From Metaverse to Betaverse (via COP26 at Glasgow)
As national politicians fumble the climate crisis, can tech-powered communities imagine - and do - better?
What a newsweek to start a writing platform concerned with future prospects, and their Scottish echo. There’s no handy abstractions available. We’ll have to start in the midst of everything.
In Glasgow, the security helicopters are beating above the heads of cli-fi writers; obsidian limousines drive confusedly around the city’s back-streets, Cop26 diplomats adrift inside. In my twitter stream, a post announcing the creation of a Govan Free State is immediately followed by a post of “camaraderie and solidarity” with striking city care workers. In the same social media flow, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon - not a formal negotiator in this “Code Red” conference - carefully marks her position on the commissioning of new oil fields off the Shetlands, requesting an “environmental assessment” of whether they’ll blow through carbon targets.
Beyond Sturgeon’s dyad with Christine Anampour (preceded by her elbow bump with Greta Thunberg), giant nation-states offer their percentage chunks of mitigation to the disrupted biosphere. Elsewhere, galactocrats jet in to justify their carbon-spilling space jaunts. I retweet that I am going to speak at a Cop fringe event on the 6th, an idealistic day of music and talks curated by wellbeing economists. And this in a venue which made possible both my first drunken student tryst, and hosted a gig from my pop-musician heyday.
A metaverse? Who needs to invent that, when—sitting between a coffee, a window and a smartphone—one’s consciousness and attention can zoom in and out of any current phenomenon, braiding it with your own memories?
Yet the coincidence of Zuckerberg’s vast and unlimited attempt at mental enclosure, and a convention of national leaders chafing under the demands of planetary limits—both playing out before me in my home town—needs to be marked somehow.
First point to make is this: if a metaverse is like a virtual and parallel world, running alongside and interpenetrating our own, then what exactly is the Cop26 compound on the banks of the River Clyde? Cavorting with your card-playing robot pals in a simulated space station is one thing—but declaring UN sovereignty for two weeks over an urban zone, and enforcing that with a ring of steel, is quite another level of ad-hoc world-building.
This spectacle of autonomy (or is it authority?) is happening on an island which already judders with territorial claims. An independence-dominated Scottish Parliament weighs up its options: whether to wait to be granted another referendum by the UK state, or to push on with one based on its own legitimacy. Meanwhile, Westminster/Whitehall implants its economic “freezones”, which reduce regulation and constraints on business, anywhere they see fit, under the general Rule of Brexitannia.
On this theme, I would also keep an eye on the policy garden shed of Dominic Cummings, the apostate Tory advisor. He seems to be about to emerge with a British plan for micro-sovereignties and parallel institutions, effected by blockchain and other secure technologies, “building new things that can replace these rotten old institutions” for communities.
Cummings’ guru in this is a tech investor called Balaji Srinivasan who recently imagined how you might start a new country: “the network state is built cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we begin with a digital community”. According to Balaji, this community then composes its “national” territory from many discontiguous plots of land across the planet, which have been secured by members. They’ll then thread them together under one jurisdiction, by means of a crypto-based economy.
You’re laughing incredulously? Who are these marginal people, conjuring up such ad-hoc socio-technical structures into being? Well, ask the doughty denizens of Greater Glasgow during Cop. They are currently agape at the sight of Cop26 delegates being given an “integrated travel pass” across the Scottish Central Belt for a fortnight. After which the cross-modal service—the dream of green urbanites—will be shut down.
So if we want the experience of swiftly building new organisations and infrastructures, to serve and help our communities to flourish, we don’t need to wait for the seductions of the Zuckerverse. (One assumes that Glaswegian citizens - currently expressing their traditional militancy - will soon be generally demanding to have what the Coptocrats had).
The possibility of this everyday structural dynamism seems to be more and more, right before our eyes. Covid has drawn much organisational flexibility and inventiveness out of us, both at grassroots and governing levels. We might all be expected to be a little more anarchist and self-determining in our lives.
It’s not that easily done, of course (and you have to carefully pick your anarchist references). Leisure-hour cavortings in Zuckerspace are a real distraction from the core issue. There is a clear demand for much more responsive, participative and smaller-scale integrations between “clicks” and “mortar”. That is, between the networks and virtualities in our lives (& heads), and the physical places and spaces where we shelter and make, care and help for others, be convivial.
In fact, it’s not just a clear demand—it’s an urgent one. Cop26, so far, is a stunningly poor ad for the old political order. Even for Scottish independistas like myself, who still imagine that a new small nation-state could innovate all kinds of new relationships and protocols, the Cop-out of national interests displayed at Glasgow is dispiriting.
George Monbiot, the Orwell of our times, makes it crushingly clear that globalised capitalism, and the extraction/use of fossil fuels, are the mega-systems that we need to disassemble, in order to secure our existence on the planet. (Though it has to be said that many in the investment community and capital markets seem to have swallowed the message - that inadequate action on decarbonisation will actually destroy much more future economic value than it generates - more readily than national macro-economies). Will the instruments of change be nation-states, democratic or otherwise, fitfully and falteringly agreeing to climate targets that fall short of the necessary anyway? That seems an increasingly forlorn hope
Monbiot argues for disobedience, on all levels, from private to public life. Disobedience and rebellion certainly has its place. But one of the most valuable inputs into my thinking and practice are from those who best disobey by proposing, then building, viable alternatives. They don’t oppose the existing systems, but enterprisingly outmode them and make them obsolete, to polish Buckminster Fuller’s old chestnut.
Indra Adnan, who founded The Alternative UK (and which I helped her to co-initiate), is proselytising and educating around practices like citizens action networks (or CANs). These are new structures for collective action that evade the toxicity of party/partisan politics, and seek to unite the will of communities via conviviality, skilled convening and a celebration of existing local capabilities and enterprises. The aim is to be cosmolocal, too—using ICTs and virtualities to connect up and share experiences/expertises with other communities across the planet, who share a fate of climate crisis and broken national politics.
The aim is the slow establishment - in an idiosyncratic and non-standardised way, along with kindred forces like Transition Towns and bio-regions - of a “parallel polis”. This is a concept borrowed from dissident Czechs in the 80s (Vaclav’s Havel and Benda). Such a polis is rooted in a vision of regenerative, relationship-oriented and feminized lifestyles/workstyles (meaning, they’re not the sterile, pop-up, tech-bro autarchies of Srinivasan and Cummings). But in any case, there is undoubtedly a new space of everyday local autonomy opening up - with various players contending.
In Scotland, the do-tank Common Weal (whose board I’m on) is also ambitious for community power and invention. Like me, they hold out hope that Scotland is the right size, and has the best inheritance of natural, infrastructural and human resources, to strike an ideal “republican” balance. That is, between top-down administration, and bottom-up self-determination, with the planetary boundaries in full view to all.
(More on CW in ongoing posts. But I must quote them from this week to give you a flavour… I’m asking their head of policy, the physicist Craig Dalzell, for advice on some names, and say at one point, “this is a century for engineers, chemists, physicists”. His answer springs back: “It's the century of plumbers, carpenters and shepherds. We need thousands of km of district heating pipes, and tonnes of timber construction and sheep wool/wood fibre insulation.” CW claims to have the world’s first fully costed Green New Deal).
Of course, nothing stops Craig’s world of “plumbers, carpenters and shepherds” being first simulated in a metaversal space near (or inside) you. (Though all the polluting and exploiting externalities generated by these cloud-worlds, as noted by Kate Crawford, may soon force us to be much more discriminating about how we use them).
But we will have to consciously and deliberately transform the Metaverse into a Betaverse. (Beta = in a preparatory stage, never quite ready, testing, testing…) The Betaverse can be an experimental place in which we can rehearse dramatically new forms of living and making. We’ll need to do this, if we are to achieve that tricky, near-vertical tumble “down the slide” (see the graphic below, and article ref) which the urgencies of climate crisis force upon us.
If we want, we can turn up to this Betaverse as cheery big robots and floating friends. Indeed, as I’ll often be saying in this column, playfulness and friendly relations are the best spirits in which we can handle rapid, disorienting change. But genuine world-saving (even just saving us from ourselves) has to be in the background programming. And that’s a much bigger, more consequential poker game entirely.
All comments welcome. If you think I can help you strategise around and act through these issues, contact me here.
Linktopia
All the ♥️’s a sticky platform can generate in a week
💲Post-neoliberalism. Just as you were getting to grips…
👨🎤 No, you’ll never be as pretty as David Bowie promoting his album in 1995
🤖A theory of justice for Artificial Intelligence
🤗 There’s a National Care Service (like an NHS) coming in Scotland. So what is care?
😵💫In case you thought there was a shortcut to all that canvassing: Psychedelics won't automatically bring about a progressive society…
💚…But love, as an evolved human survival adaptation, may help us come together enough to save the climate
Useful: Carbon Tunnel Vision
⛓ "Meta will be a holding company in charge of a thriving ecosystem of interconnected products and services, all seamlessly integrated into a hybrid world able to effortlessly extract profit at every point in the system." Not arguing…
…But hardly brand new either: Ethan Zuckerman built the first metaverse, 27 years ago
I've likened the whole of economics, including capitalism, similarly. It's as if all our economic experts spend their wasted lives examining in the minutest detail our society, and mostly its money - sometimes from a distance, using powerful binoculars, sometimes closely, using a microscope. They can construct wonderful theories on all the multitude of measurements they can make using all sorts of rulers, gauges and graphs, and construct models of mind numbing complexity, they can even make portentous prognostications about people's wealth thirty years hence - yet they can't even predict the world's greatest financial crash and the biggest event of their professional lifetimes a month before it happens. Because all these millions of man hours is a futile use of their collective intelligence; they totally deceive themselves, and totally deceive us, because it's what lies outside the view of the binoculars, or the microscope, that's truly fundamental. What economics can safely tell us must be less than 5% of what it is to be human being existing on this planet, it ignores and is incapable of measuring, or even understanding, the other 95%.
Our view of the cold stars, the luminous moon, the blinding sun, the porcelain sea, the colour of a rainbow, love, hate, jealously, grief, joy, a Rembrandt, beauty, friendship, warmth, comfort, family, intimacy, the sound of the wind in the trees, the pebbles on the shore, the crackle of frost on the ground, the smell of hay or the stockpot, laughter and tears in the theatre, the goose bumps from a Handel aria, the throb of rock music, laughter in company or in reading a favourite novel, a sense of care for society, the taste and pleasure of a pint of bitter after a hard few hours in the garden, a prickly conscience, our wonder at everything, earnest argument, easy companionship, not just amongst ourselves, but with the creatures and flowers that share our existence, the thrill of knowledge and the thrill of sport, the tug of the fish on the line, the familiarity of a well-known poem ---- there is a whole 360 degree world unfolding and acting and playing around our head of which economics and capitalism can usefully describe or guide us but a small fraction. A whole 360 degree world that describes, inchoately, what we are and what we think we are.
The whole of human society coped (imperfectly admittedly) without any economics for thousands of years. We now have economics, and our planet and our society is in deeper trouble now than at any time in its collective consciousness. An economics that ignores most human's rights and needs, but panders to unfulfillable human desires, lying to us and to itself to say it can fulfil them. Wearing blinkers, looking through the tunnel, doesn't even begin to describe the way we've imprisoned our brains and our entire culture to a certifiable insanity.