If you’re my age, if you’re a millennial, you just might be in the last generation of kids who stayed out playing until the street lights came on. Or until our parents, from the twilight on the back patio, whistled across the neighborhood to us - our signal to come home. We might never get that back. Our kids might never know what that feels like, and it might be that no humans in any advanced society will ever know that again.
If you, like myself, ever had life-changing experiences with other kids, then you know how much power is in shared experiences. If you ever explored at construction sites, and maybe even got in trouble for it. If you and your friends ever had to run from the cops because you were trespassing. If you ever saw one of your friends fall off of a log bridge into a river, and you had to help him climb out.
If you learned about other kids by playing in-person games together, for months and years on end. Or built the coolest, most luxurious tree-and-rock fort that you thought the world had ever seen.
There’s something to be said for these experiences. They create relationships. They are the bricks upon which solid, lasting friendships are built. When two or more people experience something dangerous, or thrilling, or trying together, it brings them close to one another. It forms a bond. It puts something inside each of them that they’ll never have with somebody else. A permanent bonding of the hearts and minds. When people experience life-changing tragedy or hardship or excitement together, and all they can do is share it with each other in person and in real time, it adds bricks to the foundation of a deep human relationship.
These are the kinds of things that made us friends when we were kids. And that is what is missing from today’s social world. Yes, “kids don’t play outside anymore,” but it’s more than that.
They don’t go down the road to that undeveloped part of the neighborhood and build a fort or explore uncharted territory. They don’t get themselves into crazy, unexpected, risky situations “out in the world.”
Now, granted, risky situations aren’t inherently a good thing. I don’t want my kids or your kids getting hurt. But my point is, that building up of shared experiences, exploring, and togetherness is missing from our kids’ lives these days. (And, if we’re being honest, that same deep togetherness is missing from a lot of our lives as well.)
Our children don’t go riding bikes or hiking anymore, getting intimately familiar with the lay of the land. They have no claim to the outside world anymore, because they aren’t intimately familiar with it the way we were. They explore the world digitally, through the screen of an iPad or a mobile telephone. Their only claim to the world is informational - academic. They haven’t gone out and made the environment theirs by interfacing with it. Exposing themselves to the world in that youthful, vigorous, boundary-pushing way. With curiosity and earnestness. With the other kids of the neighborhood, or their friends from school.
And so, it follows that our kids don’t seem to have the quality of friendships that we used to have. We have forgotten how to live life with each other. To build up a friendship on the virtue of shared experiences. To be accountable to each other for safety, companionship, and consistency. Even for survival. To be the kind of friends whose default mode of being was going out and playing with each other all day long. Now our kids just text each other, meet up, and sit inside playing video games and watching completely pointless internet videos. (We’re guilty of this too.) Or, if they do go outside, it’s usually pretty limited and uninteresting. It’s not in that world-exploring, life-altering, soul-enlightening way we used to. They’re not going on adventures. That’s what’s missing - adventure.
And this is why the idea of an entirely-digital world scares the living shit out of me. This is why I think Mark Zuckerberg is the most dangerous man on the planet. He wants to remove from us what is fundamentally human. He wants to turn us into digital assets. In a lot of ways, he already has. “The Metaverse”, an all-digital always-on alternate reality, seeks to strip us of what humanity we have left.
We’ve already lost God. We gave that up willingly in favor of consumerism and instant gratification.
And we’ve already lost our ability to educate ourselves properly. Or trust the media. Or trust just about any other institution that runs our lives.
We’ve already largely given up on healthy family structures and personal accountability. We have already allowed ourselves to be manipulated into attention-based feedback loops that are unbelievably horrible for us.
We have sex too freely. We watch too much Netflix. We spend entirely too much money on pumpkin spice lattes. We don’t take basic accountability for running an honorable and self-loving life. We have lost a tremendous amount of self-respect. We don’t take our own actions seriously enough - and the worst part is, we know it. No wonder half of the free world is on Wellbutrin or Lexapro. It’s not because humans have biologically changed since Nixon was in office - it’s because we lead profoundly unfulfilling lives. It’s because so much of our behavior is anti-human. It’s not just suboptimal - it’s actually anti-human. Anti-social, anti-productive, anti-happiness.
The metaverse, and all who support its strongest and most extreme promises, are trying to be the nail in the coffin. To turn us all into androids. Cyborgs. To finish turning us into a primarily digital species.
I think, for some of these tech giants and “genius CEOs”, their ultimate goals actually go directly against the best interests of humanity. They want us to be completely and helplessly enslaved to technology just so they can keep increasing profit margins and selling ad revenue. They want to finish the process of turning us into digital cattle, driven around the pasture by their own proprietary brand of mind control before coming home to be milked. Left to their own devices, these “genius CEOs” will reduce all of human living to cybernetics. They want to turn our entire lives into a constant stream of digital feedback loops, knowing that our psychology and spirituality are no longer strong enough to willfully be able to break out.
I understand that what I just said seems pretty cynical and grim. But I’m quite serious. I did, after all, say that this scares the living shit out of me.
But hey, I’m an optimist by nature.
Actually no, I just lied to you. I’m a pessimist by nature. I’m that smartass who’s always ready to tell you why an idea won’t work. Or why someone doesn’t deserve something and I do. (I’m also an ego monster.)
Rather, being an optimist is a skill that I have consciously developed over years of trying to live a better life. So… I’m an optimist by rational and emotional choice. From putting in my optimist reps.
So I’d like to highlight what makes real, in-person interactions and relationships so valuable.
When you share the same room with someone, you are with them. You are together. You’re breathing the same air, you’re occupying the same space. You have (unless you’re either having an awful day or you’re a politically-charged jackass) a biological and emotional desire to be at peace with them. To share something with them. To focus on solutions and unity instead of conflict and tension. You have a fundamental desire for togetherness. That’s an evolutionary strategy for building good social structures and being an acceptable person.
This makes us accountable to each other. It makes us want to be reliable, and forthcoming, and solutions-oriented. It makes us want to be genuine. It makes us want to figure out the other’s sense of humor and share a joke to brighten the room. It makes us want to ask questions about the other person for the goals of understanding and intimacy. It makes us one species, one tribe, who can exist in peace and want to avoid conflict. It opens the door, even just the tiniest bit, for unity and progress forward together.
When we are in the same room, the same tribe, the same group, we tend to want to focus on good outcomes for both or all. We tend to be accountable to a shared set of goals. We try to avoid deviating from that shared set of goals. We try to avoid being unduly selfish or argumentative.
When you can see someone’s eyes, and their body language, you feed off of each other. You engage in a give-and-take where you’re taking in physiological and emotional cues and moving your connection forward. A job interview, meeting your boyfriend’s parents, working with a coworker at at the factory. It doesn’t matter. These desires and cues apply to essentially all situations in which you’re face-to-face with someone.
When we breathe the same air and occupy the same space, connections happen. Trust and oneness are built. Conflict is avoided, peace is pursued. We figure out what game we’re playing, and we play it together.
Unfortunately this is precisely the opposite of how humans behave in the digital world. We are losing the human touch. We are losing our grasp on what good social structures are and how they’re built. Twitter ugliness, one of the most stark examples, is a foul and formidable thing.
Of course, lots of people are still loving and peaceful and solutions-oriented online. And that’s wonderful. But at scale, digital communication has often been surprisingly awful. Unbelievably toxic and unproductive. Politically radicalized and hateful, selfish, ugly. Digital safety and pseudo-anonymity have produced the worst humanity has to offer. It’s like we’re all on the freeway, ever cutting each other off, and calling each other the most creatively foul names we can think of and wishing genuine suffering upon each other. It’s unimaginably unhealthy, and it’s not how human beings were designed to behave socially. Again, it’s not just suboptimal - it’s anti-human.
When you’re not in the same room as somebody, that accountability I described vanishes. Or at least it does for people who don’t have the skills to overcome the digital bastardization of our minds, which… at this point seems to be the majority of people.
There’s a mutually-assured civility that comes with in-person conversation. People tend to respect a basic, unspoken level of dignity in face-to-face interactions. Once you remove this element of restraint and dignity, there’s no limit to how ugly people can be to each other. Or how far they will go to simply “not lose” an argument. When you have the safety net of a screen, anything goes. When the threat of immediate social consequences, and the visual unpleasantness of making somebody feel uncomfortable, are removed… humans turn into chimps. We genuinely don’t care how we make the other person feel. It’s horrible. I want as little of this as possible in our future - because we clearly aren’t going to learn how to manage ourselves better. We have to be stronger than our technology. Right now, we absolutely are not. We don’t use technology - at the moment, technology uses us. It’s not an extension of us - we are an extension of it.
Human social structures are built on cooperation and competition, and that doesn’t always require in-person contact and mutual presence. We can cooperate and compete over distances and with electronic connections. We can jump on a Zoom call together and be productive. We can compete in digital spaces over digital infrastructure. We can form Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and exercise democratic principles in self-governance.
But it’s not the same. It’s not, and it never will be.
Meeting on Zoom is not the same as meeting in a conference room. Ask anyone who had to work from home during Covid - they’ll tell you. Working side-by-side and engaging in genuine and real-time interaction with people cannot be replaced by email and video calls. It’s not possible. The genuine interplay between human beings is not replaceable. We are social creatures who rely on real-time connection, real-time feedback, real-time body language and humor. We need to see and feel other people’s presence for it to really matter. For it to be fully human. To build real relationships. The internet has no replacement for that, and if we think virtual reality headsets can do the job then we are gravely mistaken.
I don’t want to go to virtual meetings with digital avatars. I want to go to real meetings. As awful as most meetings are (“this could have been an email”)… given the alternative, I’ll go to meetings every day forever. Because at least they’re real.
I don’t want to simulate my life. I want to live my god damn life. Out here, with molecules and atoms and grass and trees and people who actually exist around me. Not bytes and digital assets and avatars of people I don’t actually know.
It’s really, really hard to care about people when you don’t actually know them. When you’re not actually accountable to them. When you don’t occupy the same space and see each other’s eyes.
And this is exactly what people like Zuckerberg want.
They’re not geniuses. Geniuses embrace what is human and make the most of it. That’s precisely the opposite of what these tech giants are doing. What they are doing is anti-human. What they want for us is horrifying to me. Our mental health is already in shambles - imagine how it’ll be when we lose even more of our real-life feedback and social mechanisms. The human race will scarcely be able to survive.
My little brother always makes the joke that eventually we’ll be driving Amazon cars around, filling them up with Amazon gas, going to buy Amazon groceries for our Amazon homes. And, as silly as it sounds, his vision is right. Whether it’s Amazon, or Meta, or Google… this is what our overly-digitized, overly-monopolized future may look like. We cannot willingly give over any more control, much less any more of our humanity, to these institutions who don’t give the first sign of a shit about us.
Admit it. They don’t. They don’t care.
Please don’t praise Apple because “they give us tech that we want and make our lives better.” Please stop doing that. Please stop acting like Apple is even a remotely decent human institution. All they care about is shareholder profit and conquering more market share. If they had even the most minor respect for humanity, they wouldn’t be paying destitute foreign children pennies a day to make $1,100 iPhones. There’s nothing further that needs to be said. No person or company who cared about people would ever do that.
If Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, Facebook, or Google ever cared about us, they wouldn’t have sold our mental health to the highest bidder.
But they did.
And I don’t forgive them.
I read a thesis for a metaverse project yesterday. It was smart and well-written, of course. The project aims to build a 3D walkable world that is worth living in.
That, to me, is a completely empty goal. There is no point.
I mean sure, I can see value in some digital experiences. Purely for recreation. A gamified reality could be a lot of fun - for recreational amounts of time. Playing a game that feels more real could be fun. But my sense is this: there are not zero, but nearly zero, digital-only experiences that will actually be net good for humanity. What we will lose by embracing this technology is far more than we will gain. We are giving away yet another piece of ourselves for more digitization; more alternative reality; more dopamine; more escapism; more colors and sounds and feedback loops. We are willingly making ourselves less human just because our technology and its overlords tell us that's what we should be doing. We are voluntarily compromising more of our self-respect and our mental health.
To me, it's net bad.
I still want to be human. I still want to live in a world where I breathe the same air as the people to whom I’m accountable.
I don't want to walk through a fake museum. I want to walk through a real museum. I want my actual eyes to gaze upon Leonardo da Vinci’s actual work.
I don't want to make more non-real, all-digital friends. I've got enough of those. I want real friends who eat actual meals with me and spend time inside my actual home. That's the only thing that makes us human. It’s not replaceable.
I don't want to live in a simulation of a better reality. I want us to make the god damn reality we’ve already got better. With effort and self-control and love. By holding onto what is most deeply and truly human inside of us. Real social structures and face-to-face togetherness. The building and nurturing of real relationships.
I love people. And I want to share space with them so that we’re together.
Take care of yourself, drink some water, and have a nice day.
For further reading on The Metaverse, and a perspective you probably haven’t thought of, check out Ben Hunt’s three-part series at www.epsilontheory.com. It’s called Narrative and Metaverse, parts 1-3 (part 3 will be out soon). Really outstanding critical thinking and honesty about big issues. Short, easy reads, and very very worth the time.