Averse to the Metaverse

 

The company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, sparked some criticism after it opened its keynote "Horizon Worlds" virtual-reality (VR) platform to France and Spain last week.  According to an article in Slate, new European users were disappointed in the graphics, to say the least.  And judging by the screen shots provided in the article, they have a point.  Adjectives like "bland," "cartoonish," and "slightly weird" come to mind.  In common with many VR systems, only the upper bodies of human avatars appear.  I've never understood the reason for this myself, but one user speculated that it was so that nobody online can have sex. 

 

At any rate, it doesn't sound like the French are going to start holding meetings of the Académie Française in Horizon Worlds any time soon.  But Mark Zuckerberg can live without the Academy's forty members if he can get several million mere mortals to join.

 

Meta has put a huge chunk of its colossal resources into its metaverse venture, some $13 billion, and you can be sure the firm is not doing that for fun.  Its vision is that as Internet bandwidth and access increase, you will be able to don a VR headset and basically live life online:  working, playing, even exercising (I suppose, but this might present problems unless you're doing it on some physical treadmill tied to your VR system).  As for sex, there's plenty of that on the Internet already, so maybe Meta is staying out of that area purely for business reasons. 

 

There is a theory in the history-of-technology field called "technological determinism."  It basically says that technology has its own built-in direction, and once a technology develops into a feasible, marketable form, there's no stopping it.  Its development path and growth are intrinsic to the nature of the technology, and human factors and influences count for nothing.  The term was invented mainly by people who didn't believe in it to criticize those who appeared to support it, but I've never encountered a pure card-carrying technological determinist. 

 

Nevertheless, a lot of stories of how technologies developed tend to make it seem inevitable in retrospect.  I think this betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the storyteller, and some of the best histories of technology I have encountered look at failed technologies that might have succeeded if certain almost random factors had gone the other way. 

 

With "Horizon Worlds" we are witnessing the first baby steps of a new technology which Meta, at least, hopes will inevitably dominate the Internet and become as much a part of our lives as mobile phones—and all they can do—have become today.  And, as any good public corporation will try to do, Meta intends to turn this into cash—lots of cash.

 

The Slate article quotes a University of Virginia professor's dark prophecy that Meta hopes to "monitor, monetize, and manage everything about our lives."  While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it's hard to deny that the picture conjured up by proponents of VR, especially the Meta-style of VR, seems to aspire toward a kind of totalizing, all-inclusive situation in which people would take off their VR headsets only to attend to physical needs, like eating, going to the bathroom, and (maybe) sex.  And sleep, unless we manage to genetic-engineer our way out of that little necessity.

 

In promulgating his Meta vision, Zuckerberg and his colleagues suffer from a problem that they has in common with many tech-savvy leaders who combine awesome technical and business skills with the philosophical understanding of ten-year-old boys.  There are various answers to the question, "What are humans for?"  Different cultures and religions come up with different answers, but the worst response of all to that question is to ignore it altogether. 

 

Any entity whose business operations affect millions or even billions of people, as Facebook/Meta's does, should consider seriously what its model for human flourishing is.  And the bigger the firm is, the more seriously it should consider that question. 

 

Unfortunately, this rarely happens.  Instead, a business like Meta is in practice avoiding two guardrails on opposite sides of a wide road.  One guardrail is profits:  if the firm ceases to make money going forward, something has to be done to avoid the guardrail of losses that kill the firm.  The other guardrail is a combination of law and public criticism.  Even a profitable business can go out of existence if its leaders end up in jail or become social pariahs, as the Weinstein Company did when its head Harvey Weinstein was accused (and eventually convicted) of sexual misdeeds.  As long as a firm avoids hitting these two guardrails, its leaders will consider it a success, and will keep doing whatever they feel is necessary to keep going, regardless of the firm's effects on the souls of its millions of customers.

 

Aesthetics are more than just a thing that has to meet minimum standards in order for people to use a platform like "Horizon Worlds."  Aesthetics is another word for beauty.  In the past, advances in technology have led to the creation of beautiful things that make the world a better place.  Advances in building technology led to artistic creations such as Chartres in France and Burgos in Spain.  Cathedrals were designed for the ordinary human, just like "Horizon Worlds" is.  But those who built the cathedrals of the Middle Ages were guided by a very specific vision of human purpose:  to encounter, and eventually to love, the Divine.  Their creations gained thereby a timelessness that motivates even a secular culture such as that of France's today to reconstruct Notre Dame after its disastrous fire, at a cost of millions of dollars.

 

The metaverse can be a place of truth, beauty, and goodness.  But those values can be achieved only if those designing it make these values intentional goals.  On the other hand, if their guides are only the two guardrails of profit and avoiding jail or pariah status, they are likely to forge an erratic path that may lead millions of people to places they wish they hadn't gone to.

 

Sources:  The article "Why the Metaverse Has to Look So Stupid" by Nitish Pahwa appeared on Slate's website on Aug. 19, 2022 at https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-horizon-worlds-facebook-looks-crappy-explained.html. 

Does Money Trump Ethics in Architecture?

 

Not too long ago, I was talking with an alumnus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who mentioned plans for a strange new dorm on campus.  When I was attending Caltech in the 1970s, I had the privilege of visiting UCSB, and it has classic California vistas:  beautiful beaches, palm trees, hills in the distance.  You'd think that any dormitory there would take advantage of the view and at least allocate one window per dorm room. 

 

Well, Charlie Munger doesn't think so.  Mr. Munger, an investing associate of Warren Buffett, is a billionaire who has donated $200 million to UCSB to build a new dormitory for 4500 students, which would make it one of the largest campus dormitories in the U. S.  But he is saying that the dorm has to be built to his specifications, which are eccentric, to say the least.

 

For one thing, most of the rooms where people actually live will not have any windows.  Mr. Munger says they can have TV screens like staterooms in Disney cruises have—a kind of artificial view that can show anyplace in the world, presumably.  The building will have windows, but they open into common areas, not individual dorm rooms.  And so far, the plan is for the building to have only two entrances. 

 

Architect Dennis McFadden has served on UCSB's building design review committee for about fifteen years.  But he resigned when the university overruled his opposition and accepted Munger's plans.  In his letter of resignation, he said that “[t]he basic concept of Munger Hall as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being."  That about covers the field.

 

I'm assuming that the university has not yet run the plans by the Santa Barbara building-code enforcement authorities.   When they do, I think the fire marshal will have a few things to say about plans for 4500 students to exit in a few minutes through only two doors.  Maybe Mr. Munger won't mind the university hanging fire escape stairs on the exterior, like you used to see in old noir movies of nighttime chase scenes in Manhattan.  But that's an issue for another day.

 

The more fundamental question here is, how loudly does money talk when it comes to building a fairly permanent thing like a dorm that promises to create problems?  If we judge by UCSB's actions so far, you'd have to say it talks pretty loud. 

 

It's one thing if an eccentric millionaire leaves her dog a $12 million trust fund, as the late Leona Helmsley did for her Maltese, appropriately named Trouble.  But buildings in general, and dormitories in particular, affect the lives of thousands of people over their useful lifetime. And while I doubt that anyone staying in Munger Hall will actually die from it (unless they really do build it with only two exits and there's a fire), they may not grow weepy at their thirtieth class reunion remembering how wonderful it was to wake up every morning to a TV screen instead of an ocean view.

 

In The Aesthetics of Architecture, the late philosopher Roger Scruton tackles the old saw de gustibus non est disputandum (Latin for "in matters of taste, there can be no disputes.")  He disputes learnedly through some three hundred pages that just as there are right and wrong ways to behave in society and to execute works of fine art, there are right and wrong ways to design buildings—not simply from a safety point of view (which goes without saying) but from an aesthetic point of view as well. 

 

If UCSB builds Munger's dorm exactly the way he wants it built, it won't fall down.  And with appropriate fire codes observed, it won't be dangerous to live in.  But judging from the exterior artist's renderings posted online, the building can't avoid looking like what it is:  a big box to house as many students as possible in as small a volume as possible. 

 

We have something similar on my campus at Texas State University.  Called Tower Hall, it is a monolithic oblong block dotted with tiny four-foot-square windows, and from the outside (I've never been inside, although my nephew survived a semester in it) looks like a nice, well-designed prison.  I'm not sure what combination of poor judgment, penny-pinching, and administrative absence of mind led to the construction of Tower Hall, but fortunately the mistake has never been repeated, and since the advent of our current President Trauth twenty years ago, she has imposed a pleasing Romanesque style on any building built during her watch. 

 

Engineers, and possibly even some architects, spend little time or effort to consider the long-term effect of the appearance and aesthetics of their works on the spirits of those who use them.  Americans are not accustomed to think in terms of decades, and perhaps the enticing bait of a $200 million donation beguiled the UCSB authorities to throw good judgment to the winds and agree to Mr. Munger's plans for a building that will ultimately cost more than five times that amount.  Such issues have imponderable effects that may not seem important, but accumulate over time. 

 

If we're looking for bad examples, I will hold up for inspection the school I served for seventeen years:  the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  While it is a highly regarded research institution that would be better known if it were not in the shadows of Harvard and MIT, the Amherst campus is a collection of nearly every major architectural style used for public buildings in the U. S. from 1880 to 2020, from a faux-Gothic chapel to a 1960s-bunker-style administration building to a 26-story library that is wildly out of place in a small New England town.  It shows what happens when every administration wants to make its presence known by doing something different than the last one did with whatever money comes to hand.  Although there were other factors involved, I blame the architecture of that campus for at least some of the most depressing days I have ever experienced in my life.

 

I recommend that the building planners at UCSB take an extended field trip—in February, let's say—to UMass Amherst to see what happens when other considerations prevail over aesthetic ones in architecture.  If that doesn't change their minds, nothing will.

 

Sources:  The website ArchDaily carried Kaley Overstreet's article "Health, Safety, and Welfar:  What Happens when Design Trumps Ethics?" on Nov. 14 at https://www.archdaily.com/971880/health-safety-and-welfare-what-happens-when-design-trumps-ethics.  I also referred to an NBC news article at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/uc-santa-barbara-mega-dorm-munger-hall-rcna4401, and Wikipedia articles on Charlie Munger and Leona Helmsley.  Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture was published in 1979 by Princeton University Press.  I thank Michael Cook of Mercatornet.com for drawing my attention to the ArchDaily article.