IRL.
This acronym has become shorthand for the regular, offline human existence in which we all participate, a realm lying outside of that new digital alternative to which investors, entrepreneurs and media commentators are increasingly drawn: the metaverse.
โIn real lifeโ evokes a place where our bodies are physically present, one in which we actually live. It also implies, by extension, that the metaverse is unreal.
That might seem perfectly logical to you. If so, Ben Hunt is here to tell you youโre wrong.
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The always thought-provoking essayist, whose writings at Epsilon Theory have brought poetry, philosophy and communication theory to the analysis of economic and financial phenomena, has penned a tour de force โ the first of a three-part series โ that calls on us all to urgently address whatโs happening with the metaverse. Why? Because itโs as real as everything and anything that defines our civilization.
Hunt tells us to focus on the narrative-building work thatโs starting to give the metaverse shape in our minds. Itโs related to an idea weโve often visited in Money Reimaginedโs newsletter and podcast: that the institutions that define who we are and how we live โ our religions, nations, laws, identities and, yes, our money โ are social constructs, the product of shared stories that we all tacitly and often subconsciously believe in. Like Yuval Harari โ whose work on the power of stories I often cite โ he knows that, far from being a reason to doubt their legitimacy, the collective belief in made-up ideas is what gives these institutions their power.
Still, as powerful as these narratives are, they can change. They can be supplanted by new ones. Author Neil Gaiman said, โIdeas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.โ Hunt reminds us that โslavery used to be a thing. Settling your differences through dueling used to be a thing. The divine right of kings used to be a thingโ and that โLittering was not a thing. Owning pets was not a thing. Privacy was not a thing.โ
Heck, 30 years ago โthe internetโ wasnโt a thing. And by that I donโt mean the routers, switches, fiber-optic cables and Wi-Fi modems that connect computers and enable the distribution of bits and bytes. I mean the abstract โplaceโ where public discourse happens, where new forms of communities arise, where life is monitored, assessed and acted upon. That internet is a concept we collectively dreamed into existence.
Similarly, the metaverse will come to occupy a prominent, influential place in our imagination.
This wonโt happen instantaneously. Its shape, meaning and impact on our lives will evolve over time โ an evolution that individual human beings can and will influence.
Hunt offers an analogy here: Our future engagement with the metaverse could mimic how, with the help of science, we came to accept the real existence of an unseeable โmicroverse:โ that realm of viruses, parasites and other microbes that weโve since learned how to manipulate, sometimes in sinister ways.
He warns of the internet equivalent of gain-of-function research, where scientists have developed the power to alter the genetic mutation of microorganisms, singling out Facebookโs Mark Zuckerberg as someone with an outsized (and unwarranted) capacity to steer the evolutionary direction of the metaverse. Itโs up to us, Hunt writes, to ensure that this emerging real phenomenon serves humanityโs broad interest.
A real alien lifeform
Much of this way of thinking is familiar to me. I was lucky enough a few years back to be asked by digital media entrepreneur Oliver Luckett to be his co-author for โThe Social Organism,โ a book that views social media as a de facto biological phenomenon. Luckett helped me see that just as genes drive biological evolution, so, too, is the evolution of human culture shaped by memes. This is more than Twitter ideas shaping conversation. Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of memes in his 1975 book โThe Selfish Geneโ to posit that the spread of human ideas flows from competition between these core โunits of replication.โ The Social Organism argues that the internet has taken this process into overdrive.
Huntโs essay takes that biological reference even further.
โNarratives are as real and as alive as you and me,โ he writes. โWhen I say that narratives are alive, I donโt mean this as a metaphor. I truly believe that narratives are an alien lifeform in exactly the same way that viruses are an alien lifeform.โ
Narratives are an alien lifeform? Note that Hunt is using the word โalienโ to mean something thatโs incomprehensible to us initially. Both narratives and viruses, he says, arenโt โobservable or easily comprehensible within the human-scale macroverse โ the familiar world of Newtonian physics and multicellular DNA-based organisms where all us humans, past, present and future, live out our lives.โ
Just as we learned to view viruses and the microverse as real, so, too, will the metaverse eventually become part of our accepted reality. Whatโs at stake is who or what controls it, which is why this early narrative-forming phase is so important.
As we explored in last weekโs column, whether or not blockchain technology is an integral part of this new iteration of the web, the bigger issue is whether we make the same mistakes of the โWeb 2โ era and allow centralized corporate entities shape โWeb 3โ in their interests rather than those of the general public.
Read more: A Crypto Guide to the Metaverse
Hunt zeroes his focus on Zuckerberg, whose renaming of Facebook as โMetaโ should be seen as an early salvo in the battle to shape the metaverse narrativeโs evolution. It seems like there may be more to come on this topic in the second part of Huntโs Epsilon Theory trilogy, which is entitled โNarrative and Metaverse, Pt. 2: Gain of Function.โ
The essayistโs take is not fatalistic. We can resist these outsized forces of control. But it is vital that we can recognize them and are ready to fight back.
โThis is the battle of our lives,โ Hunt writes. โThis is always the battle of all human lives. The past, present and future of human freedom is not determined in the macroverse but in the metaverse, and it is here where we must make our stand. First we will write the words to see the metaverse. Then we will write the songs to change it.
โClear eyes. Full hearts. Canโt lose.โ
