The metaverse won’t be a place to escape but a digital copy of existing real life – so what’s it for?

“Keep shovelling, lads. It’s good of you to form a gang to stuff my metahole.

“Yes, Rod, that was a joke. Yes, it sounds like a sexual euphemism; well spotted. No, Rod, I made it up because I thought it might be funny. Yes, I realise that it wasn’t but… No, Rod, I did not mean that I actually want you to stuff my… Yes, Rod, I do think you’re sexy (there, I’ve let you know) but I wasn’t really asking you to er, um… look, just keep shovelling, eh?”

Rod – to be more precise I should say MetaRod – is helping me fill a pothole outside my front drive. To be more precise again, I should say it’s a metapothole outside my metadrive in front of my metahouse. The sprightly avatar of an ageing rockstar is amongst my metaneighbours giving me a metahand to metafill the metafucker.

This is not how I expected metaverses to turn out.

At the beginning, it all seemed a bit of harmless diversion from the humdrum of everyday (real) life. Its main attraction was that it was so obviously unreal. The graphics were shit and that was exactly we wanted.

Despite all the advances in 3D graphics over decades of development, persuading cash-strapped post-pandemic/war/Brexit/etc consumers such as me to invest in headsets capable of hi-res realtime rendering was too great a task. As a result, early metaverses all looked like that Dire Straits video from the 1980s.

Then the real estate people moved in.

Apparently in the unlimited virtual space, you need to buy plots of non-existent land and build non-existent properties on it. Instead of the metaverse being a free and easy fantasy escape-land, we’re told it needs to conform to everyday conventions of size, space and temporal physics.

Oh, and finance: if you don’t own bits of it, you’ll have to pay someone metarent to occupy their patches of metaland. If you don’t like it, go walk.

Ah yes, the walking bit. I had naively imagined that a metaverse would not need to conform to real-world physics. But with the introduction of metalocations, it became necessary to move between them using a 3D meta-er… metaphor that was both literally and virtually pedestrian. So the metaverse started to have roads.

Brilliant. You’ve given up commuting and can now work from home. Slip on your 3D headset and… you find yourself having to metacommute to your metaworkplace, because your metahome is on the wrong side of metatown where the metarents are cheaper.

And because everything in a metaverse is virtual, the scenery changes from one second to another and the streets move around on a whim. As you walk past a vacant metaplot, a skyscraper is erected on it, demolished and rebuilt to a different design. You look back and it is now a children’s playground.

In other words, commuting in the metaverse is like navigating a shit version of Google Street View.

At least with Google Street View, there is an element of amusement as you progress down a street in giant leaps, watching trees and buildings that have long gone suddenly reappear then disappear. Best of all with Google Street View is the way the weather keeps changing: from one step to the next, it is gloriously sunny, then overcast, then snowing, then sunny again, then raining. Endless entertainment for the perpetually bored.

No such fun in the metaverse, where nobody has worked out how to make money from the weather so haven’t yet bothered to develop a way to make it change.

Now that we have metaroads everywhere, we need metavehicles to travel down them. And – here it comes – we have to start paying rent to use the roads that we didn’t want or need. For ‘rent’, read ‘taxes’.

At this point, the metaverse really did start resembling a digital copy of real life and all the types of things we’d hoped we could escape by going meta in the first place.

Then it got worse.

On 4 July 2022 (if you can remember that far back), the former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, published a book on how fun it would be to establish independent countries in the metaverse. The Network State postulated that one could build metabusinesses, metaschools, metainfrastructure projects and a veritable metasociety of metaindividuals in that virtual arena. As it expands, the metasociety would begin to share so much similarity to real-world societies that it should eventually seek independent digital nationhood, even recognition by the United Nations.

It was all quite silly in its own way, rather like Sealand. Unfortunately not enough people were laughing.

Why by all the Gods would anybody in their right minds want to declare nationhood? Most countries started out being defined by geographical boundaries, subsequently redefined over and over again by wars. Nations are just big gangs, always on the lookout for a bustup with a neighbouring gang, usually by sending the poor to do the fighting for them. It’s bad enough we have to suffer this in real life; there is absolutely no good reason to replicate this nightmare in the metaverse.

Oh look. Srinivasan happens to mention along the way that these metanations would establish their own cryptocurrencies. Unless every digital gang agrees to use one specific crypto, the digital nations would have to establish intermetanational currency exchanges.

Now why would the former CTO of Coinbase suggest such a thing?

I’m reminded of the early days of web browsing, just as the money-men came in. Personally, I happen to support the concept of digital advertising and marketing, but it did rob the internet of the fun aspect of being able to escape from it all. Back then, practically the entire internet was running on the goodwill of (mostly American) educational establishments, albeit on the backbone of military ones. But still.

Srinivasan also suggests paying for it all with social contributions within those digital nations. Ah, taxes again. How else are we going to support the poor, unemployed and disabled in the metaverse? Did I say ‘disabled’? The metaverse is about as much use to a blind person as a ticket to a Soulages exhibition.

So we moved from Dire Straits videos to city digital twins to independent metanation states.

And to me, trying to fill a virtual pothole on the road at the end of my virtual driveway. I’m paying my metataxes but metaCity Hall still haven’t got around to sending a developer over to fix it. So here I am with Rod and his mates doing it ourselves.

Sometimes I wish I’d never entered the metaverse: it’s just as bad as the real thing. But unlike real life, there is no way out: I asked my metanation state to delete my profile but they said they had to keep my details on file for another 1,000 years. In the virtual space, you are immortal.

I’m told this was written in the terms and conditions that I agreed to when I first signed up. Actually, they weren’t, but the clause was added to the T&Cs in one of their regular monthly updates and apparently I had expressly and deliberately not objected to it at the time, whenever that was. So I’m stuck here for the foreseeable metafuture, and for the best part of an unforeseeable millennium that comes after that. Plenty of time to fill this pothole that I paid someone else to fill already.

It seems two things are certain in the metaverse: immortality and taxes.

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He wishes he had taken the blue pill. Or was it the red pill? Or maybe just click Cancel. Better still, he should have called up Task Manager and clicked End Process Forever. More of me at The Register and at @alidabbs.