Recommended Reading: "The Gospel of the Metaverse"
With Meta, Facebook is preaching a gospel that rivals the Christian Gospel nearly beat-for-beat. Do we have the ears to hear it - and reject it?
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For this week, I had planned to write about the habit of typing out comments/replies and then deleting them instead of publishing them, and how James 3 cautions us that we can still burn ourselves with the fires our tongues light. Unfortunately, a perfect storm of a weekend work trip and other obligations forced me to punt on that to next week, and opt for something shorter instead. The good news is that I stumbled across an article that is absolutely worth your time and attention, and while I have a few comments to make on it, your time will be much better spent with this piece this week.
The article is called The Gospel of the Metaverse, by Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It is short, but remarkably incisive; it is something you’ll want to bookmark and have on hand to share with friends and family any time Facebook/Meta comes up in conversation. Read the piece here before continuing onward.
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Pretty good, right? While I always appreciate it when people share my own work, I would much rather people read this extremely well written piece instead, so please consider sharing The Gospel of the Metaverse on your socials and group chats. There are plenty of things I could say about this piece, and this will likely become a staple reference for much of my work going forward. But, four quick takeaways for you to consider:
One: I read Snow Crash for the first time last fall (courtesy of my good friend, Jacob Cates). While I don’t think Stephenson’s depiction of the Metaverse tracks quite as well with what we are discussing today (despite inventing the term and concept), Stephenson does nail - with terrifying accuracy - the kind of very-late-stage capitalistic anarchy that a society governed by a Metaverse would create. It is shocking how the Frankenstein’s monster of gig economies, branded sub-cultures, and pockets of digital geopolitical entities (a la pockets of Digital Babylon) was first described by Stephenson in the early 90s, and not written on-the-ground thirty years later. But despite the changes in the Metaverse concept, what seems to be lost on Zuckerberg (and nearly every other Big Tech entrepreneuer who claims sci-fi novels/films as inspiration for their work) is that you cannot have the technology without the impact the technology creates; you cannot lift the Metaverse out of Snow Crash without bringing the world of Snow Crash with you. Even if Zuckerberg does not personally claim Snow Crash as an inspiration for his version of the Metaverse, he is on the hook for explaining why his version of the Metaverse will not result in the same kind of very-late-stage capitalistic anarachy created by Stephenson’s Metaverse; given how this economic nightmare feels more relevant today than it did in the early 90s, that is a very difficult argument to make.
Two: Selinger’s reading of Facebook’s 2013 “Dinner” ad and their recent Super Bowl ad “Old Friends, New Fun” are among the best-written paragraphs I’ve ever encountered on advertisement exegesis. Philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith has written much on the importance of “reading cultural liturgies”, or discerning what cultural riturals and artifacts (in this case, advertising) teach us about ourselves, our world, and our purpose in it. What is truly shocking (dare I say horrifying) is that Facebook’s message has not changed from 2013 to 2022, despite the incomprehensibly large amount of evidence that their 2013 message has not materialized at all, and that the complete opposite has emerged instead. The language of “spiritual darkness and blindness” is the only language I can think of that makes sense of such stupifying arrogance and stubbornness on Facebook’s part - calling their refusal to change their messaging a decade later “tone deaf” or “ignorant” does not do justice here.
Three: I do not know how intentional this was or not, but Selinger’s description of the “storyline” of the Gospel of the Metaverse matches Christianity’s Creation/Fall/Redemption/Restoration schema almost beat-for-beat. The main quote for that is this:
Thus, the story’s moral is that we, the human viewers, are just like a discarded object—something out of step with an inhospitable world. We’re permanently alienated, entirely without options, and unable to exercise any individual agency or connect with others to work towards a common good. Framed this way, structural change is impossible, and the only way to avoid the living hell of life is for a company like Meta to create an entirely new world—one where, magically, we can do whatever we want and be whoever we want to be, without any strings attached.
As someone who regularly preaches the Christian Gospel, often in the context of a Creation/Fall/Redemption/Restoration schema, Selinger’s description of the Gospel of the Metaverse echoes the Christian Gospel disturbingly well. The “good news” that Meta has come to fix our broken world and will usher in an entirely new world free of pain and suffering is, quite literally, a dark mirror parallel of the Christian Gospel’s proclaimation that Jesus has come to fix our broken world (with a very different understanding of what is broken, how it happened, and the solution for it) and, as Christianity has confessed since it’s beginning, that “we look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and to life in the world to come”. And while I’d argue this dark mirror parallel of the Christian Gospel applies to Big Tech as a whole to various degrees, there is no denying that Facebook is among those preaching a rival Gospel very loudly and clearly - if we have the ears to listen to the subtext behind the cute dog animatronics.
Four: This Substack exists on the premise that our current tech/media ecosystem is not a spiritually neutral reality, and that Christian Scripture supplies language and concepts for making sense of our current social and economic realities. As an extension of Scripture’s literal and symbolic depicition of Babylon as a historical empire and greater spiritual conglomerate, Digital Babylon preaches its own gospel that rivals the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his coming kingdom; if this premise were true, we would expect to see instance of a “Gospel of Digital Babylon” that we could contast as the inverted version of the Christian Gospel. Selinger has detailed the single best example of a type of “Gospel of Digital Babylon” that I could possibly want, and it couldn’t come from a better “type” of Digital Babylon: Facebook itself.
Thank you for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. As I mentioned at the top, next week’s installment will be my planned piece on the “typing and deleting replies” phenomenon of social media, and how James 3 warns us that our tongues can set fires in our souls even if we do not ultimately fire out the tweets or comments we want to respond with. If this was your first time reading the newsletter, please consider subscribing so you can get new pieces delivered straight to your inbox!
Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.
Austin.