I have a Twitter account. I never use it, but I have one. And about once a week or so, I receive an email from Twitter telling me about things they think I should know about. A couple of articles ago, I talked about how there was a tweet saying, “Experts say masks are safe and effective in helping prevent the spread of COVID-19.” And, according to the tweet, the “experts” are health officials and fact-checkers.
Of course, I mocked the tweet. I had to. Anyone with half a brain knows it’s insane.
But here’s the thing. I’ve received that exact same email from Twitter at least a half a dozen times since then. I know it’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit. But the people at Twitter must be working under the theory that if you feed people enough bullshit, eventually they’ll start to believe it.
I used to have a teacher that said if you wanted someone to remember something, you had to tell them the thing you wanted them to remember at least three times. Twitter has doubled that, and I still don’t believe them. It doesn’t matter how many times they tell me masks are effective, I’m not going to believe it.
So, maybe they need better bullshit.
A few weeks back, I was listening to a podcast about Deep Fakes. Those are faked videos, created by Artificial Intelligence, that are nearly impossible to tell they’re not real.
The podcast played clips from NASA during the Apollo 11 mission, when the first humans successfully landed on the moon. I listened to audio between NASA and the crew that occurred while the Lunar Module was descending. And then the host said, “and we all know what happened next”, and I heard audio of an explosion and crash of the craft. The next thing I heard was President Nixon giving an address to the nation eulogizing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and honoring them for their sacrifice.
Now, I know that didn’t happen. Everyone knows that didn’t happen. But for a few seconds, I had to pause and remind myself that the two astronauts didn’t die on the moon that day. I was listening to a freaking podcast about deep fakes, and my reality was still blurred.
Obviously, Nixon never gave that speech. There was a speech that was written just in case it was necessary. But President Nixon never said those words. Except I heard him plain as day. Because an AI created a video of Nixon giving the speech. And I had to force myself to remember what was true and what wasn’t.
It’s a lot like how knowing that you’re taking a placebo has little impact on whether or not the placebo will work. Even though I knew it was fake, the fakery still worked on me. At least for a few seconds.
I’m about as cynical as they come and like to think that I’ve got my feet firmly planted in reality. But even I was momentarily confused.
Now, imagine what would happen if the people spreading the bullshit had access to even better bullshit.
And that brings me to the Metaverse. What is the Metaverse?
You’ve heard stories of guys chatting online with some hot, buxom “warrior” chick only to find out later that “she” was, in reality, a middle-aged, out of work, overweight slob still living in his parent’s basement. The Metaverse is like that, except on steroids. It’s a fully-immersive virtual reality world (or worlds) that will eventually become the primary source of social interaction for future generations.
In other words, it’s Social Media 2.0. And Facebook, one of the world’s largest purveyors of misinformation, is leading the charge.
Oh yeah, it’s also probably the single biggest threat to our democracy.
The same people who grew up playing online video games are going to be the early settlers in the Metaverse and these people are also the most susceptible to being manipulated by the people running the show.
If you think social media is bad now, just you wait. Game developers have gotten good at manipulating people. And the people who made those games are the same people who are now making the Metaverse.
I worked on one of those games once. Around the holidays one year, we introduced some commemorative plates. Sort of like the ones your grandmother picked up on one of her vacations. Except that these weren’t real plates. They were just pictures of plates. We gave out a bunch of them and then said we had the equivalent of supply chain problems and couldn’t make any more.
Two things happened. One, no one questioned our inability to make more pictures of plates. And two, the price of those pictures of plates went through the roof. Everybody wanted one. Many went so far as to spend a whole bunch of real money to buy fake money to use to buy a picture of a make-believe plate.
Companies have been blurring the boundary between reality and fiction for decades. In fact, that’s the business model for video games. The more they can suck people into their make-believe fantasy world, the more money they can get people to spend.
Game developers know that their largest hurdle is to get people to give them a credit card. And they’re really good at it. In less than 25 years, online video games have gone from zero to being a multi-billion dollar a year industry.
If you can get people to open their wallets, you can get them to do anything.
But it’s not just kids who are going to fall for what I’m calling Bullshit 2.0.
About 10 years ago, I had a one of our game designers come into my office and close the door. He was in his mid-forties and, by all appearances, seemed normal. He also played the game he designed and had developed some in-game friendships. As per the company rules, none of the people he played with knew that he worked for our company and was, in fact, one of the designers of the game.
Eventually, he told me that he had caught wind of a plan by his online friends to exploit a bug and crash the servers. For those unfamiliar with technology, let me tell you that crashing the servers is a really bad thing. It loses customers for the company and ultimately also loses revenue. So, we’d do whatever we could to make sure that it didn’t happen.
Except this guy, this 40-something guy who you’d think would know better, wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell us of the upcoming attack on our service. The reason he was hesitant to tell me was, in his own words, “I don’t know if my loyalties should lie with the company or with my friends”.
I told him finding the answer was easy. All he had to do was remember who signed his paycheck.
The point is, as online technology becomes increasingly immersive, it’s going to be harder for people to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s make-believe. Some people already believe everything they see on CNN or read on Facebook. Imagine how much worse it’s going to be when they’ve plugged all their senses into a world that is purposely designed to confuse them.
And that brings me back to the threat on our democracy. Middle-aged, unemployed, overweight slobs already can’t tell the difference between a virtual hot chick and some other middle-aged, unemployed, overweight slob. Even middle-aged, employed, normal-looking guys don’t know if the virtual world or real life is more important. And both of those dudes can vote.
Anyone who is reading this knows that the election system in the United States is broken. There is no way that Biden got 80 million votes. The fact that he got any votes at all is in no small part due to the efforts of Facebook to mislead and manipulate people using their platform. Facebook and other online companies have already been caught tailoring messages and advertisements to influence how people vote.
What do you think is going to happen when the people running the Metaverse, the same people who are making billions of dollars a year with their video games, have at their disposal the most effective bullshit spreading machine in the history of mankind?
I can tell you this, it’s not going to be good.
The Metaverse is specifically designed to trick people into believing things that aren’t real. Which means that it will be used to trick people into believing that “gender is a social construct”, Joe Biden isn’t the worst president ever, masks are effective, and men can get pregnant.
And even if the people running it use their powers for good instead of evil, that only solves part of the problem.
Our democracy will still be in danger. Because the people in the Metaverse aren’t going to know if the person who’s working so hard to convince them how to cast their vote isn’t sitting in a high-tech sweatshop somewhere on the outskirts of Beijing…or Moscow…or Tehran.
If you’re interested in seeing the entire video I mentioned, here’s where you can find it.
