A Shotgun Blast of Tribalization
“It's a social-validation feedback loop... because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
-Sean Parker, former president of Facebook
We are social animals by virtue of habit, culture, and evolution. It is a biological imperative: we thrive in human-to-human contact. Facebook and other social media claim to meet this fundamental human need—validation, recognition, and contact with other human beings. If healthy relationships are nourishing meals, then social media is cotton candy—a sweet, vanishing sugar rush.
On social media the sugar rush is a burst of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that motivates reward-seeking behavior, creating a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction. The human vulnerability is the desire—sometimes craving— for the feelings created by dopamine.
The designers of video games, online games, Instagram, Facebook, and other applications deliberately try to trigger dopamine release in the user’s brain.
Sean Parker, former president and co-founder of Facebook, explained:
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them... was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you... more likes and comments. It's a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
Exploiting the dopamine function in the human brain was deliberate. Parker continued:
“The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
This past fall, Facebook changed its name to Meta to escape the recognition that Facebook has spawned hate speech, conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism, not to mention the negative publicity of Facebook’s continued privacy violations and dishonesty about leaked Facebook studies showing how Facebook was harming teenage girls. Zuckerberg announced Meta née Facebook will make a $10 billion investment in the metaverse. Zuckerberg (or his avatar) said:
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We’ll be able to feel present like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.”
David Baszuzki, co-founder of Roblox, makers of the popular video game, Fortnite, said of the metaverse:
“Our vision goes well beyond play. We’re imagining a place where people learn together, where people work together.”
That’s not visionary: we already live in a world where we learn together and work together. The difference is that in our world we don’t have to pay Roblox or Google or Apple for the pleasure of working and being together.
In many ways, the metaverse is already here. Virtual reality headsets are advertised on TV. People are hyper focused on their telephone screens. We have artificial intelligence, 5G, and cloud support. Many people—especially younger people—already spend an inordinate amount of time on current social media, ensconced in game worlds or TikTok. For them, the shift to virtual reality will feel seamless.
In fact, Big Tech envisions people building their lives inside the metaverse with virtual friends, virtual clothes, and virtual real estate. Corporations like Nike, Adidas, and Chipotle are rushing to buy “real estate” on virtual reality platforms like Sandbox, a Hong Kong-based online game platform centered around blockchain technology. Four-thousand investors bought “land” in November alone, bringing the number of landowners on Sandbox to more than 16,000.
Republic Realm, a digital real estate broker and developer, paid $4.3 million for a lot on Sandbox, becoming the most expensive single purchase of virtual real estate, surpassing the $2.4 million paid by crypto currency investor Tokens.com. Investors own the rights to the land as non-fungible tokens (NFT). (An NFT is a one-of-a-kind entity that exists online that can’t be duplicated but can be bought and sold.) Developers put up buildings with space for rent. They also build “experiences” like concerts or shows, charging for entry.
You, of course, don’t go to the concert. Your avatar goes. Sadly, this avatar is not the Hindu god Vishnu in human form. It’s an electronic representation of you—basically a Lego figure with big eyes and your hair color. After the concert, your avatar goes into a chat room where you can meet other Lego-like avatars and then you can chat—just like in real life.
Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern moved her life into virtual reality for 24 hours. She found a group of pleasant Lego avatars with the voices of real people. They convinced her to visit a comedy club. The comedian avatar on stage seemed to hit on her. In December, a woman on Facebook’s Horizon Worlds was groped by another avatar. Online harassment of women extends into virtual reality. The next day, Stern attended virtual meetings. Now the avatars looked more like floating torsos with no legs. Legs are supposedly coming soon, Stern was told.
Even if you are a floating torso, you want to be good looking. You can buy virtual high fashion for your avatar. Want to see yourself in Gucci, Dior, or Ralph Lauren outfits? Or dress up like the K-pop stars Blackpink? Visit Zepeto. Every day roughly two million people visit Zepeto, Asia’s busiest metaverse platform, to hang out and buy virtual fashion. Avatar outfits sell for a few dollars each. (Zepeto doesn’t have dressing rooms. You click and with a splash of glitter, like Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell, your avatar is ready for a night on the virtual town.)
According to fans, Zepeto allows you to do things that are difficult to do in the real world. A 28-year-old Zepeto fan said:
“I can never wear the things Blackpink wears in real life. But my Zepeto avatar—she can. The dress-up part, I really love that.”
Like the plan for the original social media applications, the metaverse will continue to exploit human psychology for profit. They will continue to offer experiences that prompt the release of dopamine. However, human connection will still be shallow and incomplete in the metaverse.
Zuckerberg claims that people will feel “present,” the far-away person will feel as if she is right next to you. However, people will feel present like they do on the telephone: Your avatar (a.k.a. you) will meet other avatars (a.k.a. real people) with human voices like yours.
The mixing of avatars prevents human eye contact, exchange of scents and pheromones, the tactile sense of skin—in short, it prevents the experience of being a human being in a body, an experience we have spent millions of years evolving to understand.
If you are lonely, maybe the metaverse provides some social contact. But, the more people who abandon the real world for a virtual world, the greater cost we pay as a society. We already live in a world of conflicting realities: millions of people believe the disinformation informally sanctioned by Facebook. They believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that vaccines are a conspiracy to steal your freedom.
What Facebook and other social media originally considered a “closed loop of social validation” has become a shotgun blast of tribalization, where we are open only to what we want to hear, what feels good, what confirms our bias. A democracy cannot exist without the acceptance of basic realities, such as the integrity of elections. We face significant problems like racism, climate change, income inequality. We can’t solve these problems by retreating into the escapism of virtual reality. Meanwhile Big Tech makes mountains of money from our escapism.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.