A Word for an Inadequate Existence
Metaverse • noun • (meh-tah-vurss)
Definition: a three dimensional virtual online environment
Origin: English (1990s)
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
In October, after years of negative press due to being unable or unwilling to adequately combat misinformation on its platforms, Facebook decided that it needed to rebrand itself.
Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had decided that his social media behemoth had long outgrown its early 2000s origin as essentially a dating and hooking up website for college students, and that it needed a new name to articulate its current agenda.
Overnight, “Facebook” became “Meta,” but earlier in the year Zuckerberg had already given hints about this impending change.
In July, Zuckerberg described to The Verge how Facebook was transitioning from primarily being a social media company to a “metaverse company.”
The metaverse is a hypothetical online universe in which people could virtually “live” via the use of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. 3-D headsets, gaming transaction platforms, and the popularity of games such as Second Life have encouraged people to support the potential for devoting larger and larger amounts of their time towards living in a fabricated, artificial world.
Ironically, after countless people had articulated how Facebook was negatively impacting reality due to the rampant spread of misinformation, the company made the decision to devote their attention toward an alternative reality in which they have ultimate control.
As one of the most powerful companies and platforms in the world begins to heavily invest in the metaverse, we must familiarize ourselves with this abstract idea and examine the bizarre western philosophical traditions that far too often encourage people to value the abstract and unreal ahead of reality and existence.
Escapism and the Metaverse
Ever since I was a child, I never understood the American desire to escape reality. People actively talk about the need to “escape” their homes, their jobs, their families, but they also know their escape is only temporary. Personally, I have never desired to spend much time engaging in something that I would later feel the need to escape from.
While some of my classmates enjoyed reading fiction and fantasy, I instead gravitated towards non-fiction because I wanted to spend more time reading about the world in which I lived. After graduating from college I did not pursue a 9-5 job, and instead worked in the film industry in Atlanta. This was an all-consuming profession, and I struggled to relate to my friends with traditional jobs who yearned for the weekend as the escape from their job.
Similarly, I have never considered vacations to be an “escape” from my reality, but an extension of my reality. Strangely enough, people often describe their vacations as an “escape” from their job, but they know that their “escape” will only be short-lived. Without any coercion, they return to the thing they believe they need to escape from.
The annual celebration at Burning Man is a fascinating example of American escapism. The festival was created by white American men, and the purpose of the festival has been to provide Americans, and especially white Americans, the opportunity to temporarily escape the debilitating, soul-crushing, capitalistic structures that white Americans built in the United States.
It is essentially a festival to provide people with a temporary reprieve from ethnocidal white America, and it was created by white Americans. The goal is not to provide an escape, but the façade of an escape so that people can become energized and empowered to sustain the status quo they loath.
Additionally, the focal point of the festival is a large wooden man who symbolizes the oppressive American “man.” Eventually, the “man” will be burned as a symbol of liberation prior to everyone leaving the festival and returning to the lives they needed to escape from. In this festival, white America is both the problem and the solution, yet the problem never gets solved because white Americans can absolve themselves of the responsibility to make things better by participating in the festival.
Disney World is a more consumer-driven American form of escapism as people “escape” into a magical kingdom and can temporarily exist apart from the day-to-day burdens of American life. Unsurprisingly, as Disney World has begun making changes to make itself more representative of America’s diversity, conservative Americans have denounced Disney World’s “wokeness.” By being more aligned with reality, Disney fails to allow Americans the escape we crave before we return to the jobs we dislike.
And while Disney World and Burning Man might be enjoyable and entertaining, they are both very expensive and impossible to do everyday at whatever time you want. The metaverse provides a far more affordable and ever-present form of escapism, and it should come as no surprise that American entrepreneurs and business-leaders aspire to invest in the metaverse.
Instead of investing in ways to make reality better, they aspire to create the appearance of an utopian escape from the ethnocidal dystopian reality we live within. And the “escape” only exists so that we are more inclined to return to a life we do not enjoy.
Essence, Illumination, and the Metaverse
Prior to the emergence of Existentialism and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, the dominant philosophy of the western world prioritized essence ahead of existence.
In this newsletter, I’ve spoken about essence quite a bit, but essence can basically be defined as ideas or identities that provide people with meaning. The ideas of race or religion can be meaningful essences, but an essence can be far more simple, too. One’s essence could be their identity of being great at basketball or being very attractive. While essences can provide people with meaning, and essences are not inherently bad in themselves, they can become incredibly bad once you prioritize essence ahead of existence.
When an essence precedes existence, a person or collection of people have concluded that an idea has become more important than life itself. When this occurs, people have essentially empowered themselves to justify unimaginable levels of destruction in order to preserve an idea.
For example: if European Christians believe that Christianity is the supreme faith and is more important than existence, they will also be able to justify terrorizing and killing non-Christians on the basis of this belief in their essential supremacy.
Yet essence does not merely influence how people interact with people with different ideas— it can also impact how a person lives their life. If an essence, idea, or identity is more important than existence, people will gladly commit to living miserable lives and becoming miserable people in pursuit of an idea. The ends will justify the means.
During the Dark Ages (from the 5th through the 15th century), the supremacy of essence dictated European life, and in addition to launching the religious wars of the Crusades, which empowered European Christians to terrorize and kill European Jews during their march to the holy land where they intended to kill Muslims, it also created a destructively passive relationship with existence.
For one thousand years, people were not encouraged to live so that their life could be enriching, sustainable, and nurturing. Instead, they were encouraged to live in a way that would grant them access to a divine, and not demonic, afterlife. Existence became relegated to an afterthought, and access to the afterlife became the meaning of life.
One’s existence could be dystopian so long as one obtained access to a biblical metaverse.
During the Dark Ages, reality became an afterthought, and due to this people also struggled to understand or obtain knowledge. Due to life’s apparent meaninglessness, knowledge was not something people were empowered to obtain through their actions on earth. Instead, people believed that humans existed to have God’s knowledge illuminated through them.
The primacy of essence created a chaotic, knowledgeless environment awash in misinformation and religious fervor. It was an environment that people yearned to escape from while never truly knowing how to escape. The façade of an escape would prove sufficient enough, and the religious gatekeepers to the biblical metaverse became the most powerful men in society.
The desire to escape reality and the embrace of a metaverse do not liberate us from the pitfalls of valuing essence more than existence, and the quicker we understand this the better we will be at making a better world.
