The metaverse is meant to be socialist!

plus paying attention to virtual Gucci handbags and de-forming animals in the anthropocene

As I steer this ‘letter chat further into the uncomfortable space that is nuance and grey (for this is my favourite brain and spirit calisthenic), I am reminded that this Walt Whitman line is definitely my favourite:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Much of what we suffer from, and thus the planet and everything we touch suffers from, is an inability to contain our multitudes. And our largeness. It all feels too much. We feel too much for ourselves.

So we turn to the black and whites, our leaders stamp out questions from voters and journalists that demand their nimble and considered guidance through the swamplands of our complex world, and we talk in clichés with dumb finality (“It is what it is”, “She’ll be right”).

In this emittance that goes out to about 60,000 of you each week, I’ll try to right this horribly spirit-crushing habit in my own small way.

At a personal level, hiking helps. I’d love you to get into it, too. I’ve just come back from a week of hiking and camping the Three Views, Pigeon House, Mt Durras and Binge Binge walks in Yuin country along the south coast of NSW. Moving through nature for hours at a time sees me enter and embody the largeness and get comfortable with the multitudes. All of The Things settle. Not in rigid order, but into a rightful fullness. It feels snug. Yes, that’s the word. Snug, like I belong and fit and the world is as it needs to be. Nothing to fix.

Which is a convenient segue to flagging my hiking site where I’ve endeavoured to plonk many of my epic adventures with details for you. (If you have coin to splash on associating your brand or service with it, do reach out. I’ll be honest - to keep this site going I do need some support.)

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We have killed so many elephants…

that they’ve adapted to be unpoachable… but there’s a horrible clusterf*cky cost

News just in: we have killed so many elephants - for their lucrative ivory - they have evolved in one generation to be tuskless. Which is very wow! And reminds us that nature will win, it will adapt around our vile greed. And fast.

But…there’s a cost – the adaptation is lethal to the males. The tuskless ones all die, often before birth. I’m speculating wildly (I couldn’t find an evolutionary explainer) that it’s because nature knows they won’t survive without an ability to fight and might not be geared to cooperating with the elephants that still have tusks to dig holes for water and so on.

I’ve also read that birds and other species are shape-shifting to survive climate change. Scientists are not excited. They are worried that such fast de-forming will have spin-offs. Are we ready to witness similar in humans?

When you’re a struggling fossil fuel company, this is what you do:

make it the consumer’s fault

Know this: after you’ve denied the science, you deflect and distract. The dirty dozen of the climate crisis are all doing this right now. Their favourite trick is to put the shit back on us. The issue, they patronisingly advise, is our personal footprint. But don’t fear, wonderfully they’re here to help us count it and get us feeling really guilty and busying ourselves with recycling…and hopefully becoming too burdened to remember that 90% of emissions are caused by the fossil fuel industry, the slippery muthafukkers.

Coca-|Cola did it a decade ago. You can drink our sugary water, they assured us, but don’t forget to burn it off! They launched public campaigns that got us all believing it was a neat calories in, calories out situation (which is 100% disproved science – you can’t jog off a coke!). Which duped us into thinking the issue was our laziness. Our cringey guilt then saw us reaching straight back for sugar.

As a head’s up, after denial and deflection comes doomism…as in, “it’s too late to do anything, so we are probably best continuing business as usual, guys!”. Look out for discussion around this, and for signs of it. It’s dead dangerous. Actually, it’s deadly.

I heart libraries

(who wants to expand this wonderful idea?)

This is a gorgeous tale.

During Covid, a librarian noticed cars in the library car park each night filled with families. It turns out they were there to hotspot the wifi so the kids could do their homework.

The lovely librarian who hatched the plan - Coralie Kouvelas// The Guardian

So the librarian - Coralie Kouvelas - and a bunch of other librarians raised $50,000 to give wifi dongles with 60GB per month of data to 100 families for a year. 

There are hundreds of thousands of kids across Australia who were left behind by the assumption students could all just switch to online learning. These same kids were also most likely to have parents who continued to work outside the home during the lockdowns. What is going to happen to these little humans? Two years of interrupted schooling is going to take its toll on these already disadvantaged young people.

BTW: According to the 2021 Australian Digital Inclusion Index, 92 per cent of Australians earning less than $52,000 a year would have to pay more than 5 per cent of their household income to access quality, reliable internet connection.

I’m going to look into whether there is a continued need for dongles for more kids and then find a way to extend the librarian’s campaign. Who’s keen to help?

We need to be on top of the metaverse

honestly, it’s about to ruin the last vestiges of life

With hindsight, we are horrified we let Facebook happen. It crept up; we never thought a misogynist hot-or-not college ranking gimmick would take over the world.

Now The Zuck is telling us he will be gifting us his metaverse. His unflinching aim is to take over IRL life. The metaverse is “a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces,” he said. It’s “an embodied Internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at.” WTF?

There’s much to say on it all, and you can get a primer on it here. (As I say, we need to be abreast of the metaverse…I recommend getting primed!) The upshot is we’ll be incentivised to go to a virtual movie with virtual friends on Facebook, wear clothes on Facebook, own virtual property on Facebook…instead of just doing the real tactile version.

I throw in some thought starters:

• The way I see it, we will be soon robbed – or disincentivised – from living IRL. We will be surreptitiously denied the tactile, sensory, challenging, messy gutsiness of what makes our lives with each other real and juicy. We will become curated, crafted, isolated with K-faces and glass skin, meek and avoidant of conflict that we can’t mastermind with programmable tactics.

• Are we going to ensure someone does some research on all this? What it could do to us? A long-term social and psychological impact analysis?

• Are we going to get some consensus on whether humanity wants this? Once it arrives it will be too late to uncouple, of course.

• Who is going to monitor, police this new world? How will greed and cheating and inequities be tamed? Facebook’s Oversight Board certainly isn’t the answer.

And some slightly tangential thoughts I’ll add as icing…

• The metaverse extends and enhances capitalism, the very thing that has landed us in the climate crisis…dot dot dot… that is also ruining our life.

• Metaverse, the term, comes from a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson and, before that, from Star Wars. These metaverse frontiersmen – Zuck, Elon, Bezos et al – are mega-fans of these sci-fi tomes and movies and they love to quote Stephenson, Iain Banks, HG Wells and Douglas Adams. But they miss the point (I mean, it’s almost comical). All these early explorers of such realms were socialists…their metaverses were about finding solutions beyond capitalism, returning us to organic humanity.

• Tied in with all this is blockchain stuff, such as NFGs, or non-fungible tokens. I’m seriously worried where all this will head for the same reasons – it enables and empowers more (extreme and disassociated) capitalism and removes us from our humanity. And is not held in check. I listened to this Ezra Klein podcast where crypto expert Katie Haun was espousing the fun and freedom of buying virtual Gucci handbags that cost more than the real thing. Ezra was quizzing Katie on where the fun and worth lay. From what I could tell it resides purely in owning something no one else can (even though this “thing” is a mere bunch of bytes that you can’t touch or smell or use to carry things), and then being able to sell it for a profit down the track.

As I say, thought-starters only. But I add a request. Can we all start thinking and talking about whether this is what we want from our one wild and precious life on this planet?

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On brighter notes, this week I chatted to Saul Griffith on my podcast. He’s President Biden’s renegade climate advisor from Wollongong and he drops the best ever climate bomb…electrify everything! Follow Saul closely…he’s going to be going many places and I was chuffed to get an hour with him.

PS As an aside, please do give me feedback in the comment section on both my podcast and this newsletter (is it too long, do you want certain topics covered?).
I work in a silo. I podcast and I write to connect and I respond well to sticks (over carrots; praise does not motivate me).

Onwards,

Sarah xx