Your Idea of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is Wrong | An Essential Lesson on Anxiety | The Conspiracy Theory in the Master Narrative
with Slavoj Zizek
Welcome, you wonderful multiplicity.
For my full posts, dream exploration, weird stories, and if I’m helpful in leaving you with something to contemplate…subscribe to the full letter below! (It’s $5 a month, so if I provide you with the value of a cup of coffee every month…maybe give it a whirl. It also helps me keep my lights on:))
To those subscribed, thank you…it means the world to me.
And to everyone…thank you for being here.
So…let’s enter the labyrinth.
Your Idea of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is Wrong.
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet.” — Zuckerberg
Our idea of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is wrong.
It isn’t intended to become a separate and new reality, analogous to The Matrix.
Our real reality will not become the dystopian future of Ready Player One.
No, that would disrupt the current symbolic order currently in place!
You see, the Metaverse will never be intended as purely an escape. Why? Because nothing in our modern technology revolution has been created purely as an escape. And when it comes close, consider a streaming service that keeps you watching for hours on end—but why do they want you to watch?
Profit and data collection (the data collection is for more profit, yay).
So, Zuckerberg wants to fill in the space between our current digital space and reality. It will be a digital simulation that connects with the ‘real world’ so that your digital behavior becomes more predictable than its current form. It is intended to become a more optimized data collection, so they can then manipulate your behavior for profits.
It will be just like our current digital degradation…but much worse. Yay!
Zuckerberg wants to be better able to manipulate your desires while maintaining the illusion of more choice. Thus, he wants to better integrate himself into our reality, while simultaneously convincing us—we are free.
The best form of control is convincing the masses they are free.
He wants to invade the tiny bit of perceived freedom and self-expression that we have left.
So, be ready for further digital product placements, queues, and manipulative symbolism. Then, they can create your desire in the digital space and the real world — immersing them into each other.
They can then profit off of every aspect of your life.
They can then control every interaction of your life.
They can then control all of your whims and desires.
It will become the optimization of profit and productivity, even if it means the masses must endure or be subjected to unjust suffering and manipulation.
The fantasy of profit allows for the continued death spiral of the masses.
The continued obsession with profit extraction maintains the symbolic order.
An Essential Lesson on Happiness, Freedom, and Anxiety
“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” — Slavoj Zizek
When we begin recognizing our access to freedom, we come face to face with uncertainty; as with every choice you make, you recognize the plethora of other choices that were in front of you.
We still want freedom, but we must accept the chaotic uncertainty that comes with swallowing its pill. We must cast aside the nostalgia we have for the past to embrace the uncertainty of the future. If, as a society, we truly want freedom, we must be willing to plunge into that grand challenge of the unknown. Failure, suffering, and sadness will be inevitable — as freedom does not bring happiness.
Where does our desire for happiness even come from?
“Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.” — Slavoj Zizek
The desire for happiness is a desire to be a slave, as we wish to be told what we’re certain of, to swallow some shallow illusion of peace and harmony. The pull towards peace and harmony is one of being pulled into the will of a tradition, and to fall into a tradition based on the nostalgia of the past is to become a slave.
Change comes when we look to shatter the peace and harmony in our lives, and embrace that uncertainty of the future.
We become afraid of change.
So, we allow society to determine what it is to be happy. We strive for someone else’s image of happiness. Thus, we look to the commands of society for them to tell us what that happiness looks like. As a result, we hate those who refuse to swallow the pill of society and instead choose their own uncertain perception of existence.
Marriage? ‘It will make you happy.’
Have children? ‘It will make you happy.’
Buy a house? ‘It will make you happy.’
We are told how to be happy; we are told we ought to be happy. Yet, maybe this pursuit is simply a distraction? A distraction to help us avoid acknowledging one grand lie we have before us.
Part of this grand lie is telling us: we have freedom. Now, what do we perceive as a necessary aspect of freedom? Choice.
And with this ‘freedom’ comes anxiety around choice.
Freedom!
Maybe freedom is not found within security.
If you want freedom, you must accept the chaos of uncertainty in order to truly be free. It’s with the anxiety of choice that you recognize how many other choices were once before you. With this acknowledgment, your path becomes unclear as it becomes more unknown. That being said, you are certainly the only one who can take this path for yourself.
The anxiety of choice is an internal battle between choosing what society has told us will make us happy and choosing our own uncertain perception of existence through freedom.
And maybe freedom comes with seeing that I am nothing more than a slave to myself within myself.
“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”—Slavoj Zizek
The Conspiracy Theory in the Master Narrative
Sometimes we convince ourselves we’re seeing the threads of some grand narrative at work, one that many people are failing to see, yet we must take a step back and consider…are the connected threads of my own mind?