Most people should be at least nominally familiar with the movie series, ‘The Matrix’. I don’t pretend to understand all the layers of meanings that some say were built into the film and I understand that it goes quite deep, but the one part that sticks into my mind are the visuals that have a correlation to something that’s becoming a reality today. Several of the principal characters live in a dystopian environment that appears as a grimy dark mechanical hauk of civilizations past and to engage with what would seem to us like the real world, they must do so via digital manipulation. The characters, when traveling to the otherworld, must lay supine upon a chair laid back with a rod-like device shoved up through the back of their head, into their brain and through that medium, they experience what seems normal to us, but is really illusory.
Consider another visual: in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg acquired the company called Oculus Rift which created a goggle head piece by which the wearer could enter and interact with a fully digital visual experience. At a conference attended by tech types, every single participant is outfitted with the Oculus Rift head piece, every single person except for the man walking down the aisle Mark Zuckerberg. While that scene was likely just a snapshot of experience, calculated to make an impression regarding the presentation, it struck me, and I think a lot of other people, as an aspirational metaphor for tech-lord Mark Zuckerberg. He will be in the driver’s seat taking everyone else where he wants them to go.
We are on the cusp of the same kind of world being prepared for us by many players but most notably, the most public of them all, Mark Zuckerberg (via his new ‘Metaverse’) who is now rolling out plans, hardware, and software for us to engage in a world that will exist only in our mind and in the digital pathways that he builds, any which we’re allowed in. Perhaps it’ll be on a price curve that will go up commensurate with the pleasure involved to ‘live’ there, but more likely, like the Facebook of today, it may be ‘free’ in exchange for how much of your inner self you’re compelled to give to him. It strikes me as something far worse even than Orwell’s ‘Brave New World’, where even though everyone is conceived in and tightly controlled in castes, there is no ambiguity as to what is real.
The push to mainstream digitally enhanced reality falls under the umbrella of an even more foundational movement called transhumanism, where our lives or at least the lives of a favored ruling class, would be permanently augmented to keep up with ever evolving computers and for those lives to be extended indefinitely. It’s like a science fiction novel where all human imperfections are eventually eradicated, including death. While I don’t believe those devotees will attain their ultimate goal, I do believe they will make considerable strides in corrupting humanity and the human experience as we know it.
I would make the case that our present interval in technology is our last chance to build a barrier to preserve humanity.
I recognize that there are already people living in false digital worlds. That’s a fair description of some of the most hardcore gamers and others who are experimenting with biological/digital hacks that would ostensibly keep us on par with the supercomputers that would otherwise destroy us. While that is both noble and horrifying, I would call the current push into virtual reality an effort to say: if you can’t beat them, then join them. Given that we have free choice, some of us at least, it’s also an admission saying that we don’t have the will to stop ourselves even though we’ve had several millennia of experience conceiving, exercising, and refining the humanities and ethics. That kind of resignation is unacceptable.
How do you fight back against a mass movement that is trying to change the fundamental nature of humanity? How have we even gotten to the place where that question must be asked? Regardless of the answer it must be addressed.
First and foremost, for those of us that believe that every person should have a free choice we have to accept the fact that some people are going to choose digital manipulation as their existential reality and if we value our choices, we must value theirs even if many choose that path. Yet, I believe we’ll see in our lifetime, individuals fully confined to rooms or even chairs, where their body is allowed to atrophy, and every moment of their waking existence has some form of directly inputted digital enhancement. If this goes a step further, it becomes a horror show, when a choice by many becomes a non-choice forced on many more.
I’m sure there are some – a particular class of people in fact, that would yell something like: ‘Who are you to define what humanity is? Don’t you know there’s suffering in the world, who are you to deny anyone an alternative?’ While that’s certainly a fair question to ask by anyone that’s sincere – (most would not be), and while the full answer would need to be answered by a thousand books, I’d only remind the questioner of a few things that are worth more than all the VR in the world and that if they’re not a present experience, they’re worth finding, working and waiting for, even if it’s just some of them:
- Standing at oceans edge, in a deep forest, on a high mountain in sunlight or under stars
- The reciprocal love of a pet
- Honest labor to accomplish a physical project
- Food, simple or complex, prepared well, and eaten in peace
- The smell of rain
- Art
- Growing something
- Making love
- Being there for a child
- Touch
We must find the fundamental nature of humanity again for ourselves and fight to protect and preserve it. The movement to destroy it is real, it is not science fiction; it’s happening now. Virtual reality is on the verge of becoming a mass movement. It’s all well and good if it’s a tool that you put down and unplug, and then turn off the light to go home. That level of voluntary control will be eclipsed only too soon. Even now, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to close the deal with it to the masses. If he succeeds, the world will become like his opiate den filled with his dependent addicted.