Why the metaverse won’t make humans more connected
According to Mark Zuckerberg and some other pundits, the metaverse will us humans an ability to connect unlike ever before. We’ll get closer, become better friends and form entirely new communities. To some degree, yes, we will. But also not really. Eventually, humans may, but that is likely several generations, as in maybe a hundred years, away. There’s a simple reason for this, one eschewed by Tech Giants, hungry for another communications tool from which to charge us monthly fees to connect, or an annual plan that’s a little bit less.
Lest I sound like I’ve an axe to grind, no, I don’t. I’m quite interested to see how this metaverse rolls out. There could be some very beneficial outcomes and cool applications that help humans do some cool things, collaborate on solving problems and benefit us. But we should never forget that all technologies can be used for good and bad. It is not the technologies themselves that are bad, they are neutral. It’s how humans use them.
But the reason the metaverse won’t connect us the way it is being pitched is simply human physical and cognitive abilities in the real-world. Simply put, our brains haven’t adapted to this kind of social behaviour yet. Most digital products are designed to manipulate various aspects of human behaviour. Gamification to trigger our competitive reflexes. Eternal scrolling in apps like Twitter, TikTok or the Facebook feed because humans like when things end and will scroll to get to an end. Except there never is. Just don’t tell our brains that. Memes are designed to smack our reptilian brain like an assault, they are viruses with one command; “spread me.” There are other manipulations.
To truly develop relationships with one another, to form social bonds, humans need to establish trust. This is done in 3D, not 2D and it is done full-body. 3D avatars are far from capable of mimicking the twitch of an eye, the truth of a smile or a fake, the touch of a hand in a handshake. Verbal communication is only 30% of how we communicate with each other. The rest is subconscious and achieved through physical world non-verbal cues. In addition, a new skill we are learning and being taught, is how to recognize fake images.
As a digital anthropologist I’ve studied hundreds of online communities and researched how humans use and engage in social media, for over a decade. In the study of online communities, they are very fluid. Usually the core group of people, a founder or two of the group and the originating members, may stick around for a year or two, others will come and go, then they leave. The mechanism of reciprocity in forums and groups is information. As that information becomes of less benefit, people drift away. There is no permanence. In real-life, it is reciprocity of some form, plus rituals, such as community events, holidays and personal celebrations that we share in-person, not digitally, that shape a culture and build community bonds. No digital technology has been able to mirror that.
This is the hope of the metaverse, but the truth is, in evolutionary terms, our human brains just haven’t adapted yet. The metaverse can’t accelerate natural human evolution. Our current species, Homo Sapiens has been plodding around the earth around 200,000 years or so. Just adapting to walking on two legs took millions of years since we branched off from apes. Our bodies are still evolving, but we’ve scant evidence to show advances in cognition to the degree required to reach the desired level of interaction in the metaverse.
We humans are entering what I believe is the second biggest adaptation of our species, that is, the Cognitive Age. We are accelerating our development of tools that will augment our cognition; Artificial Intelligence, robotics, Virtual and Augmented Reality. With them we will do cool stuff. What we don’t know, is how our biology will adapt or how long that will take. Perhaps that is where BCI (Brain Computer Interface) technologies will come into play?
We must recognize that this is augmentation. That has limitations on the human psyche and the relationships we can form. Despite social media and the advancement of communications technologies over the past 20 years, our brains still respond in primal ways and our basic behavioural nature is manipulated to make us do things. That in itself proves the fallacy of the metaverse in the way it is being promoted. It is also why manipulating our basic biological behaviours works for digital products.
Digital technologies work at our most basic levels. Our brains needs to adapt, to somehow figure out how to have a relationship with more than 150 people. Something we still can’t do. To find new cues to form trust and bonds in a 2D simulated world, rather than this 3D world we stumble about in. And in evolutionary terms, we’ve had not even the fraction of a blink of an eye to do so.
Trust is of significant importance in forming and maintaining relationships and social networks. We’ve yet to solve the problem of passwords. Trust in digital technologies is very low right now. We’ve yet to figure that out too.
What will be fascinating to see, over the coming decades, is how human cognitive abilities will evolve, or if they will, with ideas like the metaverse. Humans have co-evolved with technology since we figured out how to use a twig to clean our ears. It’s called technogenesis. We’re on an interesting evolutionary path.
