This is a semi-regular update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.

Current book word count: 152,831

Writing

As predicted, polishing the blockchain & Web3 section was a breeze, at least compared to the previous one. There were some changes here and there, especially sharpening the field notes. It’s a section that requires personal patience to read and write as I always want to jump in and add everything at once. But hey, it’s a complex and convoluted topic that meshes together technology, economics, ideologies and social dynamics.

That means that 51 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. We’re getting there. Only 10 chapters left in the first part of the book. The rest are chapters in the second part of the book, which contains the model and analysis of the history, so they are differently structured. No idea if they are easier or harder to polish, but I’m looking forward to switch gears from retelling the past to synthesizing it.

That said, I wanted to share a little work in progress today. The following excerpt is lifted from the section “The Metaverse Duality“, which talks about the most recent developments and interpretations of the metaverse concept. I open the section by talking about Hauntology, which I think is relevant to understand the concept of the metaverse as it exists today.

In my mind, the metaverse has become a duality: A concept that looks into the future in an attempt to describe the next iteration of “Life Online“, as well as an expression trapped in the past, permanently bound to cyberpunk aesthetics. When people point to “Ready Player One” as their idea for a metaverse, either the novel or movie, they are clinging to a superficial facelift, something that brought the original vision of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash into a new decade by returning to long lost visions of the future. They are describing a retro-metaverse.

Work in Progress – Memberberries & Hauntology

Season twenty of the animated series Southpark introduced a sentient fruit called “Memberberries”. Throughout the season, the anthropomorphized grapes constantly implored everyone around them to remember historic pop culture icons, aiming to invoke nostalgic feelings for the supposed good times of the past:

“Member Ghostbusters? Yeah, I member. Member Slimer? Yes, member. Member Star Wars? Member Stormtroopers? Yeah! Member Chewbacca? I love member Chewbacca!”

/ South Park, Season Twenty Episodes

In the show, Memberberries acted as the physical manifestation and mirror of the idiom “sour grapes”. Instead of criticizing or disparaging something unobtainable, these sweet berries now represented the lure of a glorified past that was now perceived lost. While this started out harmless, pushing mostly famous movies and songs from the 1980s and 1990s, the Memberberries pushed increasingly more conservative and racist ideologies as the season progressed.

For the creators of Southpark, the Memberberries represented a criticism of the pervasiveness of nostalgia-based media, for example reboots of old products, films, or TV series, but also the invocation of their style in new media, for example the usage of neon colors, pixelated graphics, 8-Bit samples and music, either directly misrepresenting the past as being better or invoking this notion by simply reiterating the old messaging.

This had been a growing trend since the early 2010s, for example with “Tron: Legacy” (2010) being a late sequel to the 1982 science fiction classic TRON, the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and even “Blade Runner 2049” (2017) continuing the story of the original Blade Runner movie. While the originals had been groundbreaking in their ways to anticipate and capture the future in some way, many of the sequels were not exploring new themes, concepts or aesthetics, but merely repeating the previous ones as easy to consume memories.

In 1993, French philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of “Hauntology” in his book “Spectres of Marx”. The term encapsulated the way humans never encountered their environment as fully present, as their perception of the present was always influenced by past experiences and in anticipation of potential futures. In a very real way, the present was haunted by what no longer exists and by that which has not yet come to be.

In his 2014 book “Ghosts of My Life”, media theorist Mark Fisher applied hauntology to the persistence of the past in media, cultural memory, retrofuturism and lost futures. Fisher proposed the idea of a cultural hauntology, in which the present was now trapped and haunted by past media, art and entertainment. In a talk at the Klub MaMa in Zagreb (Multimedijalni Institut) in 2014, he stated that:

“What is the bad news that we already know is that the dimension of the future has disappeared. That in some ways, we’re marooned, we’re trapped in the 20th century, still. That, what is it to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on higher definition screens.”

/ Mark Fisher, “The Slow Cancellation Of The Future”

For Fischer, one way to make sense of the passing of time was to relate art and culture back to a specific time period, understanding how it reflected the societal and technological context of the period. The original movie Blade Runner was noteworthy as it took the societal angst in the face of overpopulation, runaway capitalism, cultural blending and accelerating technology and gave it form as an audio-visual experience. According to Fischer, this form of art as cultural expression has slowed to the point where it has now turned into a blend of the past, only recycling themes that were once relevant to cultures long gone. Movies like Blade Runner 2049 represented artifacts, facsimiles of futures suspended in time. And instead of creating new visions, a hauntological culture emerged that focused on reliving lost futures that had never arrived.