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Culture Wars to Come with the Arrival of the Metaverse

Las guerras culturales que se avecinan con la llegada del metaverso

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[Leer en español]

In the 80s, we saw for the first time a man receiving a video call, it was Marty McFly in the movie Back to the Future II, at that time human beings saw communicating through a screen as something very distant and almost impossible. However, a couple of decades later, this became something extremely common.

In 2018, the movie Ready Player One was released, in which Wade Owen Watts—like practically the rest of humanity—prefers to spend his days in the “OASIS” metaverse, rather than carry out their lives in the real world.

Unlike McFly’s movie, with Owen Watts’ story we won’t have to wait so long for it to become a reality, the metaverse is just around the corner, and whether we like it or not, it will surely come to change the world.

Ready Player One (Flickr)

In the past, many games have certainly flirted with the idea of metaverses and have built scenarios where thousands of people unfold part of their lives. Habbo (formerly known as Habbo Hotel) is an example of this, a digital ecosystem where hundreds of thousands of people created their virtual identities to attend parties and meet people anywhere in the world. A couple of years ago, there was no technology capable of taking those virtual worlds to another level. Today, however, for better or worse, there are devices that can lead people to believe that they are an elf living on the planet Meta, instead of human beings living in Illinois, Chicago.

The culture war that will be born in the Metaverse

The implementation of the metaverse will undoubtedly have a strong impact on humanity, after entering these virtual spaces, it will perhaps be increasingly difficult to return to reality. At present, it is already quite complicated for some children to socialize and even for families to talk because smartphones have curiously created bridges for remote communication, but barriers to face-to-face interactions. Have no doubt that the metaverse will radicalize our habits and behavior even more if smartphones have shaped our culture, character, and behavior,

I would hate to become a preacher of disaster, but considering the social decline we have witnessed in recent decades and the destruction of values and morals in the name of progressivism and collectivist policies, It is very likely that the metaverse will become a space where new political battles will be fought and that will consolidate the differences between increasingly distant groups of people: between those who accept and appreciate each other as they are, and those who have chosen to identify with different genders, races, and even species.

The metaverse will open up endless possibilities for anyone who considers themselves and wants to be recognized as a dog, a dolphin, an alien, or a demon; and even, not to go too far, it will also allow white men to adopt the virtual form of a black man and vice versa; not to mention gender, which will obviously be the first thing to change in this computer universe.

Facebook, El American
Metaverse (archive)

Now, what happens in the metaverse is not really something that in theory should concern us, after all, how does it affect me if my neighbor decides to portray himself as an elf in the metaverse? The truth is nothing, my neighbor can adopt the personality of a dragon in that virtual space and I wouldn’t care about that; but the problem lies at the moment when people start to confuse the metaverse with the real world, and want to transfer their virtual identities to the physical space, and believe me, that will happen: then they will start new political and cultural battles much heavier than the ones that already exist.

Mental disorders, victimhood, derealization and low self-esteem

The metaverse will create a new social mass of excluded people who will develop a series of insecurities, mental disorders, distortion of reality and victim complex. It won’t be long before these individuals who in their digital metaverse are capable of flying, giving a concert for thousands of people, and having “sex” discover that they are not even capable of leaving the house to cross three words with their neighbor without feeling intimidated. This scenario will be the perfect breeding ground for the new progressive revolutionary warriors, who will create more categories of gender, race, sexual identity and species, with the ultimate goal of transferring their demands into the real world.

No doubt the left will feed on this space and try to collectivize the demands of the oppressed world developing in the metaverse. In less than a decade, we will have millions of people in the world who do not accept themselves and will want to demand that those living in the real world “respect their virtual identities.”

For most people, it will be easier to create a new life in the metaverse than to deal with their problems in real life. This will result in an increase in obesity, depression, and other diseases linked to sedentary lifestyles, and all this will lead to the same vicious circle in which we find ourselves today: that of a universe full of people with a victim mentality who believe that governments must appear to intervene and solve all their issues.

The metaverse will allow the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to be rewritten over and over again with different results, that virtual space will be filled with profiles of “successful and gambling people with an active sex life”, which in the real world will most likely correspond to men or women with low self-esteem, poor physical conditions and no intimacy with another human being.

Very probably we will also see in the near future the new virtual families, and ecologists calling for having children in the metaverse and not in the real world to “save the planet” and reduce CO2 emissions.

Whether we like it or not the metaverse is here to stay, and we will have to learn to deal with the consequences and political struggles that will be created from it.

Emmanuel Rincón is a lawyer, writer, novelist and essayist. He has won several international literary awards. He is Editor-at-large at El American // Emmanuel Rincón es abogado, escritor, novelista y ensayista. Ganador de diversos premios literarios internacionales. Es editor-at-large en El American

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