The Metaverse and Metamodernism: Towards a peer-to-peer Horizon
An Assemblage of Internet Randomness
10.23.2021 - Another week passes by, and another Newsletter arrives. I hope that you enjoy reading this one. As always, please share with anyone who might find any of this interesting; it would mean a lot to me and help me out.
For those new to this Substack, <Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
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Now the main topics of this Newsletter will be:
The Metaverse and Metamodernism
Neo-Vaporwave, Metamodernity, and Urbit
I hope you all are doing well
-C.N
The Metaverse and Metamodernism: Towards a peer-to-peer Horizon
To understand the current situation of the ever-accelerating cybernetic culture, we need to understand what the Metaverse is in relation to the internet. The Metaverse or in Web 2.0s language cyberspace is just the virtual space we inhabit online. There have been three main paradigms of how we interact on the internet. First, without going into their full historical background, we have Web 1.0, which is the internet in its most primitive glory. Before, there was Facebook, Twitter, and all these other tech conglomerates. Many advocate that the end of Web 1.0 matches the .com bubble burst in the 90s, This set up the environment, the domination of the surviving .com conglomerates to make way for things like Facebook and Twitter, Amazon, etc. The current internet landscape is that of Web 2.0. An environment in which the online is everpresent in our lives, we create, form relationships, communicate, curate, interact, etc., all mediated by these tech conglomerates and their servers. Thanks to the rise of these social media platforms and online services, there have never been more people present online than ever before, but the cost is our privacy and our data. For anyone coming from the Paradigm of Web 1.0 of Web anonymity, cyberpunk, and cybernetic Anarchism, for Facebook to be one of the most popular online hubs is laughably horrific.
The popularity of distrust in these tech conglomerates, the hyper invasion of one’s privacy and hijacking of one’s data for profitability via targeted advertising, and the rising and less subtle forms of psyops happening gave rise to an accelerated need for a new way of online computing and networking. With the rise of Blockchain tech primarily set up and instantiated by Bitcoins emergence in 2009, we have the theoretical sediment for Web 3.0. In short, Web 3.0 Is the reaction to the lack of ownership of one virtual space/data. There are many competing technologies, all of which are situated or aligned with crypto. This includes, as mentioned, Bitcoin, which thesis is “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Ethereum facilitates smart contracts, which have given rise to NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) the which instantiate a new way to claim ownership via the Blockchain, and finally, Urbit, which sets out to in perhaps not so direct way integrate the other two. Urbit is a personal OS designed from scratch to run peer-to-peer applications.
“It solves the hard problems of implementing a peer-to-peer network (including identity, NAT traversal, and exactly-once delivery) in the kernel so app developers can focus on business logic.”
We’re going to shelve the Urbit discussion for later in its piece if space is allotted, whether or not Urbit will or can be capable of completing this and what obstacles still potentially need to be overcome for a truly peer-to-peer future. So instead, I will link a video below that summarizes some of the main points laid out above for simplicity and clarification.
The Meta
Now, these three phases of the internet are not isolated from their cultural and/or historical context. The online space tends to exhibit properties from the dominant political and historical paradigms. An example of this would be the radical cyberpunk/anarchist potential that was instantiated by the internet. This wave was originally not just a reflection of Neoliberalisms domiance in the ideological wars culminating in the collapse of the Berlin wall and the fall of Communism as a legitimate alternative to Capitalist-Democracies. For a short period of time there was a sense of emacipation brought about by Neoliberalism, the fact that capitalism is a corrosive agent that is able to disrupt and dissolve long lasting institutions and traditions within decades is not just empirically evident but it is able to normalize and accelerate the conditions to do this. This can be obviously criticized as colonial imperialism or hyper-imperialism but this is also outside the scope of this essay and its vindication has been written about with greater lucidity in works like Nick Lands, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity.”
Web 2.0, by extension, was marked with the inherent hyper surveillance potential Neoliberalism latently possessed. This came in the form of both the excesses of hyper-consumerism and data extraction in the form of services and protection.
Post 9-11, we saw the potential of all capitalist democracies (primarily the US) to disseminate a narrative and create states of exception quickly. The same tools previously only attributed to totalitarian regimes were equipped and used in the name of “Freedom.” This is primarily seen in something like the Patriot Act and the installation of safety theaters in the TSA. Similarly, a populace that is so quickly able to succumb and give up something like privacy in the name of a bastardized abstract like freedom is only exacerbated in the rise of Social Networks, which aggregated one’s data in exchange for using a service at no cost. This is false to anyone who has ever taken an introductory course in economics: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Facebook and other social media platforms function and can maintain their “services” free of cost because the cost of use is your data and your content. None of your posts belong to you, and all of your data is subject to being sold. You don’t reap any of the benefits except maybe the convenience of being bombarded with selective advertising or a random new video on your feed based on aggregate data based on user demographics. In this world of Web 2.0, you “use” the web less than the web uses you. Not only this, but at any moment, your “empire” can be taken from you in the form of de-platforming, which no one is safe from considering that the previous president of the United States was banned from almost every central platform.
The newest paradigm shift to local computing, as stated, is not just due to a reaction to how we currently use the internet and the responses to things like identity, property, and sovereignty. These have implications outside of the virtual space. Covid-19 has shown the waiting power and competence on many legacy institutions, including the legitimacy of sovereignty by many states not limited to just the United States.
Metamodernism
There’s a line from the T.V show Portlandia, “the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland,” and in some sense, that lives on with crypto. The dream of a peer-to-peer future is alive in crypto. To understand the technological landscape, we must realize the Ideological landscape that has been at play due to the temporal displacement brought about by COVID-19. COVID-19 removed the blinds over their eyes of Postmodernity as the Logic of Capitalism. Postmodernity harbors a cynical outlook, an entire generation of Millennials raised on irony. With a generation as nihilistic and irony poisoned, the only tangible form of cultural transgression left is a return to classical or even traditional values.
This is not to be mistaken with naive revivalism of these values, for the metamodernist does not reject Postmodernity. On the contrary, with the rise of the Metaverse, a space that is as intangibly real as our very own physical reality, the relationships and interactions formed online create a sense of parasocial belonging. Gen-Z and the entire generation raised already immersed in a world of constant surveillance and the fleeting reality we see the return or the rise of popularity in metaphysical frameworks such as idealism. However, when we spend more than 70% of our time in front of our screens, the bonds, relationships, and personas, we create often embody realities that are much richer and closer to the reality we wish to inhabit. The entire Metaverse vindicated Jean Baudrillard when he asserted that we would only go deeper and deeper into hyperreality, into an ephemeral and flat/superficial reality if there ever were one.
Thus, Metamofdernism is not to reject postmodern nihilism. Still, quite the opposite in the wake of abstract nothingness and lack of traditional commitment, one is trusted into a real vitalist and Nietzschean position, the position of the will to power. The ability to perform a transvaluation of values, in which all previously held values fall to zero, smashed by our theoretical hammers opening the possibility to instantiate the future that we wish to create.
Convergence and Resonance
The alignment of decentralized technologies like blockchains and the rise of cultural and theoretical movements like metamodernism can be traced along a faultline demarcated by things like VAporwave and its relevance in certain online groups, particularly those coalescing around particular right-wing Ideologies. This is seen clearly in the emergence of fashwave as a dominant subgroup of Vaporwave aesthetics.
Vaporwave is an aesthetic modality that is purely postmodern, bordering on metamodern. Yet, it is still a legacy aesthetic of web 2.0 and the logic of capitalism. A pastiche assemblage of differing cultural artifacts which produce an aesthetic that is not only embracing the fruits of consumerism as much as its critiquing it and its longing for the future that never came.
Web 3.0s primary metaphysics is of resonance and convergence. Multiplicities come together to create molar aggregates that can stand up to the corrosive forces of entropy. If anything, it destroys the notion of linearity or a unified time. We regain the notion of Time working in tandem or against each other, Time as multiplicity. This is to vindicate a thinker like Nick Land, advocating competing time systems, like templexical Time loops in which linear and cyclical history can work in tandem. Maintaining the cyclical nature of a time loop but also maintaining the linearity of classical modern Newtonian time. The Blockchain doesn’t solve the problem of space-time as much as it instantiates its time regime for its autonomous purposes. We must get time right to do anything coming out of this Covidian Time War.
There is much to iron out, and still, theory needs to catch up to the cultural and technical acceleration. Whether or not the future lies in the hands of crypto, we can only see. There are strict obstacles that still need to be overcome by cryptos, such as the hard limit of energy independence from fossil fuels and the infrastructural reliance on legacy institutions, the most significant being on-grid energy reliance of both energy and information aggregation and proliferation, as a project like Urbit begs the question, “who owns Urbits servers right now?”.
All that can be said is that the META is here.