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.

This was a problem. For a while I tried a bleached-blonde mohawk — I looked like a prat, but you couldn’t fault the commitment. A chin-only beard was a nice idea, but I was not a hirsute teen and after several months’ growth I looked as though I had a tennis ball made of pubes stapled to my chin. But, of course, the obvious option for the wavy-haired metaller is to go full skinhead, and that is what I did: buzzcut, grade zero. 

In 1998, aged 17, three friends and I went to OzzFest at the Milton Keynes Bowl. It was a heavy metal festival organised by Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath; it had various luminaries of the metal scene playing, including Fear Factory, Slayer and Pantera. My scalp was freshly shorn. It was a blazing hot day; I was too young and self-conscious to want to show weakness by applying suncream, and, of course, I was drinking and smoking weed all day, because that is what you do at a festival when you’re 17. 

On my second or third venture into the moshpit, the physical activity, and the drink and weed, and of course the relentless sun on my gleaming bonce, became too much for me, and I started to faint. Fainting in the middle of a large moshpit is not a very good idea. Luckily, a group of skinheaded young men spotted me going pale, grabbed me by the arms, and cleared a path out of the crowd for me. I like to think they were doing so out of solidarity.

I’ve been thinking about metal lately, because recently, one of the formative albums of my youth turned 30 years old. Metallica’s self-titled album, also known as The Black Album, was released in August 1991. I graduated slowly from rock to metal in my teenage years, going from Queen to Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam, to Metallica and Faith No More, and eventually Pantera, Carcass and Fear Factory. It was probably The Black Album which did as much as anything to push me along that route. And Metallica were the first band I saw live, at Earls Court in 1996.

It’s probably not so true nowadays, but in my youth metal still had a hint of danger about it. Men wearing make-up and long hair was still mildly shocking to people who remembered the 1950s, and a lot of people still did back then. When the Columbine massacre happened in 1999, conservative voices blamed it on Marilyn Manson (and the video game Doom, something else I spent a lot of my youth playing). Not that long earlier, there was a serious societal concern that heavy metal was encouraging Satanism among American youth. Geraldo Rivera made a documentary saying that heavy metal encouraged devil-worship.

You can see why: the metal aesthetic is blood and skulls. If you go to a death metal festival, you’ll notice something: all the band logos look exactly the same. They’re bone-coloured, illegibly stylised writing on a black background. (Apart from the heroic Party Cannon, of course.) 

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If you listen to heavy metal lyrics, especially the 1980s and 1990s, Metallica-heyday era ones, they’re usually about things that Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer fans would recognise. Monsters, battles, that sort of thing. Three Metallica songs are about Cthulhu, the sleeping elder god from HP Lovecraft’s fiction. “Enter Sandman”, one of their biggest hits, sings about “Dreams of war, dreams of liars/ Dreams of dragon’s fire/ And of things that will bite.” They have a song about werewolves.

And the Satanic panic people were partly right: there are lots of songs about devils and demons. Slayer, one of the popular beat combos I saw on that warm Milton Keynes afternoon, has a pentagram logo and lots of songs with titles like “Angel of Death”, “Hell Awaits”, and “Black Magic”. Oh, and “The Antichrist”. You could see how that might mislead people into thinking that they had a thing for this Satan character. Lots of metal is aggressive or violent in content: bands with names like Cannibal Corpse or Bloodbath, songs with names like “Hammer Smashed Face” or “A Skull Full of Maggots”.

But from the inside, metal feels nerdy and warmhearted. Metal gigs have always, to me, had the sort of vibe of a classic car meet or a real-ale festival: a place for slightly socially awkward people to find a social group outside the mainstream. The aggressive image it projects is at odds with the rather gentle souls you actually meet doing it. This was particularly made clear to me when I went to Download festival in 2015 and asked lots of metallers for their musical guilty pleasures, and came back with lovely photos of pierced, tattooed, bearded thrashers holding up whiteboards saying “C’est la Vie by B*witched” or “Katy Perry, Firework”.[1. I recommend the Spotify playlist we made of everyone’s choices. It’s really pure and wholesome and fun.] And everyone was super lovely. 

Philly Byrne, the lead singer of the well-respected thrash metal band GAMA Bomb, agreed: there’s a nerdy stripe to metallers that you don’t get quite so much in other genres. “The thing I say is that metalheads in reality are librarians,” he says. “There are things you can just be into, and that’s fine: with dance music, it’s fine to just be into it. But with metal it’s expected that you’ll know lots and lots. You’ll have knowledge and experience. You’ll collect old LPs, you’ll get patches on your jacket. It’s more like real ale fans or cinema nerds: they’re quite dad-ly, they have a soft edge to them.” 

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Metal is, in fact, full of the sort of people who play Dungeons & Dragons (another Satanic Panic victim!): nerdy, often (but not always) male, somewhat obsessive. And similar to Warhammer, the fire-and-death ethos is at odds with the geeky, friendly reality. (The metal band Bolt Thrower, incidentally, sang mainly about Warhammer. It’s like a crossover episode of my favourite things.)

You don’t get into metal as a teenager if you want to be one of the mainstream cool kids. You get into it if, like me, you’re not quite sure if you can pull off being one of the mainstream cool kids, so you look for a solid identity elsewhere. Those skinheaded lads who rescued me from collapse in the moshpit were probably gentle-hearted nerds trying to find their way in the world, like I was.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t awful people and bad things in metal. The Norwegian black metal scene has two actual murderers (1, 2), and the aggressive image spills over into reality on very rare occasions. More prosaically, it’s quite insular: a certain amount of gatekeeping goes on over who counts as real metal or who counts as a real fan. I remember ambiguous feelings when “my” bands, bands like Metallica or Faith No More, appeared on TFI Friday or Top of the Pops: on the one hand, the normies get to see how great they are; on the other, they’re mine. But on the whole, it’s a place of gentle souls, a place for the awkward and weird who didn’t quite fit the mainstream. 

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Plus, metal is one of Britain’s greatest exports. A disproportionate number of the first real heavy metal bands – Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Mötörhead, Saxon, Venom – were or are British: often from working-class Midlands backgrounds. Understandably that has meant that it is predominantly a white genre – but only predominantly. “I’ve played all over the world,” says Byrne. “I’ve played in Japan and South America, I’ve played to an audience of Navajo people.” There’s a popular Mongolian metal band, the HU. There’s a thriving K-pop/metal crossover genre, led by BABYMETAL. It’s a global phenomenon, born in urban England in the 1970s.

I haven’t been to a metal gig for a while. Partly that’s getting older, partly it’s been the bloody pandemic, partly it’s because my job’s changed and it’s harder than it used to be to pretend that I write about music, so can I have free tickets please. And of course it’s parenthood: for a brief period I managed to get my son, then three, to say his favourite song was “Black Star” by Carcass, but now he’s seven and likes George Ezra. (My daughter likes Faith No More, so there’s still hope.)

But now that the UK is opening up a bit —Bloodstock went ahead only last weekend! — maybe I ought to get involved again. After all, Metallica are still going strong. The only trouble is that, as I learnt researching this piece, headbanging these days gives me a headache and my glasses fall off. And, of course, I still have the wrong sort of hair.

I will do what I swore I would only do again if civilization were actually coming to an end, because it very possibly is — which is an excellent excuse. I will re-activate my subscription to World of Warcraft. And I will ride forth once more on my creaky mechanical ostrich to do battle with dragons and ogres in the magical realm of Azeroth. I urge you, friends, to join me.

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. It takes place in a vast sub-Tolkien fantasy world of mages and warlocks, elves and rogues and warriors. It has its own market economy, and its own ecosystem of professions and careers. It has vast landscapes to explore — some of them very beautiful in a 1970s album-cover way — and enormous numbers of quests to fulfil and missions to run.

You start out as weak as a kitten, and as you “level up” by running errands, killing monsters, practising skills and collecting treasure, you grow in strength. It is fiendishly well calibrated to keep you playing. It’s wicked fun. Like bingeing on chocolate or cocaine: you know you’ll regret it but you can’t resist that tiny bit more. I know so many people who couldn’t bear to look at their “/played” number: the in-game log that tells you to the second how long you’ve spent in the game.

Every time you think you might just log off now and, I don’t know, go to bed or make some food or go out to the pub to meet flesh-and-blood human beings, you’ll catch sight of a non-player character flashing with the little yellow exclamation mark that indicates they have a quest for you. Or you’ll think: I’d best just go to the Auction House to flog what I don’t want from my latest haul of booty. Or you’ll think, gosh, if I just dig up another ten bars of platinum in this quarry I’ll have what I need to craft that nifty pair of gauntlets I’ve been craving. So on, for another ten minutes, you go… and another ten.. and another ten….

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And, happily, no death in Azeroth is forever. Every time a monster kills you, your ghost pops up in a nearby graveyard and you can hasten, incorporeally, back to your downed body to resurrect yourself. You can try that battle again, resume that quest, pick up where you left off. You’re always going forward, however slowly. It’s comforting in that way. It’s comforting in all sorts of ways.

MMORPGs are just what you thirst for in a global lockdown: they are a way of being less alone when you’re alone. Man, do I know this. I was addicted — I think it’s not too strong a word — to World of Warcraft back in the noughties, and I was kinda sad at the time. I was drinking too much and smoking too much and doing too many drugs. I still feel an almost physical queasiness remembering the comedown ends of my vampiric weeknight WoW sessions: a vermilion sun setting on another day in the supersaturated landscape of Azeroth, even as the real-world dawn greyed in the window of my south London flat.

Escapism? You bet. And yet it wasn’t just a retreat from reality. In the game I was able to connect with dear friends whom I seldom if ever saw in real life. One was in rural France. Another pair in California. I missed them, and my connection with them, and we met almost never in meatspace. And yet I spent more time with them online than I did with members of my close family in real life. We logged on and sought each-other out and talked through the in-game chat function. We were close. I felt bad about my addiction to WoW, but it also helped get me through.

It’s an addiction that I overcame. I can’t remember when I logged off for the last time and deleted my account. I can’t even remember why. I suspect it was something to do with getting a wife and children and finding the outside world a bit more tolerable than, for a while, I had. But delete it I did, and I haven’t gone back. And when I do, I wonder if it will feel like time-travelling back to rediscover myself in my early 30s.

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The relationship of WoW to human time is in any case somewhat strange. Even when you are logged off, Azeroth’s world continues to turn: sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, at the same rate as the world turns here. According to some calculations, the game’s 11 million-odd players have logged something like 6 million years of in-game experience between them. That is as long as it took us to evolve from our first upright ancestor to the humans we now recognise — humans who have invented fiat money, and air travel, and advanced medicine, and all those other things whose futures are now looking kinda shaky.

And it bears mentioning that World of Warcraft even has form when it comes to pandemic infectious disease. In September 2005, Blizzard (the company that owns and runs WoW) rolled out a new “raid” for high-level characters. A raid is an example of an “instance”, a stand-alone section of the game (a dungeon or a citadel or similar) designed for large groups of players to team up to defeat.

The final boss in this instance was a bad-tempered chap called Hakkar The Soulflayer. They rather go in for nominative determinism in WoW. It was distinctly possible to tell the difference between old Hakkar and a ray of sunshine; and when he was really pissed off, Hakkar would cast a spell called “Corrupted Blood”, which afflicted all players nearby with a “debuff”, draining them rapidly of health and making them prone to affect other players nearby with the same disease.

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Now here’s the thing. “Corrupted Blood” was never supposed to leave the instance. It was supposed to be specific to the final battle in the infernal dungeon of Zul’Gurub (or as we might now think of it, Azeroth’s Wuhan). But an oversight by programmers (characters’ pets could get infected, and if you stowed your infected pet in its virtual carry-case and left the instance the plague came with you) meant that very soon Corrupted Blood was all over Azeroth like a madwoman’s shit.

Lower-level characters who caught it dropped dead more or less on the spot (standing in, here, for the vulnerable elderly or those with comorbidities). Non player characters couldn’t die of it, but could be infected and pass it on (these became, if you like, the asymptomatic carriers). The cities emptied. Healers did what they could. The terroristically minded spread it for lols.

Various forms of quarantine were tried — and failed. Only when Blizzard reset the servers and patched the game was the outbreak eliminated. Academic epidemiologists — no word of a lie — subsequently made earnest studies of what the Corrupted Blood incident could tell us about real-world pandemics, and published their findings in learned journals worldwide. And now here we are: Corrupted Blood 2.0 is out in a world where death is permanent and nobody yet dares even to imagine what resetting the servers would look like. Hell with this. I’m going to wait it out in Azeroth.