Juan Villoro
The rocks surrounding Chiloé Island are inhabited by a unique species of cold. Among them are two varieties of penguins with the surnames of explorers, the Magellanic and the Humboldt. Less well known is the cormorant, or “sea crow”, a dark bird with a pelican-like beak that dives to fish at great depths because its plumage is not waterproof, and it gains weight when it gets wet. In China and Japan, a string is tied around its neck to prevent it from swallowing its prey and placing it in the hands of a “fisherman”. Believing that it is feeding, the cormorant works for its master.
This behavior is not very different from that of the cybernaut who surfs the net without realizing that it serves commercial purposes. The Internet emerged as a free and liberating endeavor (the era of the autonomous fishing cormorants), but it soon became a business of unsuspected proportions, making personal data the main merchandise on the planet (the age of the cormorants with a noose around their necks).
The next digital adventure will be the metaverse, an immersive platform on which several companies are working, leading Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook as Meta. As on so many occasions, the new technology was anticipated by fiction. In 1992, Neal Stephenson published the novel Snow Crash; there, the metaverse is an alternate reality of planetary scope where people lead a digital life more intense than their physical existence and which is threatened by a virus. The concept alluded to a menacing dystopia; even so, it spurred the third-dimensional programmers who had already scored triumphs with video games.
The success of the Second Life platform, in which the user is represented by an avatar that assumes a parallel destiny and does business in bitcoins, reinforced this initiative. And Stephenson, who warned in his novel twenty years ago about the possibilities of building a digital tyranny with the metaverse, is now a partner in a company to develop it: Lamina1.
The expanded reality will supposedly stimulate productivity. Accurate simulation of the environment will make it possible to safely project buildings, bridges, works of art, roads, financial transactions, and surgeries. Each person will be able to have an avatar that represents him or her in the third dimension to participate in parties, congresses, courses, tournaments, group therapies, or work teams. The experience will be so satisfying that many will not want to leave. The rough draft of life will become its final version.
Unfortunately, the process did not occur at the dawn of the Internet, when the digital wave did not belong to the corporate world. After Facebook’s scandalous sale of personal data, one does not need to be paranoid to fear that the looting of identities will increase exponentially with the metaverse.
The most serious thing about technological dependence is that it is not perceived as such. Those who search for options on the web think they are obeying their impulses without realizing that they are actually obeying an algorithm. If the cormorant thinks he catches a fish for himself, the cybernaut thinks he dominates a medium to which he is a hostage. We are facing a happy slavery that is confused with free will.
Who will be the owners of the metaverse? Four corporations control seventy percent of digital traffic. Their commercial value is estimated at $2.6 trillion, slightly less than the Gross Domestic Product of France. By the decade’s end, the metaverse will generate a $13 trillion market incorporating more than five billion users. That economy is unlikely to follow community principles. Immersive technology will increase the possibilities for surveillance, propaganda, and manipulation of societies. That is why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who at 29 became the youngest congresswoman in the United States and who belongs to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, warns that we are facing “a cancer for democracy”.
In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez questioned Mark Zuckerberg in his appearance before Congress about the ads that politicians pay for on Facebook. “Do you verify that information?” the lawmaker asked. In the post-truth era, the young mogul responded with an evasive answer.
Digital cormorants fish with a rope around their necks, and many times, they only catch lies.
This was published in Spanish on January 13, 2023, by Reforma.
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