A few years ago, I was sitting in my flat late on a Saturday night, binge-watching Breaking Bad. It was about 3am but I just couldn’t seem to tear myself away. Just then, though, there was a power cut and I was plunged into silent darkness. I suddenly felt rather depressed — it turned out that the exciting world I had been immersed in was just an illusion.
A similar sense of sadness came over me as I watched the latest advert from the company formerly known as Facebook. The Meta ad, screened during the Super Bowl this month, shows an animatronic dog performing the 1980s hit “Don’t You Forget About Me” in a space-themed arcade with a band of animatronic friends. But when Questy’s closes down, the band members are split up and sold off and the dog ends up being used as an inanimate object for people to laugh at in various humiliating settings.
Saved from a scrap heap, out of the jaws of a rubbish compactor, he is brought to the “Bosworth Space Center” — a museum seemingly named after Meta’s incoming chief technology officer — and repurposed as a signpost for the “Space Cafe”.
As the museum is closing for the day, someone puts a VR headset on our hero and he finds himself entering “Horizon Worlds”, Meta’s fast-growing social VR platform where, for some reason, no one has any legs. Here, he is virtually “reunited” with the torsos of his friends, and they reform their band in front of a virtual audience. In reality, he might still be standing alone in the dark, but this, we are to understand, is a happy ending.
The ad feels like a stinging satire on tech-bro capitalism — it could come straight out of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian TV series, Black Mirror. And yet, as we find out, it is a promotional video for the new “Meta Quest 2” VR headset, which you need to buy in order to access this metaverse world, with prices starting “from $299”.
It left me with a lot of questions. What happens when our loveable dog has to take his headset off again and revert to being a canine signpost? Will he be plunged back into misery? Is his only happiness now to be found in the virtual world provided to him by Meta Quest 2? We never find out.
What Meta is selling, here, is the idea that it doesn’t matter if your real life is awful, because for just $299 you can escape the drudgery and live in a fantasy. What it doesn’t point out, of course, is that the more time you spend in the virtual world, the less you will inevitably have for people in the physical one — or for doing other things that might benefit your non-avatar self, such as working, sleeping, exercising, procreating or even disconnecting from technology.
The message seems to be: your real life might suck, but fear not — you can have a fake one instead. If so, this does not just represent an incredibly grim vision of the future, but also quite a radical one, in which our values have been fundamentally reordered. In the west, from the time of the Ancient Greeks to the modern day — from Plato in his cave to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — the idea that reality has value, no matter how ugly or unpleasant it might be, has been accepted as an article of faith.
Settling for a compensatory fantasy has been seen as an evil we must avoid at all costs, because if we don’t see the world as it is, with all its nuance and suffering and uncomfortable truths, how can we hope to make it better? And yet with Meta Quest 2, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — who insists on his mantra of “connecting people” — is trying to convince us to do just that.
All this comes at a time when Meta is also telling us it cares about our wellbeing — the company recently introduced a “take a break” feature on Instagram, “to empower people to make informed decisions about how they’re spending their time”. Will similar warnings flash up in the metaverse? Or will we be sent reminders to get back to the fantasy?
The comments below the Meta ad on YouTube suggest that users might not be quite ready to “live in the future” yet, despite that being one of Meta’s new company values. “Nothing makes me want to put down my quest, and go outside more, than this commercial,” one says. Maybe most of us are not ready to give ourselves up to the world Zuckerberg wants to sell us. But the fact that a man with such power, resources and data at his fingertips thinks we might be is unsettling in itself.
