Occasionally, sitcoms will go meta and play with the conventions of the genre, such as the way that huge, life-changing events seem to disappear from the characters' collective memories and are never referred to again. For example, years after Married... with Children dropped the disastrous storyline about adopting a small child, the actor's face was briefly glimpsed on a milk carton on the kitchen table.
Both Web3 and the metaverse sometimes feel like one of those abandoned storylines. It seems like they should still be a bigger deal, the sort of thing people would bring up more often, particularly given the fact that so many still-powerful individuals and institutions, from the company formerly known as Facebook to the New York Times ("Investors Snap Up Metaverse Real Estate in a Virtual Land Boom" -- Nov 2021), invested so much of their reputations in these next big things that seem inexplicable in retrospect and which many of us were calling out in real time.
In one of his recent epic posts, Ed Zitron specifically made the connection between the concept of hypernormalization and the strange silence about the collapse of the metaverse starting with this quote from Adam Curtis’ documentary Hypernormalization:
The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart.
But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative.
One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation".
You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it.
The fakeness was hypernormal.
Here's Zitron:
While both the media and world governments were adept at making moves to sustain systemic thinking — that the system or systems know best and must be protected (we must prop up banks, we must make sure we’re all in offices, etc.), big tech tried and failed twice to force society to back their concepts, the first being a VC-led attempt to make Clubhouse the next Facebook (with the media attention to match it), the second being the doomed attempt to make the Metaverse the next internet, with the media dutifully covering it as if it were real along with consultancies like McKinsey and Deloitte.
To be clear, there was never proof that the Metaverse was a real thing that anyone wanted, but because Facebook changed its name to Meta, the assumption was that the rich and powerful would not simply “do something for no reason.” It petered out because despite all the hype, there was very little to actually use, or invest in, or really do with it.
Yet the most important detail is how everybody went on with their lives and ignored that Meta burned $77 billion on nothing, [Zitron actually under states Meta's losses here which continued to accumulate after the $77 billion figure became public. -- MP] or that Microsoft (which bought Activision Blizzard under the auspices of the Metaverse) CEO Satya Nadella said he “could not overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse” in 2021 and then effectively shut it all down by 2023. Nobody was fired for the fuckup. Nobody got in trouble. No media outlet apologized for being wrong. As regular people were fired thousands at a time, tech executives like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai received tens of millions of dollars a year. Everybody acted like nothing happened.
Put another way, when regular people fuck up, they see themselves restricted and punished, fired, their credit ratings dropped, evicted from their houses, embarrassed in front of their friends and peers, and when corporations fuck up, the system accelerates to isolate them from damage, explain away their faults, congratulate them for trying, and then forcefully return “reality” to a point where everything they say is perfect.
Given that these very same people, boosted by the same publications, are spending not hundreds of billions but trillions of dollars, putting the markets and possibly even the economy at risk while doing considerable damage to the environment in pursuit of their next next big thing, it seems like their last couple of fiascos should come up in conversation a bit more often.
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