Beijing Eyes the Metaverse
Warily
On Monday Chinese internet giant Baidu launched its own version of a ‘Metaverse’ — a virtual reality social world — to compete with that of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Baidu CEO Robin Li duly gave a (virtual) speech declaring that a “Golden era” of artificial intelligence and “man-computer symbiosis” was at hand. His version of the Metaverse, called XiRang (“Land of Hope”), got off to a bit of a rough start, however, with even China’s own CGTN news panning the still-crude software as a “terrible experience.”
Still, Chinese investors, like their Western counterparts, have lately gone wild for all things virtual, despite the fact that the seamless virtual world promised by the concept remains practically non-existent.
But Baidu’s Metaverse is likely to face a yet more challenging reviewer in the years ahead: the Chinese government.
We know this in part because CICIR, a state-run think tank which serves as the research arm of China’s foreign intelligence apparatus, recently released a fascinating whitepaper analysing the risks and opportunities the Metaverse may pose for China. What emerges is a Chinese state that seems fundamentally conflicted about how to approach virtual reality.
This is an excerpt from a short piece I wrote over at UnHerd today on how Beijing has been thinking about the Metaverse. You can read the rest in full for free here.
Once you’ve had a chance to do so, a couple interesting things (in my view) that were left out in the interest of length may also be worth noting in more detail here.
The first is that the think tank mentioned above explicitly identifies an ongoing “integration of the real world and the virtual world” that has been “significantly accelerated” by the pandemic, but then predicts this digital revolution may soon split between “two main directions in the future” – towards “an overall digital transformation of the real world,” in the form of the “Internet of Things,” or towards the prioritization of the virtual world over the real in the form of the Metaverse. While these paths aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, it implies this will very likely be a source of significant argument between technologists, and states, moving forward.
This is actually already a source of argument, as far as I can tell, between the internet-happy technologists and the Elon Musk types, who would prefer we focus on building things in the real world. In any case I think this is all fascinating, especially given what I wrote about in The Reality War.
It’s also all rather horrifying, given the role technology already seems to be playing in our social and economic upheavals. Paul Kingsnorth’s series on “the Machine” and Mary Harrington’s on “fully automated luxury Gnosticism,” as well as those of Antonio García Martínez on how we’re kind of already in the Metaverse, are all obviously very relevant here, for those interested in some fun further reading.
The second is that the Chinese whitepaper predicts that, due to what may be “huge differences in the views, positions, and supervision methods of the Metaverse between countries,” those countries could end up forming “mutually isolated systems” in virtual space. As in, if you think people live in their own ideological silos now, just wait until they can set their own rules of reality! Amusingly, the paper notes that this could “make cyber-attacks more dangerous,” in that interruption of such worlds could potentially produce the kind of “social shocks” that “may exceed expectations.”
Finally, it’s worth expanding a little more on Xi Jinping’s interesting personal antipathy to what he calls the “fictitious economy” – by which he means internet companies that don’t actually produce anything, along with financial speculators, and other decadent late capitalist innovations – and his strong affection for the contrasting “real economy” of industries like manufacturing and agriculture. In an April 2020 speech he warned that while China should “accelerate construction of the digital economy,” strategically it “must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy” and absolutely “never deindustrialize.” To those in the West arguing about digitization, the loss of manufacturing, national decay, and the rise of populism, this may all sound strikingly familiar.
Anyway, I figured I’d try to break down some of this for you all; let me know what you think about it, and about our rapidly approaching brave new world.
Oh and Happy New Year!
Dear N.S. Lyons, your thoughts always cause wide flights of thought in me, thank you very much. I hope no one is bothered by my lengthy comments.
The names of commentators indicate a wide range of interested and interesting minds.
Will we need separate states soon, for people who insist on living in real reality?
Chinese or US VR are equally repelling and useless to a Christian steeped in tradition and the humanities who has personal friendships and no contact with social media and other distractions on the internet.
I already (attempt to) live in the truth, goodness, and beauty of the classical world normal till 150 years ago but lost like Atlantis today. 90% of my fellow Germans can not discuss with me, they are like "Major Tom to Ground Control": Lost in a space of triviality, mainstream media without any groundings in culture, morality, faith, or even the realities of their - our - Western civilisation.
What is described concisely here will lead to the need for people like me, who probably mostly live in the USA, to create their own political entity at some point.
Of course, every conservative libertarian or "liberal" abhors Chinese totalitarianism. But the clarity of mind of Xi Jinping, Wang Huning, etc. on such issues is humbling compared to Western politicians.
History does not repeat itself in great detail. But should we not go back to a world where kids play catch in the mud and the forests, and we have some cultural grounding in the Bible, Aristotle, Shakespeare while cooking for real friends instead of living in a virtual world which - one properly documented - makes us physically and mentally sick and meak? The medium still is large part of the message, it forms the brain.
Is there a way forward instead of backward? I am not a nostalgic at all, but we are on the wrong track.
And although eventually perhaps helpless, Xi Jinping understands that well. Exactly as you say: It may well be that the Chinese bending Virtual Space with brute force will be better for mankind than Western "Zauberlehrlinge" (sorcerer´s apprentices) trying to exploit that space while actually being used by its anonymous force.
It´s good to be too old to have to fight this in my lifetime. I pity the young - more than they do themselves, they seem quite happy while reports on their mental health issues pour in like crazy.
I am not used to feeling intellectually helpless. For any imaginable issue from child-raising to Realpolitik and war, we find good theoretical solutions in the classical mix of Christian conservative and libertarian thinking, from caritas to personal responsibility before the face of god. But this here seems like a mass drug addiction to me where most everyone young or old gets proselytized and increases the mad crowd.
I am personally convinced that the political solutions will come from characters like Candace Owens reading the Bible to her 1-year-old son. From those millions who will rebuild part of the US on their historical foundations.
And maybe the solution to Virtual reality addiction = flight from reality is nothing more than a lack of competition in the internet and a lack of freely shared information about its effects, like the SWOT analysis done in business. Maybe it´s simply parents properly raising their kids instead of outsourcing them to state institutions and VR?
Happy New Year to everyone,
thanks so much to N.S. Lyons for his inspirations,
Jens Schirner
Happy New Year, comrade! I have appreciated all of your writings, especially "There is No Liberal West".