Written by / Bai Ou
Edited / Shen Jie
What exactly is the metacosm?
Many people may naturally think of "Ready Player One" released in 2018 when answering this question. Spielberg did not mention the concept of "metaverse" in his science fiction stories, but the emergence of elements such as VR glasses, games, and virtual worlds cleverly portrayed the scenes that the metaverse should have.
This is also the charm of those classic films, under the action of time and external environment, the audience can always find new value points, even the director has never thought of expression. Following this logic, Ready Player One is not only the blueprint for the story telling of metaverse advocates, but also hides some special metaphors.
The second topic of the Urban Legends series revolves around "Ready Player One", is the metaverse really a fantasy paradise in the mouth of capital?
01 Why do we need a metacosm?
In the narrative of Ready Player One, Spielberg uses a few short shots to explain the background of the entire story:
The male protagonist Wade Woz is born in 2027 as a low-level teenager, when the world has fallen into a period of material scarcity and broadband resource riots, and a game called "Oasis" has become a harbor for countless people to escape from reality, and Wade is one of the countless users who are addicted to games.
Spielberg's setting follows the routine of most cyberpunk movies, with high-end technology, most people live low-quality lives, and the world is plunged into a period of extreme order, extreme class and solidification, and then makes the male protagonist rise up after complete despair, and eventually becomes the winner of fate.
The questions that can be answered in the movie with only a few shots or monologues are tortures that are difficult for entrepreneurs who endorse the metacosm:
That is, why do we need a metaverse?
Ready Player One boils it down to "too bad reality," and Oasis satisfies the user's deepest desires. The 18-year-old Wade is not a "good boy" in reality, but he can get everything he wants in "Oasis", such as winning the next game and exchanging the prize money for a new set of game equipment; because of the excellent performance in the game, he has become an idol worshipped by his peers, and even has a appeal that cannot be underestimated.
In the metaverse's "legendary teachings", there is no shortage of similar techniques: virtual reality equipment is seen as a gateway to the new world, where you can do whatever you want, you can ski on the pyramid, you can climb Mount Everest with Marvel heroes, you can picnic camping on the moon...
Unfortunately, the reality of the "metaverse" experience does not seem to be optimistic. The lack of immersive experiences makes it impossible to create an immersive atmosphere of self-forgetfulness, even if some people have already attended graduation ceremonies in Minecraft, held weddings in Animal Friends, and listened to concerts in Fortnite, which is essentially a supplement to the real world, rather than a replacement in the true sense.
Just like the "meta-universe sample" created by several domestic Internet companies, even if they borrow a lot of social elements from each other, there are almost no highlights in the user experience, and the actual feeling is far less than that of relatively mature role-playing games. Especially in the metaverse of the underlying technology is still in its infancy, VR, AR and other hardware popularization of the whole people has no predictable time, want to reproduce the scene in "Ready Player One", and use this to leverage the user's demand for the metaverse, is tantamount to paper talk.
Explorers of the metaverse are certainly aware of this established fact, and the investors who have invested in the metaverse project are well aware of this, but it does not prevent the concept of the metacosm from becoming popular. The harsh reality described in Ready Player One may be the shortest path to drive people into the metaverse, but it is not the only channel, at least in the touchable real universe, a "winding path" to the metaverse has already been run through.
02 Pragmatic interpretation of Web 3.0
In the conceptual interpretation of the metacosm, there is a group of people who put forward the idea of Web 3.0:
Web 1.0 belongs to the one-way transmission of information, the emergence of news portals, e-commerce and other applications; Web 2.0 from a simple static web page evolved to interactive experience, user-generated content economy, evolved into social networks, financial technology and other formats; meta-universe representative of the Web 3.0, a collection of virtual reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence and other technologies, will be the key to open the door to the next generation of Internet.
If you only talk about the metaverse on the "metacosm", there is a high probability that it will be criticized as a scam of capital speculation, after all, under a series of technical constraints, the concept of empty talk will sooner or later exhaust the patience of the outside world. The view of Internet evolutionary theory has found evidence for the inevitable existence of the metaverse, and if some sci-fi technical elements are stripped away, the "oasis" in "Ready Player One" has too many "mirror images" in reality.
According to Spielberg's hypothesis, the "oasis" is a virtual space where people escape from the real world, in which they can socialize, entertain, create, trade, love and other behaviors, which boil down to nothing more than light and shadow stimulation, instant feedback, economic systems, time-passing and other functions.
As early as Web 1.0, products with similar logic have emerged. For example, in the Korean game "Legend" represented by Shanda Network in 2001, there were news reports that a player exchanged an Audi for a game equipment dragon slaying knife, which was the same as Wade Woz's behavior of changing equipment in the game.
In the stage of Web 2.0, social, e-commerce, entertainment and other tracks have appeared in the market value of tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of Internet giants, more and more people's lives and the Internet is deeply bundled, even if it is some extreme examples in "Ready Player One", you can also find prototypes in real life. For example, Aunt Wade's boyfriend, in order to make a lot of money in the game, did not hesitate to invest the money he used to move into it. At present, there are also all kinds of gray industries on the Internet, and cases of deep set and even no return can be described as everywhere.
Especially in the second half of the mobile Internet, the popularity of algorithm recommendations and short video content set off a whirlwind of "killing time", further validating Brzezinski's "nipple music" theory: due to rising productivity, a large part of the world's population will not have to actively participate in the production of products and services. To comfort these "abandoned" people, their lives should be filled with plenty of recreational activities that divert their attention and grievances and avoid conflict between a few vested interests and the majority of those at the bottom.
Compared with the slogan of "metaverse", Web 3.0 is a more pragmatic statement, which not only meets the needs of the Internet to occupy more and more users' time, but also lays a solid theoretical foundation for the arrival of the metacosm: the underlying logic of business has not changed, and the immersive experience in the metaverse is just a new tool to occupy user time.
03 The world is accelerating "folding"
If the era of Ready Player One arrives as scheduled, what will the social order look like?
Spielberg's expression in the film is slightly cheesy: "Oasis" founder Halliday left easter eggs in the game, who can find the easter eggs in the game, who can inherit the $350 billion inheritance and control of "Oasis", and then all the plot is set in the service of the story line.
What makes people a little puzzled is that the "cool film" such as "Ready Player One" is not flattering in the European and American markets, and the Rotten Tomatoes index was only 75% in the early days of the release, but it scored a high score of 9.2 on Douban, and the score is still as high as 8.7, which is regarded by many people as "god". If you interpret it around the film itself, it is nothing more than another cyberpunk-style film, which can add some elements of conspiracy theory, and the film is full of "metaphors":
At the beginning of the film, the director presents a fragmented world, where the poor live in "concentrated boxes" of garbage, and the rich live in a bustling city, which is very similar to the scene created by Hao Jingfang in "Beijing Folding". It seems that the metacosm does not solve the trend of class fragmentation, the upper and lower classes live on different spatial scales, and even the chances of crossing classes are as slim as winning the lottery.
Halliday's Easter egg is like a light shining into the lower society, as long as the Easter egg is found, it can instantly "change your life against the sky". But the revealed phenomenon is quite cruel: the upper echelons of society control the rules of the game, the middle class that "works" for 101 company is doing high-paced work, and almost all the bottom of society are blindly following the established rules. As Ados Huxley wrote in Brave New World: "People will fall in love with the entertainment and culture that industrial technology brings, and stop thinking." "It's not just the upward passage that's being snuffed out, but the ability to think and judge independently.
The film ends with what seems to be popular with many, with Wade and his friends winning the game and revamping Oasis, stipulating that users can't enter Oasis for two days a week, trying to get people to learn to embrace real life and stop being overly addicted to the virtual world. Instead of reconstructing existing social rules, Wade adapted his new identity as a vested interest.
Perhaps in the view of Financial Times reporter Isabella Kaminska: the metaverse is like a casino. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Las Vegas was still a bare wasteland in Nevada, and in order to save the economy from the gambling legal bill, the wasteland gradually became a hedonistic space to escape the harsh reality, grazing its own desires, and acting as a lamb to be slaughtered.
In the speeches of capitalists and entrepreneurs, the metaverse is always a seductive fantasy paradise, and the other side of the coin may be a carefully woven folding space: a small elite class controls the laws of the game, and countless individuals can only find emotional support and existence value in the virtual world, playing in it with ingenuity that they cannot find useful, and most people are unaware of their own situation.
Note: There are fictional components in the content, please do not compare it to the truth!