KAKAPO

Meta (formerly Facebook) is currently the market leader in virtual reality. Their investment into Oculus and creation of Meta Rooms present us with a future of socialising in the virtual realm. It is impossible to know how effective this will be in the long term, or how engaging any given scenario will be. Whether it will be popular remains unknown, but scientists who specialise in VR, such as Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan (interviewed on page 20), warn of the severe consequences of sacrificing face-to-face contact for virtual socialisation: “I think any attempt to replace face-to-face interaction will cause problems which we can’t even imagine. Nobody thought Meta could have changed an election result, but it did, and more unexpected and scary things could happen if we move our conversations entirely online.” What can be guaranteed, as is the case with social media in its current form, is that VR’s success within social media will not depend on whether it is good for us, but more likely on how addictive it is.

The most dystopian vision of the implementation of VR in social media would see large sections of the population favour a virtual life over their ‘real life’ – a mass migration into the virtual. Simulation theory, an idea most popularly explained by Elon Musk, posits that we are already there. The argument is that it is highly unlikely that we currently exist within ‘base reality’, with the likelihood being that we are already living within a simulation. It would mean that we are software, probably buried within many other layers of software simulations. Simulation theory is evidenced by the trajectory of our technological development within simulated realities (computer games, VR, and social media). It’s based on the premise that another few hundred years of technological development, even at a much slower trajectory, will produce simulations that are indistinguishable from what we today refer to as real life.

It doesn’t matter whether simulation theory is real or not. If we are software, we’re already plugged in and, hypothetically speaking, there is enough here to get on with. We would be, and perhaps already are, by our very existence, the fabric of the illusion – existing inseparably from the spectacle. 2019 is a world in which old men play Candy Crush, and old ladies with dementia are comforted by robotic seal pups. Perhaps, one day, you will meet your deceased mother on a virtual beach, her consciousness preserved digitally. Momentarily expressed in the forms of horses, you will run together along the shoreline – anything is possible in the virtual realm.

The banality of everyday life is a powerful thing. Our proclivity for the mundane and simultaneous desire for a passive interface with the exotic is evident in our consumer choices: we live vicariously through platforms such as Netflix. However, a collective failure of almost all science fiction writers has been the radical underestimation of human beings’ ability to make the future instantly mundane (see the internet for examples of this). However, 21st-century Western banality has become so uniquely of itself that it sometimes collapses under its own weight and, in doing so, re-enters the world of the surreal or ‘hyper-real’. In his brilliant book, Only Americans Burn In Hell, Jarett Kobek points to the moment that Donald Trump became president of the United States as when the ‘hyper-real’ replaced the ‘real’. It was also the moment in which we collectively realised the power that social media held over our lives. We learnt that it could shatter our notions of truth and reshape our perceptions of reality. Even more alarmingly, it allowed others to reshape our ideas of truth and reality on a scale never before achieved.

‘Virtual’ only exists in any meaningful way when held in comparison to a ‘real’ counterpart. In this respect, social media provides simulations of social experience, engagements, and interactions, giving the user a sort of simulated socialisation. Consumer values combined with social media have commodified the basic aspects of human experience, addicting us to the pursuit of virtual meaning as a result of the gamification of our social lives. The former Vice President of User Growth at Meta, Chamath Palihapitiya, provided a concise summary of his guilt and dismay in a talk to Stanford University students: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”

There is a scientific consensus that social media is bad for us and is directly correlated to depression and anxiety, particularly amongst young people. More disturbing is social media’s link to teen suicide. Conceptually, the idea of a free global messaging platform for people to connect might not be a terrible one. However, filtered through a consumer-capitalist culture, the issues can be seen in both the platform’s behaviour towards its users and users’ behaviour towards each other and themselves. The algorithmic complexity of the platform, coupled with the deluge of data that we wilfully give over, means that we are easy fodder for predatory agendas. Whether they want us to buy some shoes or support a military dictatorship, go to Croatia on holiday or stop vaccinating babies – we seem to be susceptible in equal measure.

Culturally, we have been conditioned to mimic an ideal image of life that many of us have been soaked in from birth – there is no other explanation for the selfie face. The idea of viewing oneself as a brand is an entirely socially constructed phenomenon. It is not a controversial idea and is, instead, practised daily by hundreds of millions of people, both consciously and unconsciously (see Instagram for examples of this). Few people question why they post pictures of their holidays, their friends, pranks they play on their babies or other ‘good times’, but they all do it with a watchful audience in mind.

The subversive and overarching message that is continually expressed to social media users is that social communication is like a market transaction, a stock exchange, or a consumer purchase. While there is an inherent truth that we must give and receive in order to be socially successful, social media presents a simulation of social interaction through an addictive and gamified user interface. The worst part is that this experience, because it exists to serve a consumerist capitalist economy, as opposed to actual communication, has distorted social media’s value in our lives and so is replacing face-to-face communication. We have chosen virtual meaning over meaning.

Meta is an inherently exploitative and manipulative system that achieves its goals all too well. As computer scientist, author, and philosopher Jaron Lanier explained: “You see or watch a billboard or TV ad, but the advertisement doesn’t watch you.” This marks a vital distinction between social media and other more antiquated types of advertising. Social media relies entirely on third-party income, which it generates by using your data, and that data is then used to manipulate you more effectively. Are we too addicted to leave? Is the knife so sharp that we don’t feel it pierce the skin? Or is the causality between our social media use and our feeling of meaninglessness too abstract or subtle to piece together?

Perhaps this unspoken secret with regards to social media explains why people feel it is impossible to walk away. Walking away from social media would involve deleting our better selves; our PR-managed and carefully ‘curated’ timelines would be gone, and we would be isolated from our social groups. We have become attached to these avatars, which function as totems to all that we want to be, feel we should be, and want others to believe we are – we are keeping up with billions of Joneses in this respect. Losing our social media account would be like losing part of ourselves. We have transmogrified some aspect of who we are onto these avatars, so much so that we cannot live without them. Our accounts are the narratives we tell ourselves and others – a sort of parochial fake news, the most banal story ever told.

For many years, Western consumerism has seemed like a price worth paying for the luxury and ease that we are afforded. However, in most instances, it has been handed to us by ill-gotten means and exploitative methods. It seems that right now, we can acknowledge this aspect of our reality but are not ready to connect with it emotionally. Such is life; we will inevitably have to suffer consequences in one way or another. One of those consequences is to be manipulated for the most cynical reasons and, despite seeing the threat laid bare, carry on regardless.

This isn’t exclusively a human problem. Nature will turn any living creature into a soft, jelly-like variant of its otherwise full potential if things become too comfortable or if the landscape becomes too vacuous. Take the kakapo, for example, a green flightless parrot endemic to New Zealand. It has wings but cannot fly; they are too small and its body is too fat – either that, or it has forgotten. The kakapo is not particularly friendly, but it is undoubtedly curious – it is more likely to attempt to mate with you than flee. Despite (or perhaps because of) its indiscriminate randiness, it is a critically endangered species with approximately only 140 alive today. Its natural habitat had virtually no predators, but the European colonisation of New Zealand introduced many killers – cats, ferrets, humans (and, according to Wikipedia, rats) being chief among them.

The kakapo’s world was transformed, and it was thrust into a situation for which it was ill-prepared. It was (and is) an unfair environment, a game with the highest possible stakes that it has no chance of winning. In this spurious metaphor, social media is the new predator changing the face of our reality, and we (the kakapo) are a socially and biologically conditioned creature that is easy fodder for the algorithmic formulae designed to change our minds. For active users, Meta has been used to predict significant outcomes in our lives before we have even seen them coming. Such successful predictions include marital breakdowns and mental health issues.

The most surprising aspect of our social media use, and what links us most closely to the kakapo, is the fact that everybody still uses these knowingly harmful platforms. Kakapos witness their kind die at the hands of predators, and yet they cannot learn to evade the risk. It seems that our consumerist culture has bred in us a passivity and lust for ignorance that will be our ultimate downfall.