Facebook’s metaverse would be a “preventive antidote” to the eventual rituals of digital disconnection, says writer Jorge Carrión

(CNN Spanish) – Digital avatars that walk, interact and even consume in a space of virtual and augmented reality: the metaverse that Facebook wants to build seems to come out of a dystopian novel, but it could soon be a fact.

Precisely, in “Membrana”, the new science fiction novel by the writer and cultural critic Jorge Carrión, it is the artificial intelligences (AI) who narrate the history of humanity in the catalog of their “Museum of the XXI Century”. Algorithms are the protagonists in a world in which human beings live immersed in a network that surpasses them, in a reality the physical and the digital are diluted and converge.

Does this look like the metaverse of Facebook? We speak with the Catalan author.

CNN Spanish: Would Facebook’s meta-universe be a “cathedral algorithm” like that of Membrane?

Jorge Carrion: It could be, without a doubt. In the 2000s, a series of young North Americans realized that it is impossible to continue conquering the physical world, but that there is an infinite new continent to explore and conquer: there was born digital imperialism, whose greatest exponents are Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon. Since Facebook and YouTube were founded, that territory is becoming saturated and, therefore, what you have to do is invent a new infinite territory, that there have already been some very interesting tests such as Second Life or Minecraft, and that Facebook wants to invent and exploit to continue your data mining and lucrative advertising business. I imagine (Mark) Zuckerberg’s technology for the metaverse must be some kind of algorithmic evolution that could be compared to the cathedral algorithms of Membrane, But these are very futuristic science fiction because history accelerates and what could happen in three centuries happens in one.

CNN Spanish: The AIs that narrate Membrane They say that at the beginning of the 21st century they were already “the greatest smear machine in history” and name Facebook and Donald Trump. Now the former president says he will launch his own social network: “Truth.” Where is the truth on digital platforms?

JC: We live in times of digital imperialism and empires have always wanted an information machine, a smear machine, and a persecution machine. Alessandro Baricco says in The Game that for a speech to circulate on the internet what matters is that it be light, that it has a greater chance of success, impact, virality. The lie is lighter than the truth. Trump’s move is one of terrible irony: the person who has exponentially accelerated the imposition of the post-true paradigm calls his platform “Truth”, “truth”.

CNN Spanish: The novel talks about “codecentrism”, what would it be? It already started?

JC: On Membrane I speak of three phases in the history of humanity: theocentrism, when the gods were at the center; anthropocentrism, with the human being at the center; And what has happened in recent years is a double Copernican twist: on the one hand we have moved to biocentrism, we have realized that climate change is the fault of not having understood that we are in alliance with other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses of the Earth, and on the other hand, to codecentrism, because this has happened at the same time that algorithms have been placed in the center of reality. Ideally, find a shared centrality.

CNN Spanish: With the metaverse, is a kind of membrane being woven?

JC: Virality is already online, it is already woven, but it is chaotic and meaningless. What we have to do, following Donna Haraway, is create structures of meaning. Our role as journalists, writers, creators, is to make sense of that chaos of the internet and technology, which does not have it or which has a secret meaning, because algorithms are opaque, we do not know how they work, we do not know exactly what they are. “thinking”. We hide behind the idea that they do not think because they do not have intelligence as we understand it, but I believe that they do think, what happens is that they do it in a non-human way, and therefore incomprehensible even for the programmers who have created them. .

CNN Spanish: Precisely, the book talks about Norman, “The psychopathic algorithm” created by MIT, of the AIs that Facebook turned off because they created their own “language”. In 2016 Google patented a “red button” that supposedly could turn off all AI. Would it be possible today?

JC: The whole system is very fragile, as seen with the blackout of Facebook and WhatsApp. It seems that now there is the plan of Facebook and Google to try to stay with the structure of the internet and not only with the content, that is, with the cables. And that is extremely dangerous because these corporations tend towards monopoly. But there are already so many quantum supercomputers that are being built, so many companies, laboratories, states, involved in the construction of AI, that control is impossible. There is no body, not the UN, not Unesco, not governments, not even China or the United States, that can totally control what is happening.

CNN Spanish: If in the metaverse we are avatars, where is the memory, the identity?

JC: The history of technology is the history of delegation. Now it is so far away that you can geolocate your memory: when you want to remember something you look for a photo or an email that is archived in some remote and unknown place. The problem in recent years, linked to Trump and “Truth”, is that we have also been delegating to technology what has to do with morality. We have outsourced such important issues as health or political opinion. That, I fear, is a path of no return. The great tension of our time is trying to know who you are regardless of everything that you have delegated outside of yourself.

The avatar, the nickname, the digital identity, it is real, it is part of you. But we have assumed a series of logics and inertia without prior critical reflection and we have totally connected, we have become techno-addicts. Now I imagine that in this third decade spaces and rituals of disconnection are going to be imposed, and this is going to be normalized. Perhaps that is why Zuckerberg comes forward and proposes a preventive antidote: we are going to cause more addiction because, as has been seen with the leaking of reports, they are aware of how to control addiction and hijack our attention.

This interview has been lightly edited for readability.