Against the Metaverse
Something strange happened in the United States on the last day of school in December 2021.
A vague threat, the origin of which nobody has been able to pinpoint, went viral on the social media app TikTok. For some reason, students started posting memes and oblique messages about a mysterious threat on a specific day.
What made this story remarkable is that schools — from Maine to California — responded by heightening security and notifying parents. Even though the threat was never deemed to be credible, schools and local police took the threat seriously. Some schools canceled classes. Other schools disallowed backpacks, or searched backpacks entering school grounds.
The whole thing struck me as bizarre yet disturbing. Has this ever happened before? Where schools across the U.S. take an enhanced security posture in response to a vague threat? Or any threat?
You could draw a lot of conclusions from this story, but I want to talk about social media.
We are soon approaching the 20th birthday of Facebook — the world’s first massively adopted social media network.
Several months ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook downplayed internal evidence that its platform Instagram was causing psychological harm to teenagers.
The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies and depression, March 2020 internal research states. It warns that the Explore page, which serves users photos and videos curated by an algorithm, can send users deep into content that can be harmful.
Instead of reforming his platforms to improve the welfare of his fellow human beings, Mark Zuckerburg launched the Metaverse.
The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company’s vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future.
Zuckerburg, changing the subject, envisions a future where everyone is plugged into “augmented reality.”
Fool me once, shame on you …
Political scientist Paul Musgrave wrote a Substack post analyzing the reading habits of today’s youth. No surprise, kids today are consuming a ton of digital media. Not much long-form reading. The author, who is a professor, notes how this impacts his ability to teach his class. Students are coming in with a vastly diminished set of reading comprehension skills.
Teaching requires meeting the students where they are. But what if the distance is so great that it can’t be traversed in a semester? And what if the terrain where they are is too different for the edifice you’re trying to build with them?
This might seem like a typical complaint about “kids these days,” but I believe he is right that we have introduced a fundamental and profound change in communication. Feeds and algorithms and pictures and videos and filters and likes and comments — all day, every day. Kids today are immersed in a world completely foreign to those who came of age before the smartphone.
This is not inevitable. We don’t have to stop teaching hard texts because corporate digital media is all-consuming. We have some agency in the matter. If we think it’s better for people to be able to concentrate on a topic for longer than five minutes, we can try to slow things down.
As an advocate for a counter-culture of slow information processing, I must be the first to admit that I fall prey to my digital feeds, constantly. I’ve pondered going radical and deleting all my social media accounts — essentially taking a vow of digital poverty.
But I haven’t taken that leap. Not yet.
I understand there are benefits to these massive social media companies, but it doesn’t take a Luddite to notice certain problems. The downsides are a function of monetization schemes that hijack our attention, depriving us of authentic social and intellectual sustenance.
Before we give up on reading books, let’s try something else.
Let’s create environments where young people can unplug from the digital chaos, be themselves, and learn about society and science and literature. Let’s innovate by bringing back real discussions and actual reading.
In contrast to some who think students couldn’t handle it, or would reject it for being too boring, I think our young people are starving for authentic experiences. I think students would actually find refuge in a cognitively rich academic curriculum. Even if such an experience involved physical texts and hand-written notes. There might be some initial resistance, but I think students would quickly embrace a return to thoughtfulness.
To enliven the educational experience, cut down on bureaucracy and reform the soul-crushing state testing schemes. Allow kids to connect to their community through electives, internships, field trips, and guest lectures.
We don’t have to surrender to augmented reality if we don’t want to.
Historical Photos
I want to recollect the men who built the dam, who made that road from the Roosevelt dam to Phoenix. I hope my people will realize, which I am bound to say I did not, or never realized until this morning, what an extraordinary, beautiful, and picturesque strip of country this is. I think that the drive from the beautiful city of Phoenix especially the last few miles down the extraordinary gorge, then to see this lake and dam, I think is one of the most spectacular, best worth seeing in the world, and I hope our people will realize that. I want to see them come in the tens of thousands here just as they go to Yosemite, to the Grand Canyon, and the Yellowstone Park.
That’s from Teddy Roosevelt’s dedication speech at the Roosevelt Dam on March 18, 1911. Roosevelt had already served two terms as president (1901-1908), but was eyeing a political comeback. Presidential term limits hadn’t yet been enshrined into the Constitution.
The dedication speech is fascinating in its entirety.
After a brief overview of his work passing the National Reclamation Act, and its importance to the development of the West, Roosevelt delivers a long tirade against “crooks of various sizes and characteristics.”
I feel that corruptness in public life or in the business world is rather a traitor to American institutions. I feel that the public official who grafts or stints the job, the contractor who makes money by rotten work, the business man who makes a fortune by beating the law — I feel they are all criminals of the worst type.
And now friends, do not forget this. You people here, you and I, we American citizens are responsible if we permit that kind of thing to go unpunished, and also, if we fail to pay proper credit to the men who do their duty.
Before waxing poetic about the beauty of the landscape, Roosevelt assures the people of Arizona that the dam was built by honest and upright public servants.
Theodore Roosevelt Dam was the “first major structure constructed by the Bureau of Reclamation on the Salt River Project.” To learn more, visit the dam’s informational website or read this good historical overview of the project.
Thanks for reading!
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