Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft (having recently purchased online gaming giant Activision) are enthusiastically talking up the “metaverse” — a world of virtual reality-enhanced social interactions that will be more real than reality. It will capture the nuances of offline interaction in massively fulfilling virtual experiences and then monetise them. With JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declaring it a trillion-dollar market, the metaverse, if it succeeds, will be a constant presence in our lives.

If this is, as some say, a chilling vision of the future, it’s not for the Huxleyesque reasons usually given. If the worry is that people will be drawn away from real life into an online world provided by high-tech devices, that horse has already bolted. Meta’s talk of an “immersive” metaverse belies the fact that we are already well and deeply immersed in online life.

“Self-expression” and “meaning” are already so heavily intertwined with online activity that adding a headset isn’t going to make a  difference, even if the prospect of thousands of loud, angry Twitter users being more immersed is terrifying.

While the metaverse will further the internet’s shift away from text and photos toward VR and video, it is not a revolution, or at least not the one Meta portrays. In the metaverse, people will do things together, share their experiences, and fight with each other, just as they currently do.

The new parts of the metaverse are commercial. Compared with online life today, there will be more things to buy and more money to be made. Personalised avatars, virtual pets, online concerts and shows, digital real estate, and fashion made of pixels instead of fabric: Meta, Microsoft, Verizon, and other giants all hope to serve as brokers for all these, in much the same way Amazon is the middleman and guarantor for its Marketplace transactions. If America were not still so squeamish about sex, one could add teledildonics to the list.

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For those inclined to doubt that people will pay for a pair of metaverse trainers, recall that virtual goods in games like World of Warcraft and Pokemon are sold and traded for significant amounts of real-world cash. In the wildly popular Roblox online world, pre-teens eagerly programme and share games, virtual clothes, and virtual houses to earn an imaginary currency, Robux, with a real-world exchange rate set by the Roblox parent company.

Some gamers have invested thousands to purchase spaceships for the online game Star Citizen, even though the game has yet to be released — the virtual spaceships are themselves funding development of the game. And we now have “Decentraland”, a 3D virtual world in which you can own “land” and “objects” in the same way one can offline, thanks to the blockchain technology of NFTs, which immutably declares who owns what.

So far, virtual goods in games have been confined to their online universes — you could spend $7,000 on a World of Warcraft elf, but you couldn’t take it out of the game. NFTs remove that limitation, allowing one to proudly declare ownership of a virtual hat across the entire metaverse. This Brave New World may not be more immersive than the current internet, but it will be more acquisitive, more possessive, and more status-conscious.

Viral competition has already proven to be a moneymaker: at one point, Facebook drew 30% of its revenue from Zynga’s Farmville and its clones, games that exploited social competition to encourage users to pay for virtual crops. Roblox and Decentraland are blueprints for how Meta and Microsoft hope to turn the whole world into Farmville. Just as the internet monetised personal information to better target advertising, the metaverse will monetise online interaction by having your friends do the advertising to you. Who wants to be the last on their virtual block to have a virtual mansion?

The result will be the monetisation of identity, something already visible in the burgeoning industries of paying for instruction on how to be patriotic, how to be anti-racist, how to be Christian, how to be eco-conscious. The metaverse seeks to make money off of less-loaded aspects of identity by fostering intra-group solidarity through purchases. As sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto.”

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In the metaverse, everyone can potentially be a seller and advertiser in addition to a buyer, yet the power will chiefly lie with the companies. They will exert significant influence over group standards of conduct and will have a greater ability to steer those standards in profitable directions. (The metaverse will also offer malicious actors far greater ability to pervert those standards, but that is a whole different can of worms.) In the run-up to the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) restricted all its users from forwarding private messages to more than five people.

The goal, evidently, was to stop “harmful” content, probably political, from exploding across tight in-groups within Facebook’s user population. Such blanket restrictions are indeed effective by their very nature, but imagine what they would mean in the metaverse: private online groupings could be prohibited by their hosting platform (Meta or Microsoft, say) from sharing particular content, encouraged to share more innocuous content, or simply barred from interacting in certain ways.

Yet group affiliations are strong, and aggrieved groups have a way of sticking together against the powers that be. Online life, above all, offers one the chance to pick their tribe, their gang, their comrades. Offline we are limited geographically in our affiliations, but online, you can scour the world for your crowd. The explosion of conspiracy theories, extremism, and a general distrust of any elite opinion is not a consequence of individual bad actors online, but the simple ability, brought to us by the internet, to find people who share and reinforce our opinion, no matter what that opinion may be. The metaverse will supercharge these trends. Where people formerly congregated in Facebook groups, Reddit groups, or blog chats, they will now find cozy virtual spaces in which they can be welcomed.

Offline life will not be more “real” than the metaverse, merely less affirming. There will be even less need to congregate with those who disagree with you in the slightest if, by going online, one can not only exchange words with identically-minded individuals, but can gain all the reassuring benefits of human interaction with them.

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There’s a cost to pay as well. The price of group homogeneity in any regard (ideological, cultural, demographic) is a far greater rejection of deviation. Urbanisation and immigration may have caused melting-pot tendencies in the last century, but the metaverse offers previously unthinkable possibilities for undoing the heterogeneity of modern life, separating us out into monocultural strata in which every hobbyist subculture, every sub-Marxist movement, and every sexual fetish can easily find mutual affirmation. Individuality will dissolve into the unified mindset of one’s chosen monocultures. Once having joined a stratum, members will naturally play down their differences in favour of their commonalities, to the point that they forget those differences.

The result will not be a melting-pot but a disconnected patchwork. Conformity will no longer be a meaningful concept because we will be able to conform to anything. You can pick whatever social norms you’d like to follow, but having chosen them you will follow them to the utmost. No group will feel big enough to be confident of its dominance; each group will police its boundaries rigidly, forming a kaleidoscope of what anthropologist Mary Douglas defined as latent groups. Each will feel threatened by some number of others, just as the Left and the Right are both equally convinced today that the other is winning.

In the metaverse, we will not be alone. But some of us will wish we could be.

I’d argue it has to be something that makes a big, enduring and noticeable difference to the way most of us live and work.

My parents’ and grandparents’ generations lived through many such revolutions. The car, the telephone, the washing machine, radio, TV, the refrigerator, air travel, natural gas, central heating, antibiotics, motorways… it’s a long list .

In terms of direct personal experience, I’ve lived through just two – the internet and mobile phones. Other advances don’t really make the cut. This might be because they’re improvements on an established technology (e.g. safer jet aircraft) or because they’re not significant enough (e.g. the microwave) or because, though important, they haven’t altered day-to-day life for most people (e.g. renewable energy).

Obviously, this all depends on context – for instance, a solar panel could have a revolutionary impact on someone in a developing country who’s never had access to electricity before. But, if we limit the context to people of ordinary means in a developed country, what might be about to change our world?

Obviously, there’s a lot of excitement around AI (artificial intelligence) right now – which promises a whole sequence of revolutionary developments. However, when it comes to the next big thing, Benedict Evans makes a strong case for AR (augmented reality).

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He compares the development of AR to that of the multitouch smartphone, and suggests that the stage at which AR is now is equivalent to where multitouch was in the run-up to the 2007 launch of its breakthrough commercial product – the Apple iPhone.

But, first of all, some definitions: Augmented reality is like virtual reality (VR) in that it’s a display technology that you wear in front of your eyes like a pair of goggles or, ideally, a pair of glasses; the key difference is that you can see through it into the real world, with digital images overlayed on top of your ‘natural’ view. These images can be simple – for instance, text that labels the locations you’re looking at or an arrow to provide directions. A more advanced version might display 3D animations or even hyper-realistic simulations – in effect a mash-up of the real world and computer-generated elements that is sometime called ‘mixed reality’.

A few years ago Google attempted to launch an AR product called Google Glass. It wasn’t exactly a resounding success. Like the not-smart-enough-phones that launched before the iPhone, the technology wasn’t quite ready to change the world. Evans explains why the coming wave of AR products might succeed where Google Glass failed :

“…with what one might call ‘true AR’, or, perhaps ‘mixed reality’, the device starts to have some awareness of your surroundings, and can place things in the world such that if you suspend disbelief you could imagine that they’re really there. Unlike Google Glass, the headset will do 3D mapping of your surroundings and track your head position all the time. That would make it possible to place a ‘virtual TV’ on a wall and have it stay there as you walk around, or make the whole wall a display.”

In other words, good AR enables you to see what you want to see – and not as a distracting image hovering in your face, but as an apparently real object at an appropriate depth and location within your field of vision:

“This is the real augmentation of reality – you’re not just showing things in parallel to the world but as part of it. Your glasses can show you the things that you might look at on a smartphone or a 2000 inch screen, but they can also unbundle that screen into the real world, and change it.”

Will augmented reality be so convincing as be indistinguishable from, er, real reality? Probably not in the immediate future, but then it won’t have to be. It would be like a pair of decent headphones, which might not convince you that you’re actually at a live music performance – but nevertheless provides an auditory experience that is worthwhile in itself and, in some respects, superior by comparison. At the very least the headphones provide an acceptable substitute for a fixed and bulky sound system.

If AR can do the same for the primary human sense, i.e. vision – providing what Ben Evans calls an “infinite screen” – then that really would be a revolution.

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Screens are quite literally the focus of modern life. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, TVs , electronic displays of every kind – all could be replaced and carried around wherever we go by high quality AR. That in itself is a huge deal and would profoundly disrupt the IT sector.

The full implications go much further than that, of course – but AR could be as commercially consequential as multitouch smartphones were in the previous decade. Whether today’s tech giants stay top of the tree like Apple, or get squashed like certain other companies, may come down to their ability to make you see things. 

Then the prosaic reality of Windows and FaceBook kicked-in, and we realised that the internet was basically just an electronic version of our filing cabinets and photo albums – useful or even addictive, but hardly a world of its own.

But that is changing fast. Piece-by-piece we are building a parallel world in truly remarkable detail. And it’s no game. For instance, you wouldn’t expect much mucking about in a German factory – but as an Economist report from a Siemens facility makes clear, virtual reality is being put to productive use:

“…there is another factory, a virtual version of the physical facility that resides within a computer system. This digital twin is identical in every respect and is used to design the control units, test them, simulate how to make them and program production machines. Once everything is humming along nicely, the digital twin hands over to the physical factory to begin making things for real.”

Using this technology, one can modify the digital twin to see how changes to its real world counterpart would work out. Assuming enough computing power, one could also fast-forward the simulation to predict what might happen to the original at a given point in the future – for instance, which machine parts might malfunction first.

Furthermore, components within each simulation could be copied and incorporated into other simulations:

“The spread of digital twins could shake up supply chains. For example, suppliers could be asked to submit a digital twin of their product so that it can be tested in a manufacturer’s virtual factory before an order is placed.”

Presumably, there must come a point at which the exchange of content merges the individual simulations into one giant simulation.

For the moment these digital twins are of objects – from simple products to complex machinery. But what about digital twins of real people?

In a feature for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mitchell Waldrop writes about the use of ‘agent-based models’ – computer simulations of human societies:

“These artificial societies contain thousands or even millions of subroutines, each representing individual people moving through virtual landscapes while behaving in more or less human ways. Modelers can simulate real-world geography and transportation networks; realistic populations that have the right distribution of ages, genders, and jobs; and details about who comes into contact with whom: ‘the entire social structure of households, hospitals, and workplaces’ says Ira Longini, a statistician and modeler at the University of Florida in Gainesville.”

Waldrop’s main focus is on the use of agent-based models to predict and combat the spread of highly infectious diseases like ebola. However, agent-based models are also being used closer to home – for instance, by the Bank of England:

“In November 2016, Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, took his discipline to task for failing to anticipate major events, such as the financial collapse of 2007-2008: the economic analog of a global pandemic. A big part of the problem, he said, was that his colleagues typically modeled swings in the economy using equations that focused only on global factors such as interest rates, while ignoring… individual human differences and interactions. Instead, they should be building on decades of academic research that has produced agent-based models of issues such as innovation, inequality, and the stability of the financial system.”

The Bank has already developed two agent-based models – one for the housing market and one for the bond market.

As things stand, the sub-routines representing the individual humans within each model are fairly simple. After all, the purpose of such models is to predict broad outcomes at a population level. But what happens as programming techniques become more sophisticated – allowing the sub-routines to develop into digital twins of real people, informed by data pulled in from social media sites and public sector records?

In an agent-based model owned by a prospective employer, your digital twin would be like a walking, talking CV (or résumé) with a mind of its own (or, rather, the semblance of one). How would you like to have your virtual self tried-out in a simulated workplace? Or what about an agent-based model operated by a crime-fighting agency? What if your ‘twin’ starts misbehaving in one of those?

One would hope that that the predictive limitations of such models would be understood. But the real issue isn’t whether they should be believed, but whether they are believed.