The Metaverse: Heaven for Soy Boys, Hell on Earth for Us

The Metaverse was born of occult dreams. It will keep growing until the power is cut.

You don’t need physical strength to master virtual reality. You don’t need spiritual insight or moral fortitude, either. In the Metaverse, all you need to achieve a peak experience is a set of VR goggles and a decent WiFi connection. The machine takes care of the rest.

The Metaverse, briefly defined, is a parallel digital realm that will exist alongside our own. It will be populated with 3D replicas of our real world, as well as rainbow unicorns, electro extraterrestrials, animated angels, digital demons, and Lego-man avatars for us to “embody.” Indeed, the Metaverse is billed as the “embodied Internet.”

Much like magicians enter the astral plane using ritual implements, the average schlub will access the Metaverse—both enclosed virtual worlds and ethereal holograms superimposed over physical environments—through VR goggles or augmented reality glasses. Instead of watching bad movies on Netflix, we’re to become characters in a digital dream that bleeds into the real world.

ZuckerBorg Claims the Metaverse

On October 28, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new parent company will be called Meta. Many think this “rebranding” is an effort to deflect attention from recent bad press, including the bogus “whistle-blower” scandal. This deflection theory is erroneous, though. The Metaverse is not some knee-jerk reaction. Facebook's longstanding ambition is documented in a rallying cry sent out by an Oculus executive in 2018:

“The first metaverse that gains real traction is likely to the be the last,” [Jason] Rubin wrote. “We must act first, and go big, or we risk being one of those wannabes."

Last summer, Zuckerberg announced that within the next five years, Facebook will be seen as “a Metaverse company.” His recent cringe-inducing Facebook Connect Conference, where he announced the new name, was probably in production already.

Normal adults relentlessly mocked the phony, Michael Jackson-like behavior exhibited at that conference, but it wasn’t meant for legacy humans. The promo was aimed at technophiles and naïve children.

Unfazed by the disgusted public, Meta will pour some $10 billion into their transformative endeavor. They’ll also bring on ten thousand new employees to help build their parallel universe. Without a doubt, children will be as eager to dive into the Metaverse as they are the ball pits at McDonald’s. Every fixed mutation first appears in a fresh generation.

To that end, Meta is funding Project Cambria to develop high-end VR goggles that read eye movements, facial expressions, and body motions in order to translate your physical self into expressive avatars in virtual space.

Additionally, Project Nazaré is producing ultra-light, 5mm thin augmented reality glasses that will populate your visual field with holographic cartoons and Terminator-style data streams.

All of this represents the socio-religious evolution inherent in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If our living world is an accident of random mutation and natural selection, then tech and social engineering are our only hope for intelligent design. If the pearly gates open to nothingness, virtual reality is our only stairway to heaven.

The XR Association and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

This is not a flash in the pan. There are many Metaverses bubbling up from the void. Microsoft already has Mesh and their HoloLens 2 augmented reality systems. Apple is working on a similar AR device, known only as N301. But a fully “embodied Internet” can only exist within a robust infrastructure.

The XR Association is a New Normal partnership between Facebook (or Meta), Google, Microsoft, Sony, Vive, and many other tech corporations. Their goal is to use public funding to manifest their “mixed reality” (XR)—or what Klaus Schwab describes as “a fusion of the digital, biological, and physical worlds.”

The XRA’s infrastructure plan sounds like the voices in my head when I take off my tinfoil hat:

Immersive technology will play a vital role in America’s drive to Build Back Better. ... As the World Economic Forum has recognized, we are at the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – one in which a range of new technologies will fuse the physical and digital worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries.

On the basis of that global paradigm, the XR Association is pushing Congress to fund research and development grants, workforce training and retraining programs, and various infrastructure projects—particularly broadband—to accelerate our transition to a cyborg culture.

Futurists claim this progress is “inevitable.” But the coronavirus pandemic—celebrated as “The Great Reset”—made it all possible. Lockdowns, corporate Covid policies, and induced germaphobia forced the population to fuse with their machines.

In the near future, many work-from-home meetings will be conducted via sophisticated holograms. As with obedience masks, if you don’t wear your augmented reality glasses, you won’t keep your job. Anyone who refuses to adapt to this new environment will not be able to compete. Holdovers will be socially Darwinized.

Most importantly, schoolchildren will rapidly acculturate to these virtual worlds. They’ll be socialized to treat digital entities—both avatars and AI-powered bots—as if they were real. Virtual reality will become a way of life.

Prometheus Rising

The spiritual implications are obvious. All religious worlds are symbolic realities, conveyed through mythos and embodied in ritual, where they mingle with the physical world. Virtual reality is a means to capture the symbols of traditional religion—to bring sacred realities back to earth as living 3D cartoons—and shape these entities into any desired form.

From a neurological perspective, our experience of the physical world is an embodied simulation—a mental model produced by our senses and neural processes. Strict materialists assume our imaginative states and dreams are just secondary effects of that neural processing.

Virtual reality works by hacking that perceptual system. High-quality VR simulations replace the inner world in our brains—our neural simulations—with a digital world so convincing, you subconsciously believe it’s real. People often return from extended VR experiences to find the real world dull and depressing. It’s as if they reach out to touch the gods and come back godless.

In his illuminating 1998 book, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Information Age, Erik Davis notes that the programmer Mark Pesce—an early developer of VRML code (virtual reality modeling language)—is also a “technopagan” and a “ritual magician.” During a 1994 interview with the author, Pesce explicitly tied techno culture to the occult:

“Both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination. Both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs. ... [I]n magic, the map is the territory. And the same is true in cyberspace.”

That mystic vibe was still resonating at this year’s TransVision 2021 conference—the premiere transhumanist gathering—although the Metaverse was a touchy subject. The virtual reality pioneer Phillipe van Nedervelde seemed irritated that Zuckerberg stole his thunder. Still, the VR guru remains confident we’ll see multiple indie Metaverses, not just the corporate knock-offs.

With the charisma of an advanced Zoom droid, van Nedervelde explained the religious origins of the well-worn Metaverse concept:

“When you look in the Bhagavad Gita or the Vedic scriptures, they will talk about the astral plane, which is an immaterial plane of existence, right? So we are technologically realizing that deeply ancient notion of an immaterial plane...where you can have a full existence inside a virtual world.”

He went on to propose future trajectories. “Maybe we will become mind uploads into Metaverses, rather than avatars,” he speculated, “and there we will be able to form meta-mind groups, or hive minds.” These mental blobs will pilot spaceships to explore and conquer the galaxy.

That sounds great, I guess, but what about the rabble left on Earth?

The Future of an Illusion

Drawing on meticulous research, Yuval Noah Harari imagines a number of horrific paths in his 2017 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. He writes, “Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside.”

As a World Economic Forum favorite, Harari’s predictions for the Fourth Industrial Revolution carry serious weight:

“In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens.”

It’s no coincidence that Harari appeared on 60 Minutes three days after Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta. In preliminary video clips, Harari implies governments should take control of runaway artificial intelligence, mass data mining, and biometric surveillance. He singles out Zuckerberg specifically.

Incidentally, even as Zuckerberg ascends as the dorky Sky God of the Metaverse, he’s still pushing for government regulation of technology. Perhaps he sees the state as a vassal in his virtual kingdom. He also promises users they’ll finally control their own data—as if that’s possible in an all-encompassing system.

Against all reason, he insists his Metaverse will be “human-centered.” Hearing that term, I imagine a neuroscientist at Facebook Reality Labs poking around a subject’s brain. Suddenly the surgeon exclaims, “Found it! Right here. The human center.”

The reality is that Zuckerberg’s shift toward the Metaverse, and the global transition toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution, are inherently dehumanizing. Even worse, the elites promoting these “advances” recognize that fact—but they’re going ahead with it, anyway.

The Metaverse is a wake up call. To my surprise, the public’s immediate revulsion at the news—from Left to Right—is a promising sign. We are not bodies to be enshrouded with technology. We are souls who occupy bodies. Legacy humans were made to thrive in material culture—face to face, mouth to mouth, knuckle to knuckle. Young people were made to develop their souls, through their bodies, in the physical world.

If we don’t put up high cultural barriers now—if we don’t pressure our leaders to protect our humanity, instead of running cover for predatory corporations—then the next generation could easily waste away in digital oblivion.

You think smartphone zombies are bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. To steal a phrase from kids these days, the Metaverse will be game over.

Further Reading

• Zuckerberg Goes Meta: Facebook Tries to Escape its Problems by Rebranding Itself
• From Augmented Reality to Metaverse: How Facebook is Working to Build a Digital Tower of Babel