Metaverse.. Which pill will you take?

Philosophers are pondering on the concept of reality since the dawn of the humanity. There is a reason for this. Sometimes the matters or concepts that humankind discover or produce can extend beyond our reach. The definitions we have or the limits of our understanding may not be large enough to encapsulate some matters. Reality is one of these concepts and this is why "Bending the Truth" is a thing. Yes, the beginning of the post is complicated but important :)

A lot of people are talking about Metaverse these days. They say the world is moving to metaverse, the economy is there, new technologies are there and the future of the web is there. My understanding says "just because everybody is doing something, doesn't mean it is the right thing". Don't know how many times i wrote this, but social applications are emerging to serve us but they become our essentials and this is not a healthy process. Furthermore, if there are sketchy groups behind this marketing train, it is even more suspicious.

In this post, i have written potential dangers and side effects of the concept of Metaverse. I am sure there can be written a lot more about it once i get more into it. Right now, i wonder if it is healthy to detach from reality with virtualization in this digital age. Are these products serve the right purposes. Why does reality matter? And the most important question: The blue pill or the red pill?

Where did this new Meta come from?

Metaverse is not that new as a thought but it became widely spread in our lives to be able surf on the internet in a new fashion. Instead of just clicking through pages on the internet, they create copies of the real environments and you wander in these environments in a VIRTUAL WORLD. You can visit places with a VIRTUAL REALITY headset in a VIRTUAL FORM, while sitting on your chair. It sounds good but smells bad. The capitalized words can easily summarize my concerns.

As far as i know, the concept of metaverse gained popularity with 2 events. First is the UNREAL 5 Matrix demo before the movie Matrix 4. And the second is the Facebook morphing into Meta to lead the metaverse, after the events that shed some light on data privacy issues and lawsuits in 2018. Even at this point of this blog post i have started to think that there is something fishy :)

There are tons of research on social media apps. There is a documentary called Social Dilemma on Netflix. Psychologists are sociologists are working on this matter a lot. So let me point some details that i think are important. We humans have masks in this millennia. I don't mean the masks we wear due to corona, i mean the figurative masks. We were looking for ways to present ourselves to others in a different form than who we are. We were able to make this happen in social media apps.

Our trust in each other were already deprived and we were looking for real people, who don't wear those masks, unconsciously. After all this process, there has emerged a new universe where we can hide our true-selves and even our environments. Social media apps should supposedly be bringing us together but on the contrary they ended up separating us even more with our deceptive images and prejudicial perspectives.

Humankind is a social species and our perception of reality is shaped by / with our interactions with other humans, real physical meat and bone kind of people. If you remove the real human from this equation, people will start believing the reality inside the framework of what they see and hear. Remember the cave allegory of Plato. He says the people who are born in a cave and witness only the shadows on a wall, looking at the wall for all their lives, will start believing that those shadows are the real deal. Now if i say someone is conducting this experiment today, would you call it a conspiracy theory?

What does this new Meta bring and take away?

Ok, then let me present you a new perspective before going into conspiracy theories. In the Matrix movie, which was a revolutionary movie of its time, our heroes were physically in another location and consciously in another location while entering the matrix. It was sort of like a sleeping state. The last statement in the documentary i have mentioned, Social Dilemma, they as "If you don't know you are in the matrix, how can you get out of it?". The concept of reality that i have mentioned becomes important at this point. A human instinctively tries to determine if the events or the places he sees are real or not. Imagine you are asleep now and when you are going to toilet, you are actually wetting your bed in another reality :) Just kidding of course.

Someone interviewed Keanu Reeves after the Unreal Engine demo of the Matrix. Reeves talks about a memory he had. I have added the video down below. He mentions that in a friends house the teenager girl asks about matrix and stuff. He explains it about being not real and searching for reality and etc. Then the girls says "Who cares if it's real or not?". You can find this conversation in the video at 07:00. This is a dangerous perspective. The concept of real and unreal exceeds us humans. In other words, i can never prove or disprove the reality of anything. Actually this is exactly why the distinction of real and unreal is important. Even though i can maintain my life by accepting the reality of the things i can realize, some higher level concept can emerge and destroy my own perception of reality. This would eventually lead to the concept of God if you ask me but my point here is, the search for reality should not be abandoned.

Because if we can realize the essential meta, we would have more important issues than creating our deceptive copies. If you don't try to determine the reality, someone else will determine yours. If you settle with what you hear and see and leave the control to someone else, you are basically giving away one of the most important aspects of being a human, free will, to others.

Of course digital world is one of the most important pillars of globalization. I would support people gathering from all around the world to close the cognitive gaps. But ask this to yourself: Is this why concept of metaverse emerged? Put the goals aside, have you ever paid attention to what they promise us in advertisements? Have you ever thought what might it cost to get used to this? We can turn the Matrix into a virtual world for fun, but we should also remember that it is not and will never be real.

Enough with the philosophicals, what about concrete meta?

Ok, i will touch upon that too :) Have you ever heard about Turkish legend Sülün Osman? He has sold the public properties in Istanbul, like roads, bridges and towers to people. He convinces people that he owns the public properties like these and he sells them to other people who doesn't question the reality and wants to make easy money. These people would even call themselves vigilant. Then he sells these properties at a low price. That 's how he tricks the vigilant people. Does this story sound familiar to you? Especially in recent 2-3 years?

The story of Sülün Osman sounds very much like today's crypto currency frauds. But if you ask me, buying properties and lands from metaverses looks like this too :D Some of the metaverse applications already copied the real world and started selling lands. Yes there are NFT or crypto currency values for those entities but for Gods sake think about it. You are investing real money on the digital data in someone's server and expecting it to be valued.

There was this legendary game called FarmVille back in the days. They were selling in-game coins to make your crops grow faster or to be able to produce different products. This was the first days of the digital meta marketing. People were making fun of the other people who buy these coins. There were MMORPG games like SilkRoad and people were paying real money for characters and items inside the game. And people were making fun of this too. Now the lesson is: You won't die before doing the things you judge in others :)

There is another observation i have. People are presenting buying lands in metaverse as catching the trend of the future. Furthermore, there is a well-known Turkish economist Selçuk Geçer talks about this subject too. He explains what opportunities can metaverse bring and adds that it can have the economy 3 times bigger than the today's world. I don't think burying the added values that people produce into the virtual worlds is a good idea. There is another detail. His videos are usually open for comments but for some reason, his metaverse video is not open for comments :) You can find the youtube video here.

Another concrete example. People occasionally want to surf on the internet anonymously, which is quite reasonable. Users can hide the websites they visit or change the cookie settings or use VPN software. There is a logic and purpose for this anonymous access. And that is to be able to prevent ill intentioned people from tracking you. But what does the metaverse offer us? Not only your habits of browsing through internet, but also the behaviour of your virtual avatar can be thoroughly observed. In other words, you can imagine a world full of surveillance cameras everywhere and everything can be recorded somewhere. And you can also be sure that they won't use this for security purposes.

And lastly the most realistic issue. In this millennia, humankind is making mistakes that can literally destroy itself. We are ruining the world we live in faster and faster everyday. We witness once in a history events in a different matter everyday. Should we be moving further away from the reality or trying to face it even more in this situation? Do we need virtual worlds in order to solve the problems of the real world? No. But it seems that we need virtual worlds in order to drift off from the reality of the world. For instance, there is no climate crisis in the metaverses. Your virtual avatar is not dying from hunger or not prisoned for unjust reasons or killed by radicalized people.

So, the blue pill or the red pill?

Let me end this post with a very unpleasant conspiracy theory. You might lose your connection with the real world that you are living in by witnessing the world they present you as they want. What would happen if you can combine this infrastructure with a technology like neuralink and gaining the opportunity to impact your thoughts? Wouldn't it mean that the Matrix from 20 years ago is now a thing? Doesn't it mean we are taking the blue pill?

Let me rephrase it. The technologies like metaverse, augmented reality and artificial intelligence is getting me really excited as technology grows. Of course i am not against development as a computer engineer. But as a person who understands it, i thought i should mention the side effects as much as i can. I have even created an app, which works in the real world, to be an alternative to all these metaverse applications. I am not just whining. My app is called WhoShares. Right now it is available for Iphone and Android. I can summarize the app like this: It lets you record videos at a location on the map and you can find other videos on the map too. So why did i develop this app?

Based on the context of this post, i think i can say that i have invented the red pill. You can record videos in the REAL world and save them on the map. You can tag your videos under more than 30 categories. You can find videos from all around the REAL world and observe the realities or people that otherwise you would never even be able to interact with. You can be aware of what happened before you and can remind the future about what happened in the REAL world. So the bottom line is, after reading this post, it is up to you to decide between using metaverses to try to make money or trying to leave productive marks in the world you live in. See you at the next post :)