Category Archives: utopia

Hack the Metaverse: A Metamodernista’s Take on Facebook’s Rebranding

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What is the metaverse? Why is Facebook rebranding itself as Meta Platforms? And what does it have to do with the 1990s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash?

The most obvious answer is that Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranding is a desperate response to two entangled issues:

1. The Facebook Papers have suggested that company leadership knew, and basically didn’t give a shit about, the corrosive impact Facebook’s social media platform was having on mental health and global political discourse.
2. For some time now, Facebook has also been hemorrhaging users and facing a particularly steep decline in engagement from teenagers (who are its most lucrative advertising market) with internal projections estimating a further projected “drop [of] 45 percent over the next two years [in teen users].”

Faced with bad publicity and investor worries about its flagship product, it’s no wonder that Zuckerberg wanted to rebrand. By why “Meta?”

Etymologically, the prefix meta is a “word-forming element of Greek origin meaning 1. ‘after, behind; among, between,’ 2. ‘changed, altered,’ 3. ‘higher, beyond’,” which has produced a host of common terms, such as metaphysics, metaphor, metabolism, meteor, and so on, and so in this case it might as well represent “metastasizing metadata.”

For Facebook, however, one of the advantages of the word “Meta” is that it is an already ubiquitous (and even trending) term/prefix. Picking a semi-generic term functions to camouflage search results due to algorithmic confusion (e.g., Google’s transformation into the ultra-generic “Alphabet”). In this, Zuckerberg and company seem to have overshot insofar as it turns out that there is already a computer company called “Meta.”

But the name change goes deeper. For a while now, Zuckerberg has been pitching Facebook’s transition into the “metaverse.” A term which at first pass (meta + [uni]verse) suggests a digital “otherworld” or perhaps a hypercapitalist afterlife. 

In what follows, I’ll explore the meaning and context of the metaverse. It matters because, if you are reading this virtual blog post, you are in some sense already living through a dystopia into which Zuckerberg and company, if they have it their will, will drag you even deeper. Follow me over the fold for further elaboration.

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Capitalist Dystopia Part 3——Fissures in Paradise: First World Problems or Micro-dystopias, Bullshit Jobs, and the Seeds of Bourgeois Alienation

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Photocredit camera_obscura [busy]

Fissure–Photocredit camera_obscura [busy]

Proponents of Neoliberalism have described access to free markets and free trade as a kind of global panacea.[i] It is often said that were the developing world willing to adopt a more laissez faire economic policy it would in short order achieve the quality of life associated with the bourgeois first-world. Restated, the embrace of global capitalism by less developed countries is supposed to provide access to the “American dream” and not merely in terms of Levi jeans and iPhones but resulting in a fundamentally better lifestyle.[ii] Basically, free markets are supposed to equate with freedom and “the good life.” But is that really true? Is the First-World lifestyle really all that? If we could get rid of the world’s poorest slums and produce a lifestyle equivalent to that in the metropol middle class would we all be living in paradise?

In the last entry I explored the exploitative heart of our current world-system. I showed how the underbelly of capitalism is so far removed from the ordinary experiences of average citizens in developed nations that aspects of life in some less developed nations can look downright post-apocalyptic. But I also argued that these seeming disruptions or interruptions of capitalism are the ordinary functioning of the system. In so doing, I was trying to represent real or “developing-world” problems both abroad and even inside the heartland of America. In this entry, I want to expose the dystopian aspects of the first world. I want to show the end product of all that global effort and demonstrate that even this putative utopia has fissures, which expose unsustainable facets of the current world-order. In particular, in this post I want to showcase some “First-World-Problems” or micro-dystopias and explore their amplification or extrapolations.

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Capitalist Dystopia Part 1——-The Janus-face of Capitalism or Is Walmart Utopia?

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inverted janus Is Walmart Utopia? Restated, might Walmart serve as a contemporary model for a post-capitalist future society? Both formulations of the question sounds equally absurd. Few people actively champion Walmart, and almost no one would depict it as their ideal place. Indeed, according to a recent survey it is “the most-hated retailer in America.”[i] This is not exactly a new sentiment, but nevertheless in Valences of the Dialectic, Marxist literary theorist Frederic Jameson looked to Walmart for “the shape of a Utopian future looming through the mist.”[ii]  Pressing into the power of the dialectic to reconcile with inherent contradiction, Jameson argued that it was possible to look past Walmart’s failings for the seeds of its utopian potential. If you’ll follow me across the fold, I’ll discuss Jameson’s utopian recuperation of Walmart and look at its potential inversions. Taking Jameson’s Valences and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as inspirations, I’ll attempt to trace the crystalized phantasmagoria of post-Fordist capitalism. I’ll ask–what is our contemporary analogue to the Parisian shopping malls of the nineteenth century? Put differently, I’ll try and liberate the dreams of an escape from capitalism that can be found paradoxically imbedded in the heart of certain capitalist structures. But first we’ll look into the dystopian “mist” that clings to Walmart. Continue reading →

The Stubborn Persistence of Post-Capitalist Utopia: Introduction- Post-Apocalyptic Capitalism

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One reoccurring charge against postmodernism and poststructuralism alike is that they are unable to think utopia.

At first Capitalist Realismpass, this certainly seems plausible, after all postmodernism in Lyotard’s famous formulation was defined as “incredulity towards metanarratives.” For another example, in all of Derrida’s work on deconstruction, did he not (perhaps admirably) refuse to offer an alternative to logocentrism? To be sure, he privileged writing over speech and praised grammatology. But by and large Derrida resisted utopia’s allure. Plus, aren’t classic postmodern works like Naked Lunch, The Crying of Lot 49, or Blade Runner deeply pessimistic?

Indeed it is easy to paint that entire period of philosophy and art as the culmination of skepticism or cynical reason—or in other words as the withering of modernist utopianism or perhaps as nothing less than pure crystalized dystopia. As one of the characters in Woody Allen’s 1997 Deconstructing Harry, charged the protagonist

“You have no values. Your whole life, it’s nihilism, it’s cynicism, it’s sarcasm and orgasm.” To which he replied: “You know in France, I could run on that slogan and win.”

But of course, even in France he couldn’t. As it would seem at least a hundred political theorist have observed—it is hard to organize a politics around cynicism and nihilism, people need something to believe in and work toward, and hence the inability to think utopia is supposed to be precisely why postmodern and poststructuralist theory have failed to transform into easily recognizable political projects. As Žižek has argued, totalitarian regimes maintain their hold by encouraging cynicism. All they need to forestall revolution is to convince the masses that every politician is a bastard and all politic is corrupt. People think “why bother?” and they continue supporting, with ironic distance, the mechanisms of a state in which they no longer believe. The promotion of postmodern skepticism would therefore seem to disable politics and prevent its ability to mobilize against the exploitations of global capitalism.

This critique of utopias’ absence has been sharpened recently by the British philosopher and blogger Mark Fisher. Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? (2009) was inspired by the insight (attributed to Slavoj Žižek and Frederic Jameson) that

“it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”

This too certainly seems plausible and if you’ll follow me over the fold, I’ll layout both Fisher’s case AND in the next blog-post I’ll argue against this thesis by looking at a few seeds of anti-capitalist utopia

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