"'It shows you that there are people interested in stuff beyond just living and existing,' Bridges said, chatting with fellow residents over Golden Oreos and cranberry juice after her virtual trip to Santorini. 'It’s an escape from reality.'"

From "How Older Adults Are Using V.R. to Counter Social Isolation/New tools tailored for use in senior living communities allow for shared experiences and social bonding" (NYT).

I'm not using a gift link for this one, so you'll just have to picture old people with a big VR device strapped to their face. And imagine many paragraphs puffing the joys of VR — and the joys of travel.

But VR and travel are touted as a means to an end, and the end is the all-important social connection: “When V.R. is done well, you get mentally transported to a place,” said Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.... A few minutes together on a virtual hike or sunset cruise can change a silent dinner to a lively conversation about past travel experiences...."

"All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion... as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in."

"Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company’s executives are eying gigantic budget cuts, as high as 30 percent, for the teams responsible for its Meta Horizon Worlds product and Quest VR headset — another nail in the coffin for Zuckerberg’s obsession that has been a major thorn in the sides of investors for years now.... Besides, Meta and Zuckerberg have now found their next obsession: artificial intelligence. The company has committed to spending an astronomical $72 billion on AI this year — roughly as much as the company’s lost on the metaverse, coincidentally...."

From "Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company 'Meta'" (Futurism).

Here's my reaction to Meta when it began in 2021: "Eh. I'm not making a new tag for this." 

"But our best understanding of how reality works is entirely bound to finitude."

"Physics is all about conservation principles. There are no infinities.... Technical culture often longs for freedom from finitude. A profound truth, however, is that the greatest mysteries are found in conserved systems, which can become rich and complex, not in infinite ones, which stretch out like blank white sheets to the edge of the cosmos. And so another urgent question is whether people can enjoy the storied reality of finitude after coming down from the high of fake infinity. Can being merely human suffice? Can the everyday miracle of the real world be appreciated enough? Or will the future of culture only be viral? Will all markets become Ponzi-like fantasies? Will people reject physics forever, the moment we have technology that’s good enough to allow us to pretend it’s gone?"

Writes Jaron Lanier, in "Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? Apple’s Vision Pro headset suggests one possible future—but there are others" (The New Yorker).

"Three male figures surrounded her avatar in... a virtual live events program created by Meta. They touched her avatar’s breasts..."

"... and pressed their torsos rhythmically against her, telling her that she wanted it. A fourth took photos of the incident in the app. 'My physical body was responding,' said [Nina Jane] Patel, 45, a virtual reality researcher and consultant with the Zero Abuse Project, describing the 2021 attack. 'I was very uncomfortable. Fight or flight mode kicked in.' Meta declined to comment on the incident...."

From "Attacks in the metaverse are booming. Police are starting to pay attention. A growing cohort of activists are urging police forces to grapple with sexual attacks in virtual reality, but prosecuting digital abuse could be tricky" (WaPo).

“People kill each other all the time in video games but we don’t call them murderers,” said Aya Gruber, a law professor at the University of Southern California who has studied rape laws and called jail a “blunt tool” for addressing online behavior.... 

Many of the earliest adopters of virtual reality came from the video game industry — a sector that has struggled with racism, sexism and harassment. These issues exploded into the public in the 2014 phenomenon known as “gamergate,” when internet trolls organized to harass women in gaming circles....

"I was exploring Horizon Worlds, using the Oculus headset... where a British schoolgirl under the age of 16 was allegedly 'gang-raped' by a group of online strangers."

"The police are investigating whether, under the legislation, there is any crime here to prosecute. I used inverted commas around 'gang-rape,' since the crime of rape is narrowly defined as someone being penetrated against their consent. That didn’t happen here: the child was alone with her VR headset, possibly thousands of miles from her antagonists, and was physically unharmed.... Does the fact that the girl’s attack happened virtually mean it didn’t really happen at all? Or, given that we are all going to — at least according to the business plans of Zuckerberg and Elon Musk — spend more and more time in a virtual world, does this mean that this is our new reality, a Wild West in which male sexual predators have the time of their lives?..."

Writes Helen Rumbelow "Young, female and vulnerable: a ‘rape’ in the virtual world/As police investigate the sexual assault of a girl’s VR avatar, Helen Rumbelow puts on a headset and ventures into the metaverse" (London Times).

"This being a classical virtual-reality school, Optima’s environments include settings in ancient Greece and Rome...."

"We teleported past a Roman official’s house, decked out with red-clay roof tiling, up some stairs to an open patio of black-and-white-checkered marble floors, surrounded by Ionic columns and an ivy-covered railing. Here, a teacher might spawn a set of bleachers for students to sit during a lecture on a subject such as history or Latin.... Toward the end of the school year, I joined a sixth-grade science class on a field trip to an Everest base camp. The scene was elaborately staged: our group was surrounded by gray tents held up by bright orange poles.... A whiteboard stood to our left in the snow, covered with colorful Post-its bearing scientific terms. The teacher had taken a selfie of his avatar wearing an orange mountain-explorer jumpsuit and put it on the board. Wind whistled quietly somewhere in the background of my headset....

I'm reading "Virtual-Reality School Is the Next Frontier of the School-Choice Movement/The conservative education activist Erika Donalds envisions a world where parents can opt out of traditional public school by putting their kids in a headset" (The New Yorker).

"The screen, which has an incredible fidelity, allows me to see everything in the room around me. It’s not reality, but it’s close to it."

"I know I’m wearing a headset, but I can also see everything clearly, including my watch, my iPhone, furniture and of course people.... After some mundane stuff like looking at pictures, messing around with web surfing, viewing messages and taking a rather uncanny valley FaceTime call with a digital avatar, I get to experience some truly breathtaking — and at times dystopian — moments that almost brought a tear to my eye. Because where the Vision Pro really shines is handling 3D movies and interactive graphical experiences. One moment I’m at a child’s birthday party where I’m sure my 80-year-old self would be crying at having enjoyed a life well lived and the next I’m courtside at an NBA game, on the goal line at a football match, in Alicia Keys’s music studio and fending off cute baby rhinos who want to say hello all recorded in what Apple calls Apple Immersive Video. The pièce de resistance? A butterfly that gracefully flies around the room before landing on my outstretched hand.... By the end I’m almost lost for words, a rare moment, but also left with the burning question — what is this all for?"

 
From "I tried the Apple Vision Pro. I was lost for words/The VR headset takes users to 3D experiences that feel incredibly real" by Stuart Miles (London Times).

Here's my burning question: How does it work for people who use different prescription glasses for different distances?

"Apple has done this before. Eventual hits like the iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch started in niche markets that grew into big businesses."

"But even Apple executives have been skeptical about the company’s prospects in virtual reality, which, they say, may still not be ready for its mainstream moment. Apple declined to comment."

 
From "Apple Is Stepping Into the Metaverse. Will Anyone Care? Interest in the futuristic, immersive digital world is fading just as Apple plans to debut a virtual reality device" (NYT).

The forthcoming product is a headset that will cost about $3,000.

Since Apple declined to comment, the article is mostly about the massive shunning of Meta (the Facebook virtual reality product).

The comments at the NYT are things like: "No. No one cares. I will take ugly reality over happy fantasy every time."

"I possibly cheated on my wife once. Alone in a room, a young woman reached out her hands and seductively groped mine..."

"... inviting me to engage and embrace her. I went with it. Twenty seconds later, I pulled back and ripped off my virtual reality gear. Around me, dozens of tech conference goers were waiting in line to try the same computer program an exhibitor was hosting. I warned colleagues in line this was no game. It created real emotions and challenged norms of partnership and sexuality. But does it really? And who benefits from this?"

 
Writes Zoltan Istvan in "Don't Bash Digisexuality. For Some, It Brings Hope" (Newsweek).

"Generally speaking, the best you can hope for in Horizon Worlds is the kind of aimless if well-intentioned chat you might get on a smoke break outside the work canteen."

"There’s usually a lot of talk about where people are from, of the 'I used to live in X, but now I live in Y' variety. That said, the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music. Plus the metaverse is the one place I don’t look at my phone every five seconds. There’s no option but to be present. I meet some nice people, particularly at A Very British Pub. BusinessAlum has bright-yellow, strawlike hair and speaks in a high, reedy voice, as if he’s just dropped in from Sesame Street. 'I used to live in Quincy! But the commute was so bad! And the snow! Ten feet of snow in a week! I fell and broke my back! Now I live in Florida!'"

I'm reading "Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland" by Paul Murray (NY Magazine).

Nice to run into that because I was just wondering if anyone was using Metaverse... and I was just trying — 2 posts down — to start a conversation about conversation.

Plus, I learned a new word: "bockety." This is an Irish English word. (Murray grew up in Dublin.) Used to refer to a person, "bockety" means able to walk only with difficulty. Of a thing, such as Horizon Worlds, "bockety" means rickety and ramshackle. I found these definitions in the OED, which points to the words use in this story by Sean O’Faolain, "The Sugawn Chair" (The Atlantic). 

"Once they arrive at the tropical island to the sound of birdsong, users can roam a surreal landscape dominated by a permanent beach party."

"As the music blares out thumping dance songs, computer generated avatars wave their multiple limbs while dancing on raised platforms. Above it all a giant red statue of a shot-put athlete, rendered in heroic Soviet style, looms, tensed and poised to throw a heavy shot. Except instead of an iron shot, his ball is a menacing looking coronavirus.... Avatars can walk on water as dolphins leap through the air around them and drones hover bearing message screens flashing words like 'education,' 'public health' and '#WhoWeAre.' Open books are installed on a liquid floor as a 'symbol of the human journey towards knowledge.'..."

From "EU throws gala party for ‘global gateway’ metaverse — and only a handful of people show up" (London Times). 

By "handful," they mean 6. The EU spent £332,500. So that's £55,417 per person.

"I moved around using a joystick on my hand controller. The first time I did this, I got motion sick and nearly fell over."

"I quickly realized that the metaverse was, with the exception of its games and exercise apps, best experienced sitting down.... Meta forces Horizon users to design avatars that look like real people — no giant bananas or huge robots — and many people choose to look as they do in real life, but pseudonymity is still part of the appeal. I, however, did use my real name and told people that I was a New York Times reporter who was recording my experience with a tool built into my headset. This P.O.V. camera was a little creepy, because it didn’t notify others when it was turned on. When I revealed I was recording, people would sometimes shout, 'She’s a fed!' and run away.... Putting on the headset was annoying, but once I started chatting in Horizon, I had a good time and was reluctant to leave. I liked meeting people spontaneously without the increasingly heavy-handed algorithmic intervention of traditional social media platforms. But explaining the metaverse through the lens of Horizon feels akin to unpacking the potential of 'the web' by surfing AOL chat rooms in the 1990s, during the days of dial-up modems...."

Writes Kashmir Hill in "This Is Life in the Metaverse/Every hour of the day and night with the gamers, parents, insomniacs, preteens and aspiring comedians who are the earliest adopters of the immersive, three-dimensional internet that Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on" (NYT).

This article went up 2 days ago and it was featured on the NYT podcast "Hard Fork" the same day, but it only has 109 comments. I scanned them and didn't see any that weren't pretty much the same as this one, the top-rated comment:

It just seems awful. Social media has promoted itself as "bringing people together," but that is far from what has happened in the real world. We think it's going to be some sort of School of Athens where deep and meaningful conversations happen, but it's just an opportunity to have your inauthentic self on display. If we need connection and belonging, maybe we should be having neighborhood dinners, where politics are prohibited, instead of strapping on a headset to get trolled by broken people. Hard pass.

Is anyone listening to the new Joe Rogan podcast, the one with Mark Zuckerberg?

I clicked it on and then off again after a minute and a half, basically as soon as Joe stopped talking and Zuckerberg began. I just felt a reflexive revulsion. 

There are some articles about it though, so let's read that. The Independent has a lot of transcription, so I'll begin and end there and just cherry-pick some quotes from MZ:

"[Matthew] Crawford is out to defend what he calls 'homo moto,' the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it..."

"... who uses a 'car or a motorcycle as a kind of prosthetic that amplifies our embodied capacities,' who gains freedom, familiarity and mastery by navigating swiftly through a complex landscape. Driving, Crawford argues, remains an important 'form of organic civic life' and a 'realm of interaction that demands the skills of cooperation and improvisation.' Whereas its possible replacements, especially the supposed self-driving utopia, transform democratic agents into isolated passengers moving under algorithmic power, no longer 'mentally involved in our own navigation and locomotion,' ruled, scrutinized and passive...." 

Writes Ross Douthat, in  "What Driving Means for America" (NYT).

Matthew Crawford book — which Douthat read as he drove his family across the country in a minivan — is "Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road."

More from Douthat:

"[V]irtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened...."

"Meta has asked its employees to volunteer to test the metaverse, according to an internal memo viewed by The New York Times. A stranger recently groped the avatar of one tester of a Meta virtual reality game, Horizon Worlds, a company spokeswoman said... ... Mari DeGrazia, 48, of Tucson, Ariz., said she saw harassment and assault happen in Population One 'two to three times a week, if not more.'... 'I’m not going to stop playing, because I think it’s important to have diverse people, including women, playing this game,' she said. 'We aren’t going to be pushed out of it, even though sometimes it’s hard.' In July, Ms. DeGrazia wore a haptic vest — which relays sensations through buzzes and vibrations — to play Population One. When another player groped her avatar’s chest, 'it felt just awful,' she said. She noted that Mr. Zuckerberg has described a metaverse where people can be fitted with full-body suits that let them feel even more sensations, which she said was troubling."

From "The Metaverse’s Dark Side: Here Come Harassment and Assaults/As Meta and other companies bet big on an immersive digital world, questions about its harms are rising" (NYT).

I've never used virtual reality, but shouldn't it be possible for the user to flick a switch that turns off the haptic vest so that the other player can't impose the feeling of touching on you? Also, it seems to me that most video games put you in the role of a fighter, with enemies coming at you. How does the haptic vest work when the enemy is winning?

Feel Facebook/Touch Facebook... On Facebook, we'll see the glory/From Facebook, we'll get opinion/From Facebook, we'll get the story...

Did you know you'll be able to feel and touch the glory that is the Facebook Metaverse? They're inventing a glove. 

Vox reports:

On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: a glove... the prototype haptic glove uses principles from soft robotics and employs pneumatic and electroactive actuators to quickly inflate tiny air pockets on the fingers and palm of the glove. These actuators are essentially tiny motors that can create the sensation of pressure and, hence, touch. The idea here is that if Meta could fit thousands of these actuators onto a haptic glove and combine those sensations with the visual input of a VR headset or augmented reality glasses, which project digital images onto the real world, the wearer could reach out and feel virtual objects. With gloves like these, you might one day shake the hand of someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel the squeeze.

Okay, everyone just thought about sex. We're not going to all this trouble to shake hands (or are you one of those sick freaks who get pleasure from crushing a hand offered to you for an innocent shake?). 

Here's a vision of Metaverse, felt with a glove:

 

My go-to rock music reference was The Who, but I must acknowledge the obvious 2 runners-up: 

1. The Beatles — Glove! 

 

2. Spinal Tap — "Smell the Glove":

 

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

"Today, I want to talk about a revolutionary approach to how to connect our world — without being super-weird."

Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro talk about the Metaverse. They don't like it.

"With all the new money flooding the metaverse... the kinds of conflicts between neighbors we’re familiar with from the real world have followed."

"Take the monastery and the ranch house next door. Both were built by Ogar, an in-demand meta-architect in the metaverse. His real name is Alexandre Vlerick, and he lives in the real-life Lille, France.... Right after he finished the monastery for a German client, he got another request: an American client asking for a ranch house alongside it, on land where he could raise virtual chickens, horses, and a goat. Once the client moved in, he got a red barn, a tractor, and bales of hay. The owner of the monastery wasn’t pleased with the clashing aesthetics, and a familiar homeowners’-association-style conflict erupted. 'The first client was like, "Man, can’t you do it in another place? I’ll swap parcels with you so you have a bigger space far from my place,"' Ogar said. 'But he said no.'... Many early users came to the space because they were excited to hang out virtually with like-minded people who believe in blockchain technology; others were digital artists excited about new platforms.... But for newcomers paying upwards of $100,000 worth of crypto for a parcel, participation in the metaverse might be less about the liberatory potential of blockchain and more about speculating with crypto on digital assets. There is a clear tension between the idea that the metaverse is a utopian blank canvas, socially and visually, and the fact these spaces are based on money-backed property rights.... [T]here is already a kind of nostalgia setting in among longtime users of these platforms... 'The big money is moving in....'"

From "Does the Metaverse Need a Zoning Board? As new crypto investments flood online worlds, conflicts between virtual neighbors are on the rise" (NY Magazine). 

It's a replication of the problem of gentrification. First come the young creatives. They make the place cool and alive. Then come the people who just buy their way in. But what are they buying? They don't really live there... or do they spend time there in some way. Is it art or is it investment? 

In any case, Ogar has a nice job for himself. Speaking of jobs, there must be lawyers. There must be government. Or maybe not. It's a game, isn't it? I don't understand it, but I got to thinking about the board game Risk. 

There's never a point in Risk where government emerges. You just play to the death, every time. Sometimes you feel real emotio 

FROM THE EMAIL: Steve writes:

"Gucci sneakers usually retail for well over $500, but this week the luxury fashion giant has started selling a pair for $17.99... digital only."

"The Virtual 25 sneaker is a chunky slime green, bubble-gum pink and sky blue shoe that... can only be 'worn' via augmented and virtual reality," The Guardian reports.

An impressive idea for a product. People spend a lot of money on clothes to impress other people, and if they are doing their efforts to impress in virtual spaces, then why not buy these things? It's the next step. 

It's funny, though, to buy sneakers, shoes built around the concept of comfort and physical performance. These are precisely the factors that don't matter when you are in virtual space. Why not wear wild, weird shoes in virtual space, the kind that would be impractical and painful if you had them on your flesh-and-blood feet? 

I'll just guess that in virtual spaces, you want to look like you could run away. My second guess, though, is that the importance of sneakers — the fascination with luxury branded, high-priced sneakers — is firmly established within the set of people who do augmented and virtual reality, so that's the kind of fake shoes they want. 

I thought of the analogy to virtual sex: Do people want their nonexistent sexual partners to have qualities unrelated to sexual experience but that they'd want in a real-life partner? I mean seem to have — the equivalent of the comfort and practicality of virtual sneakers. I'm thinking of — for a woman — a virtual partner who seems to have an impressive job and a prestigious family. For a man — a virtual woman with a modestly successful artistic job and a family that lives far away. You know? Sexual sneakers! Or would you like someone more challenging, the virtual sex equivalent of highly impractical shoes?

I did not think I would end up there! I'm only writing about Gucci's virtual shoes — the article is from last month — because it popped up after a new article that caught my eye: "‘Short, fat, ugly’: Gucci family lashes out at cast appearance in new film/Ridley Scott biopic tells story of Patrizia Reggiani’s doomed marriage to Maurizio Gucci."

Ha ha. The ugly people are Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, and — in a baldness cap — Jared Leto. Uglier than the actors — the actual story of the Gucci family: "The film, which is now in production and directed by Sir Ridley Scott, tells the story of Patrizia Reggiani and her doomed marriage to Maurizio Gucci. Reggiani was convicted of his assassination in 1998 after hiring a hitman to kill him.... When a reporter asked Reggiani why she had not shot her ex-husband herself, she said: 'My eyesight is not so good. I didn’t want to miss.'"

(To comment, email me here.)