and obnoxiously branded environments. Landlords are already laying claim to properties in online universes, it is clear as day that there will be currency and markets, and we are likely to be visually assaulted into buying new virtual lipstick for our avatars at every turn - unless we sign up for the highly priced ad-reduction subscription. 

"the posited distinction between virtuality and materiality is false; the virtual is not a transcendental escape, it is none other than the extension of materiality proper, it is still part of the very same dark ecology which defines all of nature in its immanence. Nature is, per dialectics, what we are always already interacting with, always subject to its own transformative changes--materially, the point of the world is to change it. All improvement, all history, is proof of this. Only techno-feudal overlords wish to pretend that history's movement must continue virtually, because they ossify the present-state of conditions precisely through their own stranglehold over capital. But the symptom of estrangement which capital represents is never escapable, the symptom is something which all modes of reality, virtual or not, will always be beholden to, it is constitutive of human subjectivity. Lacan already explained this, but there's no way anyone from Silicon Valley has understood Lacan--if they had, they'd know that placing their existential-stock in the fantasy of virtuality is intrinsically pointless." (3)

As long as we live in physical bodies, a wonderland of complete non-scarcity is an illusion, and limited resources will need to be processed and distributed to keep our fleshbags alive. With limited resources, there needs to be an economy, and there is no reason for those who benefit from capitalism to abolish a working system (a profitable system) when they could use it to fund their pixelverse. The system will continue where we left it off in the real world - continuing its movement virtually only ensures the capitalists' stranglehold on the existing class hierarchy. 

The End (of the End of the End) of History?

Political participation, at least in any system that somewhat resembles a democracy, consists of people making decisions about their shared economy, their ways of living, and conditions of working - making decisions for their community. In the world of daily life arguing and law-making on topics such as taxes and immigration, politics is difficult and messy precisely because there are many different people of many different interest groups and opinions involved, and this somehow needs to be reconciled.

If we're zooming out to observe the movement of history on a large scale, we are looking at decades and centuries of class struggle, which makes everything appear a little simpler, as there are primarily two classes at war that each have a common central interest - we are, above all, looking at a long-term progression of economic forces, which so far have brought us to the point of whichever stage of capitalism we are currently finding ourselves in.

Whether or not one chooses to believe that the contradictions between the working class and the capitalist class are unsolvable and will inevitably result in sublation, whether or not one is convinced that this clash will result in socialism, one thing certain is that isolating people to the extent that every individual essentially lives in their own hyper-specialised simulation will freeze the current political conditions in place, and we all know who will profit off of this primarily - it's the techlords responsible for providing us with our virtual bubbles. I'm not claiming a great evil conspiracy here, by the way. I think some techlords, while obviously still following their own interest which runs naturally counter to that of the working class, genuinely believe that capitalism is the best system for everyone, that we all will benefit if they continue to be able to collect profits, something about trickle downs and the creation of a space that eliminates perceived differences in Reality Privilege. I just happen to disagree - as I've mentioned previously, if we need a Metaverse to superficially erase inequalities that are baked into the capitalist system, Doing More Capitalism Forever isn't going to be the answer. But if we allow ourselves to be pulled in by the machine, this system will certainly be the last, as long as the techlords in charge do not change their minds of their own accord. If we want to maintain any hope and possibility of something radical and new, a system that will not be working in favour of the techlords, we need to touch grass and resist the grasp of the virtual pod.

As long as there is a society, as long as there is community, there cannot be an end of history. History moves along through the collective force of people united by common causes. There is, and always has been, strength in numbers. If we now reduce that number from thousands, or even millions of people who share the same goal and have the ability to get together on this basis, down to 1 (one), there cannot be solidarity, or organising, or uprising - history will be brought to a halt.

Politics requires community, and community means sharing experiences, the good and the bad. It's complaining about the rain with people at the bus stop, and it's complaining about our bosses in the workplace. While complaining about the weather may just be a mostly meaningless, small-talker way of blowing off a little steam (or maybe it is a way to remind ourselves that other people are real and are feeling the same things we are?), complaining about work can be the first step to radical political change.

Hyper-personalisation isolates us to the point that the community needed for any type of politics can no longer exist. If each of our worlds is unlike any other, we will be unable to relate to others, or recognise that they might still be sharing the same struggles we are, despite the artificial window dressing being different. We will have no idea of what other people are perceiving and experiencing in their own filtered space, what their life is truly like, so there is no other impression one could have than that of being completely alone in the world. Imagine the Facebook Cambridge situation, but on steroids: if our entire living environment can be tailored to whatever the machine thinks our preference is, whatever the machine thinks will have the most engagement-bait value when presented to us, even our exposure to news and political content will be completely individual. We could go into virtual discussion groups and not even be sure if the people we are debating are actual humans, or bots that were put in place to fire us up emotionally or direct our thoughts in a particular way. It will be hard, if at all possible, to know what other real people are feeling or thinking. We might just be screaming our grievances into the void.

“Through time, we’ve seen a progressive narrowing of how we experience entertainment: from the collective cinema experience, to the family viewing of the television, to the even narrower audience of the streaming service and various video apps, and now the expectation is that we’ll strap a set of screens directly onto our faces to ensure we can’t share an experience with another person. The development is a worrying one, and illustrates how disconnected tech executives are from real life.” (3)

Let's imagine a metaversed workplace. Again, if you've never met your coworkers in real life, and all you can see are strange animated avatars, can you ever know how many of them are real people? How many of them are actually your boss sneakily checking in to see how your work is going? Is everyone’s work environment the same as yours, or are your contracts and labour conditions as individual as everything else in your life? With the rise of remote work, employers were all too happy to take advantage of emerging worker surveillance software. Simulated environments only open more doors to keep workers in their place. In the digital space, there is no private room for water-cooler talk about our latest labour annoyances, talks that can lead to the straw that breaks the capitalist’s back through growing solidarity and the collective action that might follow.

It should now be clearer to anyone reading why separating people into hyper-individualised pods will be the safest way to prevent meaningful political change, unless the techlords in charge happen to grow bored or run out of profitable opportunities and decide to run their pixel playground differently. But it does not have to be this way. We may be isolated, but we are not alone, and we will never truly be. We are part of the movement of history throughout the course of time. We are part of a constant evolution and each individual person is a historical being. It is part of our common task as humans to recognize ourselves as the agents we are and do what we can to shape the world according to our needs.

We can do better than to passively watch our quality of life decrease within the ever-same system. But for this, we need to connect with one another, preserve real-life communities, and refuse to let hyper-reality consume our life.

It may be hard to imagine an alternative to the depressing, static future that seems to be approaching, but that does not make it impossible. Your first step should be to break up with your AI girlfriend. You can do it, I believe in you. Then, go touch some grass. Connect with the people around you and get to know them, their hopes and dreams, and the issues they are dealing with. Chances are, their struggles are very similar to yours. This is how we get closer to building the powerful tool that is strength in numbers. And from there, who knows what might happen. Like Freddie DeBoer says in his brilliant post “History is long and there’s nothing special about now”:

History moves very slowly, and then all at once.

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