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There’s been no better exploration of the uplifting side of the metaverse than a recent People Make Games documentary titled Making Sense of VRChat, the "Metaverse" People Actually Like. The host, Quinton Smith of Shut Up & Sit Down fame, amiably describes a platform where users have created a bewildering variety of private spaces, including museums and libraries, a record shop where you can listen to everything in stock, fantasy kingdoms, and even an eerily accurate recreation of a late 1990s Kmart, complete with a photo booth. Notably, VRChat has provided a familiar efflorescence of socialization and expression for transgender people exploring their identities for the first time, disabled people who find freedom in VR, and furries and otherkin who’ve built dens for themselves and their kith. Smith’s interviews with people from all of these groups are quite touching, and a reminder of the power of online anonymity.
It reminded me of the internet I grew up with: IRC chatrooms, Neverwinter Nights private servers, a bewildering variety of BBCode forums, and LiveJournal. Each was a wholly different world, loosely yoked together by the Windows GUI and nothing more.
The metaverse in its current form resembles that early internet in a number of crucial ways: relative freedom, cellular communities devoted to niche interests, the ability to remain anonymous, platforms being multilayered rather than flat and conformity-inducing. The internet of GeoCities rather than the internet of Facebook.
Of course, there’s an ugly reality to that time period as well. As early as 1995, media scholar Lisa Nakamura was warning that utopian dreams of the internet erasing all inequalities and prejudice were vastly overhyped, noting that early online games like LambdaMOO evinced ugly racism, orientalism, and harassment. Yet it’s clear that the rationalizing, homogenizing, and imposition of corporate-hegemony over that old internet has not only failed to solve that problem, but allowed it to metastasize into a threat to democracy itself. Questions of online harassment are vital in today's metaverse, and made all the more urgent by ugly episodes of abuse, like a SumOfUs researcher who experienced what can only be described as a virtual gang rape in Meta’s Horizon World.
Despite the barrage of bad press, it’s worth remembering that the metaverse is not wholly owned by Meta (nee Facebook). The marketing sleight of hand in Facebook’s rebrand was an attempt, likely, to link the two entities in the public consciousness. But the reality is that the word “metaverse” describes all networked VR and AR experiences, regardless of who owns them. While much attention is understandably focused on Horizon World, what with Meta’s aspirations to make it an omnibus social media platform for all occasions, there are other planes. Though contemporary VR in the form of the metaverse is not a true new beginning—it is, after all, still deeply tied to the internet we already have—its dramatic shift in medium offers us the opportunity to do certain things over again.
We can transition to a more regulated space without losing the beauty, freedom, and creative spirit of this incarnation of virtual reality. It’s an opportunity to get it right this time. We can effect a shift to a more ethical regulatory framework that will curb the awful episodes we’ve witnessed already without snuffing out the beauty that Smith found in VRChat. In short, we need to prevent the metaverse from becoming the Planet of the Bored Apes.
