In metaverse, the self is torn between two worlds. If art is created through a self that is authentic, where does that leave the avatar?
The Lord is their strength,
And He is the saving refuge of His anointed.
Save Your people,
And bless Your inheritance;
Shepherd them also,
And bear them up forever.
--Psalm 28:8-9 
A Reality of Our Own Making
What are we doing when we seek an alternative reality?
What do we really want?
What are we looking for?
True community?
A place to be oneself—whatever that means?
To be united with something bigger than we are?
To be accepted?
What is the metaverse anyway? A hazy concept that has a number of components most of which are still in infancy …
A Heavy Technological Shift
I’ve been doing a bit of research into this concept of ‘metaverse’, and then took a dive into VR which really took me aback. VR is a crazy trip. And while those who are into the metaverse say it’s just one aspect of the overall vision, it’s a gateway into this alternative reality that is only just emerging. Ten years from now, this alternative reality will be just as real as the ‘real world’.
What are the ramifications?
We don’t know …
It’s far too early to tell.
But already guys like Jared Lanier, one of the pioneers of VR technology, are telling people why they need to quit social media. Social media is considered Web 2.0. Now at the gates of Web 3.0, we are being told to quit the last iteration of the internet. We thus need to be critical about Web 3.0, i.e., the metaverse.
With that preface over, let’s jump into the metaverse …
A Time Out of Time … A Place Out of Place
Here are a few lines from The Metaverse Handbook: Innovating for the Internet’s Next Tectonic Shift
“[The] Metaverse is not a destination. The Metaverse is a movement—a movement toward the digital-first livelihood we’ve slowly been adopting year over year, app by app. The Metaverse becomes more real every time we replace a physical habit with a digital equivalent. We, the digital citizens of the Internet, are manifesting the Metaverse by trading time in the meat space (the physical world) for time online”(Metaverse Handbook, 20).
This is an important point: the more time we spend in the metaverse, the more we actualize its emergence by reducing the amount of time we spend in the natural world.
“The Metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life”(Shaan Puri).
Another key point: the more time and resources we put into the metaverse, the more value we place on it over against the natural world. We are saying that we prefer the digital world to the natural one.
“Puri pointed out that for the past 20 years our work, social life, recreation, sense of identity, and practically every aspect of our lives has become increasingly digital. He points out that people are trading in their Rolex watches and skinny jeans for Bored Apes and Fortnite skins. More kids are playing Fortnite than both football and basketball combined. In another 10-20 years, we will be existing more in the Metaverse than the physical world. According to Puri, ‘Our attention has been sucked from physical to digital. And where attention goes, energy flows”(MH, 20).
Affirming the Natural World
Attention is a form of worship. We worship what we pay attention to, what we are present for valuing it over against what we are not paying attention to. Presence opens reality to us, or it is the way we open the world. By being more present to the digital world than the natural world, as Puri states above, “where attention goes, energy flows.”
In our Christian faith, the natural world is created not only for us to be present in, attuned to, but also the stuff of worship itself. We worship God through the stuff of the natural world. We worship God by offering the stuff of the material world that He has given us back to Him. Water, smoke, wood, stone … As we say in the liturgy of St. Basil, “We give thanks for what is Yours …”
However, we can put ourselves over against the natural world through our ego, i.e. by believing that we are nothing but the stuff of our thoughts, that it is our thoughts are the ground of the natural world; that we posit the world through our thoughts, and so on.
The Metaverse as Cartesian Theatre
What Descartes did in his philosophy was overturn the natural hierarchy of the world by placing the self, consciousness, thought above God, i.e. by concluding that the presupposition of God is thought, the human mind, itself. How do you know that God is not deceiving you? Because you are thinking. And because you are thinking God exists, you exist; and if you exist, and you are thinking about God, then He somehow must exist.
Perhaps in some ways Cartesian philosophy (and later that of German characters like Fichte and Schelling and Heidegger) is the ground of the Metaverse. I become the true centre of the world. The world exists because I posit it. My thinking opens the world to me. Is this not the Metaverse, namely the extension of my own thoughts? We create a new world that is an extension of all of our fantasies; a place where our fantasies not only come true, but where we can invite others to share in them?
I was reading Jared Lanier’s book entitled Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, and my point above was precisely what VR opened up to him in the early stages of its design. In that book, Lanier tells the story of how he came up with the concept of virtual reality—or was inspired to its conclusion. He was in the library reading some books and papers on various technological studies, when he came across some writings about virtual reality. Suddenly he had an epiphany: virtual reality would be a place where one could makes one’s fantasies realized, and not only that but one would be able to share those fantasies with others. Your wildest imaginations could be given a kind of verisimilitude that you could experience ‘haptically’ (i.e. with the body), and invite other people into to share with you.
Sharing Your Fantasies with Others
I was immediately obsessed with the potential for multiple people to share such a place, and to achieve a new type of consensus reality, and it seemed to me that a “social version” of the virtual world would have to be called virtual reality. This in turn required that people would have bodies in VR so that they could see each other, and so on, but all that would have to wait for computers to get better. I was fifteen years old and vibrating with excitement. I had to tell someone, anyone. I would find myself running out the library door so that I didn’t have to keep quiet; rushing up to strangers on the sidewalk out in the
hard New Mexico sunshine. “You have to look at this! We’ll be able to put each other in dreams using computers! Anything you can imagine! It’s not just going to be in our heads anymore!” I’d then wave a picture of a cube in front of a random, poor soul, and that person would politely navigate around me. Why were people so blind to the most amazing thing happening in the world?
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality
The metaverse therefore is a place that is the embodiment of your imagination—as if it were real.
I Am A Lama; Therefore I Exist (on Metaverse)
And in this metaverse you can be whatever you want: human, animal, ewok … Anything.
But the ‘you’ projected onto the metaverse is a ‘you’ that is reified through an avatar. It is a way of living with a divided self. Identity in the metaverse is thus fluid, malleable, multitudinous.
“In her article for MIT Technology Review, Taylor Fang suggests that she and other members of her generation are well-equipped to curate multi-faceted identities for themselves using the ever-increasing supply of social media tools. ‘To grow up with technology,as my generation has’ she writes, ‘is to constantly question the self, to split into multiplicities, to try to obtain our own contradictions’. But, for an increasing number of people, the question is not how best to harness social media to live our best lives, it is how to fee ourselves from the constraints and expectations of real life by returning to the escapism of virtual worlds”(The Future of You, 83).
Is not the authentic life one lived in defiance of fantasies and imaginations? Don’t the Fathers and the Bible warn us about living in the imaginary, that we must cast off imaginations (St Paul); that there is a vulnerability we open ourselves to when we live solely in our heads?
And is not the metaverse simply an extension of our own heads, a way of forcing the brain to put connections together to deceive us into believing that what we are experiencing is real? Is it not just one big fantasy?
How we choose to design our avatar and present ourselves online has more importance than you might think, because it seems that our digital appearance can actually influence our behaviour … Stanford University researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Baileys on call this the Proteus Effect. In a Series of virtual reality experiments the authors observed that people altered the way they acted to match the behaviour associated with the appearance of their avatars. The more attractive the avatar, the more willing the person was to approach strangers; the taller the avatar, the more willing the person was to make an unfair offer in negotiation; the shorter the avatar, the more likely a person was to accept such an offer. … This reflects the behaviour that we might expect in the real world, but of course in the real world there are far more limitations on how we can present ourselves—and therefore on how we behave (87-8).
The Future of You, 87-88
The Mask of a Thousand Faces
The blog you are reading has been an investigation into the life of art. I’ve writing about a number of writers and saints who talked about art as that which comes out of a place of authenticity, out of an authentic self. We looked at Thomas Merton, e.g., who wrote about the way we wrap experiences around ourselves like bandages to make us feel that we are somehow real.
The following are excerpts from an excellent book on the metaverse by futurist Tracey Follows. Her book is a thoughtful look at how the metaverse is already changing our understanding of identity …
According to Eiji Araki, Vice President of the games company Gree, there are benefits to using an avatar. For example, it can give people the confidence to unleash a hidden talent such as becoming a singer or an artist. Liberated of their physicality, people seem to revel in the freedom to express themselves. One couple even met and fell in love as avatars. ‘Even before they met in the real world, they already knew each other’, says Eiji, ‘they knew each other’s characters, what they liked and what they disliked.’ And because they met on Reality, and had a lot of friends in common, it made sense to host their digital wedding party on another virtual reality platform called Cluster, inviting all their friends to gather online to celebrate. All the attendees, in other words, were avatars(89).
The Future of You, 89
Kevin Lee, head of China-based youth market consultancy Youthology:
“I have so many different selves, and they’re authentically me but they’re all different for different usages, different contexts, and different social circles … “(90).
The fluidity of identity that the metaverse fosters thus raises a serious challenge to one wanting to become an authentic individual; an authentic person, which is the point of departure for art. When the metaverse is an extension of my imaginations and myriad masks, then it becomes a place where I am encouraged to become less and less real. It becomes a place where who I would like to be supplants who I authentically am.
“If this trend continues, I think we will see our identities become more fluid than ever, as virtual media unlocks the possibilities of being who we would like to be, rather than settling for who we are. We will no longer seek merely to represent the self, but to invent the self, and to reinvent many selves that may co-exist in the various worlds we choose to inhabit”(91).
Here’s Follows in reflecting at the conclusion of her book,
“But this work has led me to revise my thinking. In the future, I believe that we will view the ‘real’ world as no more ‘real’ than the virtual worlds that we explore. And that in turn means we must think of these versions of ourselves not as second or third generation copies of some original ‘core personality’—with some lesser value—but as versions or rather extensions of who we are”(189-190).
But the extensions of oneself are not real.
You Wanna Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name
In Ready Player One, the protagonist has just ‘returned’ from a period of orgiastic pleasure. He reflects on all that he had witnessed, all that he had experienced, and with whom he had committed such acts. Then he reaches the painful conclusion: that at the end of the day, after all the virtual experiences—regardless of how ‘real’ they seemed at the time—he was just a depressed teenager sitting alone in his room, escaping his pain through virtual sex. When verisimilitude becomes chimera.
Contrast this with true Art—the icon … Here’s Pavel Florensky:
An icon remembers its prototype. Thus in one beholder it will awaken in the bright clarities of his conscious mind a spiritual vision that matches directly the bright clarities of the icon; and the beholder’s vision will be comparably clear and conscious.
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis
The Iconostasis as Door to the true Metaverse
The icon is not a ‘virtual’ reality, but opens one to transcendence—the ‘really real’ …
But in another person, the icon will stir the dreams that lie deeper in the subconscious, awakening a perception of the spiritual that not only affirms that such seeing is possible but also brings the thing seen into immediate felt experience. Thus, at the highest flourishing of their prayers, the ancient ascetics found that their icons were not simply windows through which they could behold the holy countenances depicted on them but were also doorways through which these countenances actually entered the empirical world. The saints came down from the icons to appear before those praying to them.
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis
Is the icon then not the true ‘portal’ to the heavenly, to one’s true self, to true community? In such a place, we enter into community with the cloud of witnesses, with our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Trinity, St Mary, the saints … And we enter as inauthentic, broken selves, and are brought into the presence of our true humanity, our true self.
In this sense, the authentic form of the metaverse is true prayer. Standing before the icon, a mirror opens to our to our true selves—the sinner and the saint …
There is not the slightest question in such experiences that what is coming through the icon is merely the viewer’s subjective invention, so indisputably objective is its impact upon the viewer, an impact equally physical and spiritual … [And] we can only describe experiences of seeing it as a beholding that ascends.
And what do we see in this “beholding that ascends”?
The fires of our lusts and the emptiness of our earthly hungers simply and wholly cease; and we recognize the vision as something that, in essence, exceeds the empirical world, as something acting upon us from its own dominion.
The Really Real
Is this not what everyone is seeking on the metaverse—really seeking? To escape the emptiness of our earthly hungers, those things that drive us, that lie outside of our control. Do we not seek to escape into another ‘reality’ and there find acceptance, love, an unlimited bliss—to ultimately escape the weight and ‘kick-back’ of the material world?
And is this not what we find when we stand before God, the saints, and the whole heavenly hosts amidst plumes of incense and the delight of timbrels? To partake of our Lord’s Body and Blood and enter into loving union with Him and all of creation. We find true commune-ity when we are united through the Eucharist and stand in heaven as the Church of Christ.
Could I be so galling as to state that the authentic metaverse is the realm of heaven we stand in before the altar and the inconostasis—this ‘portal’ into a really real reality that transcends (‘meta’) the material universe.
Young and Resless
Here is where we find our true identity, our true rest, our true community, our true love …
As St. Augustine so aptly stated,
“Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in You.”
I used to think this was a statement about the ‘eschaton’ that we would experience after the second coming of Christ.
But now I understand it as the Eucharist—what we experience here and now whenever we encounter Christ through His greatest gift to us. The really real reality where we are united with God and He is united with us.
