Tag: conspiracy

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The Curious Tale of the Metaverse and the Multiverse

One of the issues with trying to surf the zeitgeist is precisely that – you remain on the surface with no depth of understanding of any individual issue. So high is the noise-to-signal ratio nowadays that it is almost overwhelming for many people to ascertain what information IS relevant and important to their lives, and what is not.

It can be hard to find the time to think deeply about quickly moving events, or to link them correctly to one another. In fact, such are the time and cognitive pressures that many people end up succumbing to conspiracy theories which offer neat and totalising explanations for the state of the world, provide suitably nefarious-seeming scapegoats and attempt to rally the public to action.

Of course, a lot of this action devolves quickly into “send me money”, but at that point some people are already sufficiently relieved to find a handy explanation for everything, happy not to have to think deeply, and grateful enough to contribute to the professional liars.

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes or easy answers. Not for the world, and not for those of us who live in it. And there are many ways to become confused, or to pursue dead-end fictions, in the attempt to comprehend the fast-moving reality we find ourselves in. Conspiracy theories are just the odious tip of a large iceberg of false information and fake news. Beneath the surface are many other attempts to explain the world simply, or to simplify it, most of which are not as nefarious as conspiracies, but are in some regards equally constructed and equally untrue.

Two terms which crop up often these days, though maybe not often enough in this context, are the multiverse and the metaverse. The multiverse refers to the idea, widely accepted by theoretical physicists, that our universe is not the only one, and instead exists in relation to an infinitude of other universes, some highly similar, some wildly different from our own.

Many universes – but isn’t this one enough already?

By contrast the metaverse is an as yet hazy idea quickly obtaining momentum among tech circles which proposes itself as the future of the internet, and seeks to displace or replace many aspects of contemporary life with a virtual reality alternative.

Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of your future

So the multiverse is an expansive concept and the metaverse is a limiting one, but both seek to tackle the issue of explaining the complexity of the world by replacing it with something else. And they do so in different ways. While the metaverse is a collective effort by tech firms, Facebook (now renamed ‘Meta’) in particular, the multiverse is an idea poorly adopted from theoretical physics and science fiction novels which has grown, like conspiracy theories, in the corners of communication that the mainstream media do not reach primarily.

Already it seems that the brave new Metaversal world may not be about to materialise in quite the way its ‘imagineers’ were hoping. Only today, Facebook – sorry, Meta – announced swingeing job cuts across their company, which is undoubtedly informed by the one billion dollars PER MONTH they have been spending recently on developing Metaverse tech.

Over the past three decades, we have as individuals, societies and even as species, learned to adopt, adapt and accommodate the internet in our lives. But the prospect of a life spent primarily in virtual reality seems to be a bridge too far for many of us. We are not our avatars. We are not inputs into a global algorithm. We do not need to escape meatspace for metaspace.

But it seems some people do want to escape, though perhaps not into a corporate vision of virtual reality. After all, movies like The Matrix have warned the public to be wary of dreamscapes, especially when those dreams are programmed by others. Instead, they escape into their own dreams, where the complexity of reality can be argued away, in all its nuances and seeming contradictions, by the simple assertion that they have migrated between universes.

The growth of a subculture of people who appear to believe that they can traverse between universes is a particularly fantastikal form of failing to deal with how complex the world has become. It’s clearly not as nefarious as the various conspiracy theories circulating online, but of course any movement attracts shysters and wannabe leaders, in search of money or influence, and hence there are now people offering to teach others how to move between universes.

In one sense this is no less valid than teaching people how to chant mantras, say the rosary or engage in any other religious practice that is more metaphorical than metaphysical. But one of the catalysing aspects of online culture is the ability for people to find like-minded people. Hence conspiracy theorists can find communities where their toxic ideas are cultivated, while multiversers can source validation and endorsement from others who similarly seek to explain the anomalies of their memory or complexities of reality in the same way.

There are no doubt complex reasons to explain why so many people are subject to psychological phenomena like the Mandela Effect, but these explanations do not include watching YouTube videos on how to meditate your way into another universe while in the shower.

Both the multiverse and the metaverse offer simplistic and ultimately unsuitable resolutions to the ever-growing complexity of modern existence. Fundamentally, these escapist dreamscapes are coping mechanisms for dealing with this complexity.

The world is already too complex for any individual mind to comprehend, and probably too complex for even artificial intelligences to ever understand. But we can’t, or at least shouldn’t, escape it. Instead, we should try to understand it, and the best way to do that is to escape not from the world but from our online echo chambers.

If we can learn again to speak to one another, identify areas of agreement and try to find ways to foster collaboration despite disagreement, we stand a much better chance of improving our own collective futures.

At Sapienship, we believe everyone has a story to tell and all those add up to the story of us. We think everyone needs to be heard, and debated, and engaged with. It’s not easy, but it’s clearly the best way to resolve the major issues that face us, our planet and our reality.

We don’t need to hide in virtual realities or imagine alternative universes when the one we have is so rich with possibility and potential. Instead we need to come together to realise our hopes.

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Bringing the Elites-In-Exile back home

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at conspiracy theories recently. I may have mentioned this before.

There is, sadly, no end of midwits out there inclined to believe in all manner of conspiracy theories. These aren’t truly stupid people. Rather, they are people who feel disenfranchised and seek a target to blame.

Probably the most prevalent conspiracy theory today revolves around the World Economic Forum, who do themselves few favours by being fronted by Klaus Schwab, who looks and sounds like a Bond villain. Optics in a visually-mediated world mean a lot, more than they probably should, after all.

Davos 2022: Klaus Schwab on Fixing the Global Trust Crisis | TIME
WEF, or SPECTRE?

As a talking shop for elite futurists, the WEF are relatively easy to depict as psychotic Illuminati, so long as you don’t actually look too closely, and rely on carefully edited YouTube clips with jaundiced and misrepresentative commentary, rather than doing the long slog of actually reading their books and position papers and speeches.

The actual conspiracists are those disingenuous content editors who produce those shrill and alarming YouTube videos for profit. Which is not to say that some are not also true believers in what they produce. But they are self-aware enough to know that they have to carefully edit their material to produce the message they want. Their readers and listeners are not so aware.

For a conspiracy theory to be truly successful though, it must pass the midwit truth test, which is that it must speak to the sense of disenfranchisement of the audience, provide a scapegoat in the form of a conspiracy, and then propose resistance, in the form of an amorphous appeal to human liberty and autonomy.

Because what affects these conspiracist audiences is exactly that – a sense that their own lives are not theirs to command. In short, they lack the agency they feel they ought to have in their own lives.

We might additionally relate this to complexity scientist Peter Turchin’s idea of the overproduction of elites. Anyone who was told as a teen that their pathway to lifelong success was to become a graduate, but who then finds themselves a decade later paying off extensive loans even while working precariously in low-status service positions, inevitably feels cheated, and wants someone to blame.

So the audience for conspiracies is largely made up of what I term ‘elites-in-exile’, people who feel, for varying reasons such as educational achievement, societal expectation or self-importance, that they deserve much more access to power (and the concomitant trappings of wealth and status) than they actually possess.

Their constraints may be financial, or related to a sense of disengagement with the ongoing gallop or politics or technology in directions which they cannot relate to. And a successful conspiracy aims to hit all of these trigger buttons at once.

It also attempts to be all things to all midwits. Hence something like the WEF conspiracy manifests in an almost bewildering array of variants, mutating like a virus to accommodate pre-existing anxieties and concerns.

Therefore, the WEF conspiracy tells anti-Semites that the forum is secretly run by Jews, while simultaneously presenting it as Communist to those who oppose far-left politics. To those with a strong sense of ethnic affiliation, whether racist or simply nationalist, it becomes a globalist attempt at genocide and depopulation – the Great Replacement theory. To those concerned about the ongoing march of technology in directions which alarm them, it mutates into a cabal of ardent transhumanists. To anti-vaxxers, it aims to control or kill us all using experimental medical treatments, and so on.

In these ways, a successful conspiracy like that centred on the WEF can leverage pre-existing concerns by concentrating them on a target, amplifying them, and providing a simple one-stop solution to their audience’s concerns – resistance to and eradication of that target.

And because a successful conspiracy is constantly mutating in form to address different audiences, it becomes hugely contradictory, yet almost impossible to counter. Ultimately, the solution is an extremely difficult one to implement – addressing the agency gap for the elites-in-exile who have been abandoned to producing or consuming such conspiracies in an attempt to obtain access to the power over their lives they feel has been denied to them.

The problem with achieving this is manifold. Firstly, the democratic gap even in liberal democracies is such now that almost no one has such a sense of agency anymore. That would require a systemic reset of how we do politics at every level, to embed participatory (and much more direct) democratic modes into what is increasingly becoming a totalitarian or technocratic world.

Additionally, conspiracy theories reward the few with exactly what they are seeking – wealth from their monetised proselytising of conspiracy, status as opinion leaders within the audience, and the power to project their perspectives widely. That these perspectives are factually incorrect, erroneous, self-serving, carefully curated and deliberately misleading is less important to them in this regard.

The utter erosion of the public sphere in recent decades – a product of many malign societal developments including an overly combative adversarial politics and an overly punitive reaction to disagreements (such as cancel culture) – has left a space in which conspiracies may flourish without the disinfectant of scrutiny and debate.

There are, in short, no easy answers. But for our elites-in-exile, an easy answer is what they want in this complicated world. Even when it’s patent nonsense.

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What’s the cure for conspiracy theories?

The world seems rife with conspiracy. Never before have we had a population so well educated, yet apparently so vulnerable to believing in vast conspiracy narratives. It seems like a contradiction. Researchers at UCLA have been using AI to work out how such conspiracy theories seem to emerge and subsequently collapse with ever greater velocity. But they struggle to explain why these ideas emerge at all.

The attraction of conspiracy theories is the promise that beneath the apparent chaos of the world is some underlying order and meaning, even if that meaning is negative and the order is destructive. It’s a desire to feel control, to possess agency over one’s own life.

Conspiracy theories • NPC • meme • funny • catchymemes

In an ever more individuated and atomised world, the natural human desire for bonding en masse, for submerging into a gestalt and having a sense of belonging, therefore becomes subverted by such theories. Conspiracy theories are less ideas than they are communities.

The question is not why do conspiracy theories occur. They occur because of the human need for meaning and desire for order. Nor is the question how they may be combated or defeated. They can only be challenged and overcome by implementing transparent order in society. Transparent in this sense includes the underlying principles of fairness and dignity, because people will also strive for alternate explanations when they are treated unfairly or suspect they are being stripped of their human dignity.

The question that remains about conspiracy theories is why certain narratives prosper and others do not. To an extent this is a cui bono question – who benefits? Who makes money from proliferating certain conspiracies? And certainly, there are many who make a healthy living propagating nonsense and half-baked ideas to the masses. They may even be acting in good faith, believing in the attenuated and baroque web of connections they themselves are weaving. But more significantly, it’s an issue of what cultural anxieties are exposed by conspiracy theories.

The current most prolific conspiracy theory – that shadowy cabals of elites operating both in and out of the public eye are attempting to implement population reduction and totalitarian rule – is in this sense a throwback to the unequal and undignified social structures of the laissez-faire 19th century or even earlier, to feudalism. But it also expresses very contemporary anxieties about the Covid pandemic, and deeply held suspicions about the democratic unaccountability of transnational bodies in particular, be they the EU, the IMF, the World Economic Forum or the UN.

There are, in short, no easy answers to conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories ARE the easy answers. They satisfy the atomised citizen’s need to bond in dignity with fellow citizens and they provide a simple and moralistic order against which to resist, thereby providing meaning.

History suggests that people, no matter how well educated, will be inclined to prefer such easy moralistic explanations of the world in which they live. The attraction of such explanations is as hardwired as the desire for sugar or animal fats, and as difficult to break as a habit.

Only a world which offers its citizenry ever greater fairness and dignity, which entrusts them with agency over their own lives, has any hope of competing with the memetic addiction to conspiracy. Until such a world is in place, people will continue to believe that shadowy forces secretly rule the world and wish them harm, be they demons, or Illuminati, Elders of Zion, or psychotic men in the boardrooms of Brussels and Washington.