The Times Magazine 19above. I spent a while on mine. It looks roughly
like me but has a nose ring, because what’s the
point in forging a new identity if you can’t
incorporate a small midlife crisis? Jeremy has
long hair and a beard, in that world and this.
Unfortunately, the long hair he selected here
came atop a torso that, in his haste, he didn’t
notice had quite large breasts. Obviously, one
of the great boons of alternate realities is that
we shall all no longer be confined to the
earthly repressive bonds of sex and gender,
and hooray for that. Although here and now,
he only looks like Dana International because
essentially he got dressed in a rush.
I don’t think that’s why we get sexually
molested, but you never know. There we are,
standing around in a courtyard, being eagerly
shouted at by some random Spanish people,
when this fairly creepy-looking bald guy runs
up, bends double and starts pumping his
cartoon hands at our cartoon crotches.
“Woah,” I say. “Are you seeing this?”
“Yes,” says Jeremy, and he tries to punch
the bald man in the face. Somehow, though,
being virtually punched in the face is a lot
less impactful than being virtually sexually
molested. So I’m not sure he particularly minds.
This sort of thing is going to be a problem for
the metaverse. You know all those signs I told
you about on the walls? That’s why they’re here.
“Privacy and safety need to be built into
the metaverse from day one,” said Zuckerberg,
discussing the company’s pivot in a slightly
weird Facebook video in October.
This might seem uncontroversial. What it
highlights, though, is a conflict at the heart of
the internet itself that will grow increasingly
pronounced as the internet, via the metaverse,
comes to resemble reality. Because privacy
and safety, well, aren’t they two different
things? Theoretically we could have reported
our sexual molester and he could have been
identified, because in order for him even to
be in that world he will have been using a
registered headset linked to a Facebook
account. Only, whither his privacy then?
In the case of a molester, well, who cares?
Maybe the appeal of virtual worlds for you is to
live a wild, hedonistic life of the sort you’d be
loath to admit to your closest real-world friend.
Indeed, while writing this piece I had an email
from somebody (I think by chance) who wanted
me to write about metaverse porn, involving,
and I quote, the “first interactive action game
that has full-on sex scenes that integrate via
responsive sex toys via Bluetooth”.
Actually, I don’t believe this quite qualifies
as metaverse at all, unless there are actual
sex workers on the other end, which raises a
whole bunch of issues both ethical and legal.
Either way, would you really want to start off
by linking up with your Facebook account?
“Not everybody wants their social media
profile linked to all these other experiences,”
was how Zuckerberg put it. Hmmm, you think?Anyway, back to that Billie Eilish gig. She’s not
an avatar. She’s a pre-recorded film on a huge
screen. It’s OK. We stand around, Jeremy and
I, chatting and watching. At the heart of the
pandemic, when I hadn’t left my house in two
months, I can see how doing this with a bunch
of friends would have been a refreshing delight.
Here and now, though, it’s a bit annoying. The
real me is on the sofa at home, with a real
beer on a real coffee table next to me, but I
obviously can’t see the beer so I keep nearly
knocking it over. It’s also quite hard to drink
with a headset on. By coincidence, the last time
I saw Jeremy in the real world we went to a gig
(the Jesus and Mary Chain at the Roundhouse
in Camden). Which, it is impossible not to
conclude, was quite a lot better.
It’s only once I leave, or hang up or
whatever you want to call it, that I realise I’ve
actually just been doing what my kids have
been doing for years. Both of them adore an
online game called Roblox, based around a
virtual world. Of a weekend, they meet up with
friends on there while simultaneously skyping
them so they can chat. At the lowest points of
lockdown, it was their only social contact.
As of last year, Roblox had more than
164 million users, including half of all children
under 16 in the USA. It has been around since
2006 and it wasn’t even the first (Second Life
was three years earlier) and aside from the
way it’s not usually played with a VR headset
on (although it can be), it’s almost exactly what
old codgers like me and Mark Zuckerberg
have suddenly started calling the future.Brands are suddenly all over the metaverse,
although I’m not sure that many of them
really know why. On Roblox you can go into
Nikeland, a Nike-sponsored virtual worldy
game. Sotheby’s has a metaverse site, although
having visited it, I’m not wholly clear how it
differs from what we used to call “a website”.
The fashion world has gone particularly
nuts for the metaverse, inspired by the ideaof people buying virtual things to wear in
virtual worlds. In Roblox alone, players
have spent $1.5 billion to date on owning the
right accessories. At the end of November,
Alessandro Michele, the creative director of
Gucci, appeared in avatar form on Roblox to
present the first ever British Fashion Council
award for Metaverse Design, which was won
by somebody calling themselves cSapphire,
who makes Roblox clothes. Other nominees
included Genkroco, who has sold more than
30 million hairstyles. Have you any idea what
I’m talking about? Have I?
There’s obviously a heavy whiff of bullshit
about all this, although given that we’re
talking about the fashion world I expect it
barely touches the sides. Integral to much
of this is the idea of NFTs, or non-fungible
tokens, which are items – often artworks- that only exist online but you can buy for
real money. Earlier this year, an artist called
Beeple sold a collage called Everydays: the First
5000 Days for $69.3 million.
To my mind the whole concept of NFTs
is preposterous, but they start to make a lot
more sense in the context of the metaverse.
On its own, an NFT pair of shoes is pretty
pointless. Once your little avatar can wear
them in Roblox, they’re a tiny bit less
pointless. And by the time you put on the
goggles and feel like you are wearing your
shoes to a gig or a meeting, then they are
barely pointless at all. Your virtual NFT art
hangs on the wall of your virtual house. No,
I’m not totally sure why that’s better than just
having a photo of it either. But you could say
the same about the actual Mona Lisa.
The new aim of Facebook – sorry, Meta – is
to be the platform that underpins all this once
we are all doing it all the time. The company
bought Oculus, which makes headsets, back in- The latest Oculus model – and the last
under that name before it changes to Meta
too – has sold ten million units. Other brands
exist, but none has sold anything like so many.
Most, I expect, have been played with a bit
and now languish in drawers, although as
long ago as 2017, the porn site Pornhub was
claiming that its free VR videos were being
watched by half a million people a day.
Meta, though, wants them to become a
daily tool, for fun but also for work. To see
what that is like I set up a meeting with the
Times science editor, Tom Whipple, via
Horizon Workrooms, which is basically Meta’s
VR answer to Zoom. It doesn’t go altogether
well. I’m sitting there, again as my nose-ringed
avatar, in my own Horizon Workrooms
i GiVE My AVAtAr A nosE rinG. WhAt’s thE point of
A nEW idEntity Without A sMALL MidLifE crisis?
A less than successful Horizon
Workrooms meeting with a
Times colleague