The Times Magazine 17he first time I go into the
metaverse, sort of, I come across
a group of completely cartoonish
men standing around outside
a Smashing Pumpkins concert,
bickering about Covid and
racism. Then I pretend to smoke
a cigarette. “This,” I think to
myself, “feels very familiar.”
I can tell they are men because
I can hear their voices. Visually they are
avatars, disembodied from the waist up and
looking a bit like Lego Friends. Back in the
real world of meat, they could be anyone.
They will be at desks, in beds, on sofas or
perhaps just standing gormlessly in the middle
of rooms, waving their arms around.
They will be wearing virtual-reality goggles,
as I am. And they may also, as I am, be caught
between being hugely impressed at what the
technology can now do – blown away, really- and slightly wondering as to the point.
“You wanna smoke, man?” says a youth in
a beanie hat, and his hand comes towards me
as if holding an invisible fag.
“Thanks,” I say, and I pretend to take it and
puff on it, because this seems polite.
“Well, pass it on,” he says irritably, and
I apologise and do so. Hell, I hope it was just
a cigarette.
Near by, an older-looking guy – fussy
English voice; white; smart beard; preppy
professor stylings – is expounding on some
theory about the Omicron variant and why
it came from South Africa.
“This just got real serious,” says a black guy
with a goatee, who sounds delighted.
“If we were all in an elevator,” says a
white man in a baseball cap, with a voice
from the American Deep South, “white, black,
whatever? We would not be talking. Period.”
“Well, exactly,” says somebody else. “And
we don’t want to bring all that into this world.”
Everybody nods their cartoon heads
approvingly, and I look up at the big sign on
a nearby pillar that warns us we are being
watched to make sure we don’t do anything
vicious or inappropriate. And I wonder why
in the real world – on Oxford Street, say - that is something we don’t seem to need.
In July, Mark Zuckerberg declared that
Facebook, parent company of the social
network, was to become a “metaverse
company”. In October, Facebook changed its
name to “Meta”. Most people probably hadn’t
heard the word metaverse before. Many, I
expect, still aren’t wholly sure what it means.
The term comes from Neal Stephenson’s novel
Snow Crash, where it refers to linked online
spaces together making a virtual universe.
Exactly what that means, though, is harder
to pin down than you might imagine. Having
consulted a variety of broadly unsatisfactorypre-existing definitions, and given this some
thought of my own, I reckon I’ve got this.
Ready? For something to be part of the
metaverse, it must be an online space a) in
which you can interact, and b) that exists in
some sense even while you aren’t in it.
Or, to put that another way, while a virtual-
reality experience like the one I described is
definitely happening in the metaverse, not
all VR is in the metaverse and not all the
metaverse is VR. You might be playing a
deeply immersive VR computer game, for
example, which leaves you believing you are
standing on a spaceship with Darth Vader,
but it’s not the metaverse if it all blinks out
of existence when you press the off button.
By contrast, the lowliest comment thread
under an article is kind of the metaverse,
because it sits there, existing, with other people
in it, whether you’re looking or not. That’swhy, up top, I said it was my first journey into
the metaverse, “sort of”. Because, in a sense,
I already spend half my life in it via Twitter,
Facebook and all the rest. And they’re usually
talking about Covid and racism there too.The second time I go into the metaverse, sort
of, I am sexually molested and so is my friend
Jeremy. We’re on the way to a Billie Eilish gig
in the Horizon Venues app. Made by Oculus,
which is owned by Facebook, it’s one of the
first proper sociable VR spaces. Long ago
Jeremy was my deputy on this newspaper’s
gossip column, so he seemed like the perfect
sidekick for a pixellated night out. Also, I was
in his real-world kitchen the other day and
I spotted he had just bought a headset.
Metaversally, he’s not looking his best. To
enter the various Horizon experiences, you need
to build yourself an avatar, as mentionedT
this is My chAncE to LEAd thE kind of WiLd LifE
i’d bE LoAth to AdMit to A rEAL-WorLd friEnd
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Rifkind with Cristiano
Ronaldo. Oculus Quest 2 VR
headset, selfridges.com