the metaverse has leaped from science fiction and into our lives. Microsoft, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, have all made significant investments in virtual and augmented reality. Their approaches vary, but their goal is the same: to transform entertainment from something we choose, channel by channel or stream by stream or feed by feed, into something we inhabit.

Dwell in this environment long enough, and it becomes difficult to process the facts of the world through anything except entertainment. We’ve become so accustomed to its heightened atmosphere that the plain old real version of things starts to seem dull by comparison. A weather app recently sent me a push notification offering to tell me about “interesting storms.” I didn’t know I needed my storms to be interesting. Or consider an email I received from TurboTax. It informed me, cheerily, that “we’ve pulled together this year’s best tax moments and created your own personalized tax story.” Here was the entertainment imperative at its most absurd: Even my Form 1040 comes with a highlight reel.

Such examples may seem trivial, harmless—brands being brands. But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial. In the metaverse, it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States.

the language of television has come to saturate the way Americans talk about the world around us. People who are deluded, we say, have “lost the plot”; people who have become pariahs have been “canceled.” In earlier ages, people attributed their circumstances to the will of gods and the whims of fate; we attribute ours to the artistic choices of “the writers” and lament that we may be living through America’s final season.

The rise of these hyperreal TV shows coincides with the decline of the institutions that report on the world as it is. The semi-fictions stake their claims while journalism flails.

what Susman called “personality”: charm, likability, the talent to entertain. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer,” Susman wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”That demand remains. Now, though, the value is not merely interpersonal charm, but the ability to broadcast it to mass audiences. Social media has truly made each of us a performing self. “All the world’s a stage” was once a metaphor; today, it’s a dull description of life in the metaverse

A person, simply trying to get from one place to another, is transformed into a reluctant star of a movie she didn’t know she was in. The dynamics are simple, and stark. The people on our screens look like characters, so we begin to treat them like characters. And characters are, ultimately, expendable; their purpose is to serve the story. When their service is no longer required, they can be written off the show.

The efforts to hold the instigators of the insurrection to account have likewise unfolded as entertainment. “Opinion: January 6 Hearings Could Be a Real-Life Summer Blockbuster,” read a CNN headline in May—the unstated corollary being that if the hearings failed at the box office, they would fail at their purpose. (“Lol no one is watching this,” the account of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted as the hearings were airing, attempting to suggest such a failure.)

In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the critic Neil Postman described a nation that was losing itself to entertainment. What Newton Minow had called “a vast wasteland” in 1961 had, by the Reagan era, led to what Postman diagnosed as a “vast descent into triviality.” Postman saw a public that confused authority with celebrity, assessing politicians, religious leaders, and educators according not to their wisdom, but to their ability to entertain. He feared that the confusion would continue. He worried that the distinction that informed all others—fact or fiction—would be obliterated in the haze.

Studying societies held in the sway of totalitarian dictators—the very real dystopias of the mid-20th century—Arendt concluded that the ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.

A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience.

In a functioning society, “I’m a real person” goes without saying. In ours, it is a desperate plea.

Be transported by our entertainment but not bound by it.

Decentralized blockchains eliminate middlemen. We live in an era of 30% app store take rates, opaque algorithms, and where an increasingly high volume of content competes for an ever-dividing audience for attention. An outsize amount of the value created on these networks gets siphoned away by the platforms themselves, and a similar degree of uncertainty abounds when it comes to the terms, services, and standards permitted by these platforms.

I’ve also seen a lot of users on Twitter asking “who is Horizon Worlds for?” And it’s a good question. I have an Oculus. Meta’s core metaverse platform, the thing that ostensively will be replacing Facebook soon as Meta’s main online portal, the central OS for the company’s VR world, is too boring for children, too complicated for old people, too time-consuming for anyone raising a family, and, though, it might eventually be good enough to function as some kind of inescapable cyberhell for white collar workers to have endless meetings inside of, at the moment it's hard to imagine a real use case for it. Except for one. I’ve come to conclusion that Meta’s metaversal aspirations are just a cold and cynical bet on a future where we just can’t go outside anymore. Meta’s big plan is to spend the next few years cobbling together something with enough baseline functionality that we can all migrate to it during the next pandemic. That’s the only explanation for the absolutely deranged amount of misplaced optimism Meta has about this stuff. This is a company who has decided they can make a lot of money off a catastrophic future by forcing us into their genital-free off-brand-Pixar panopticon and mining us for data while we Farmville ourselves to death.

The internet is a firehose. I don’t, myself, have 351 thousand unread emails, but when anyone can publish and connecting and sharing is free and frictionless, then there is always far more than we can possibly read. So how do we engage with that?

So your feed becomes a sample - an informed guess of the posts you might like most. This has always been a paradox of Facebook product - half the engineers work on adding stuff to your feed and the other half on taking stuff out. Snap proposed a different model - that if everything disappears after 24 hours then there’s less pressure to be great but also less pressure to read everything. You can let go. Tiktok takes this a step further - the feed is infinite, and there’s no pressure to get to the end, but also no signal to stop swiping. You replace pressure with addiction.

Another approach is to try to move the messages. Slack took emails from robots (support tickets, Salesforce updates) and moved them into channels, but now you have 50 channels full of unread messages instead of one inbox full of unread messages.

Screenshots are the PDFs of the smartphone. You pull something into physical space, sever all its links and metadata, and own it yourself.

Email newsletters look a little like this as well. I think a big part of the reason that people seem readier to pay for a blog post by email than a blog post on a web page is that somehow an email feels like a tangible, almost physical object - it might be part of that vast compost heap of unread emails, but at least it’s something that you have, and can come back to. This is also part of the resurgence of vinyl, and even audio cassettes.

The film-camera industry peaked at 80bn consumer photos a year, but today that number is well into the trillions, as I wrote here. That’s probably why people keep making camera apps with built-in constraints, but it also prompts a comparison with this summer’s NFT frenzy. Can digital objects have value, and can a signature add scarcity to a JPEG - can it make it individual?

there are now close to 5bn people with a smartphone, and all of us are online and saying and doing things, and you will never be able to read everything ever again. There’s an old line that Erasmus, in the 15th century, was the last person to have read everything - every book that there was - which might not have been literally possible but which was at least conceivable. Yahoo tried to read everything too - it tried to build a manually curated index of the entire internet that reached 3.2m sites before the absurdity of the project became overwhelming. This was Borges’s 1:1 scale map made real. So, we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and Futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.