Is the metaverse an evolution in human development and communications,

or an overcorrection to the pandemic isolation skid?

My first trip to Europe there was no Internet, no easy phone connections. There was Europe on $5 a Day and word of mouth. Mail that with luck came every few weeks to be picked up at an American Express office. With that, we had to negotiate strange cities in foreign tongues to find a place to sleep, where to eat, how to get to the museum and landmark. Yes, it might have taken more time, but every step of the way meant dealing with another human being, the chance encounter that led to getting a ride to the train station, that ended up sharing a meal in someone’s home, or going deep into the night confronted by and trying to understand someone whose basic assumptions about the world and how to live in it were so different from my own.

Much joy and learning came from the interstices between the ostensible events; not just where we slept or ate, but how we got there, the asking for directions, the pleasures of getting lost and coming upon the unknown, the chance conversation with the table next to us that led to going to a small music club we would otherwise have never known about, or ending up sleeping across the Bosporus in Asian Istanbul because I ate a super hot pepper and some friendly folks helped me extinguish it.

Ok, it’s been a rough couple of years. Isolation and personal distancing went from being an outlier to being the norm. We’ve learned how to show or not our faces on Zoom, how to unmute, how to not speak over each other or in chorus. It’s better than nothing, but rather desiccating as a collegial or communal human experience.

And with wave upon virus wave, we’re not sure if and when it will get better. We’re trying to understand the difference between pandemic and endemic. We each have our own crystal ball, clouded and shifting, as to what the future will look like. For most of us, it ain’t pretty, and very uncertain.

But not for Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, it’s natural to want to think about ways to cope with this new, not-so-brave world, that will accommodate a seeming new reality, a new baseline of normal, and make it feel better. Turn the lemons into lemonade.

Enter the Metaverse. Let’s all use a digital world to interface. We’ll have our avatars and holograms, we’ll be oh so connected through our social media and gaming, our software stacks and hardware enhancements.

What we won’t have is touch, taste, feel, smell. Our full humanity, the god-given panoply of senses that have fostered the core of our communications since forever. There’s the saying, the map is not the territory. So-called virtual and augmented realities aren’t the same as a walk in the park, the full dimensionality of the shape of a flower, it’s smell, the feel of the dirt it’s in. The look on a human face, the movement of a body, the touch of a handshake, the laugh that fills a room.

The tech powers convey that it’s inevitable that we will be moving in the direction of isolates in pods finding more digital ways of interacting. Once smitten, they assume we will fall into a connected cyber space in order to communicate with each other, that most fundamental of human requirements. The Matrix, anyone? It’s great to think of a hologram for communicating across the galaxy. But is it really necessary to communicate across the street?

But here’s a different take – we don’t need a metaverse of fragments adhering to a communications schema. We need to reinstate, restore, reinvigorate the humanverse, of direct contact, of touch and line of sight interaction. If we let the best and brightest focus their energies and creative impulses on enhancing a desiccated skeleton, all they will produce is aless desiccated skeleton. And try to sell us on this Halloween costume parody of communication as – this is all there is, get used to it. Get over it. And... pay us for it.

We were already heading in this direction. What parent hasn’t seen, pre-pandemic, their child glued to a tablet screen or phone? Wandering through the endless clickbait of YouTube, Instagram or TikTok sequences, one after the other. Abandoning the playground, the play date, and eventually the classroom for these shadows on the cave of human interaction.

I recently gave a presentation two times for an organization, discussing their very future. The first was to an executive committee, where I was in person with five or six other people in the room, the rest, yes, on Zoom. The second time was to a full Board, all on Zoom including me. The difference in the levels and quality of interaction was stark. In person, there were spontaneous and impromptu discussions, sprinkled by personal anecdotes and experiences, occasional humor and laughter, and the reading of faces and bodies to guide the conversation, clarify confusions or issues, elucidate points that were resonating, were key.

On Zoom, there was none of that. As I stared at my shared screen presentation, that was all there was. It was a monologue, without color or texture. Yes we were able to have a discussion, but it was a fraction of the nature and totality of communication that having an in person feedback loop provided. But had I not had the in person experience, I might not have realized what was missing. So what happens when the in person experience is abandoned?

I’m not saying the tools haven’t been terrific. I loved putting on a headset and feeling like I was in the middle of an Avengers movie. But then, I took the headset off, slapped hands with those around me, laughed with them, walked the floor to the next space. The fax replaced messengers, email replaced letters, both with a speed and turnaround time that was orders of magnitude faster and easier than before –– but those were tools that didn’t claim to be the sum of the experience. Better tools for training and education are great, but they are for preparation for helping make a better doctor, a more informed student, they’re not ends in themselves.

Once again a technology is being touted as an improvement on the human condition. The way the Internet was presented to us in its early days, a wondrous new tool and toy for advancing communications and knowledge. We’ve seen what havoc can be unleashed for those immersing in the 2-D worlds of QAnon and where the dissemination of falsehoods can lead to. Imagine when it becomes an all-encompassing experience, when all the sights and sound one can have are experienced through your screen and headset.

Want to get inside the Jan. 6 party? Here’s the immersive recreation and feed, just put on your headset and get off on the ride. Remember the righteous pronouncements of the origins of Facebook and Google? (“Do No Evil”) They were going to be better companies than the avaricious brick and mortar ones of the past. That lasted until they first turned a small profit and joined the basic business club of those only wanting to generate larger ones.

The metaverse proponents want to exploit the startling enforced isolation of the past two years to replicate the fundamentals of human experience into something digital. But just as a digital recording loses the depth and warmth of an analog one, the difference between information that is parsed into snippets of bits and bytes versus one that contains a continuous depiction of the underlying sound, the full experience, so will the metaverse provide an apology for the destruction of the humanverse.

A defining quality of the human verse is serendipity. In sharp contrast to the controlled algorithmic programmed environment of the metaverse. The humanverse is browsing in a book store seeing titles no recommendation engine would show. Holding the book in the hand, reading the squib, or about the author, browsing a few pages. The humanverse is the random walk, not guided by algorithms, where you come upon a new restaurant from a far corner of the world, or a clothing store of a young designer not on the radar at Amazon. It’s the chance encounter with the people at the table next to where you happen to eat, finding what you have in common, people and ideas, or fascinated by a life so different from your own. When the pure efficiency of the task doesn’t take primacy, the experience can be more human, and far more humane.

I’m not a luddite. I’m am grateful for Wikipedia, and for my Kindle, for being able to press on a word to find its definition or historical context. But the virtues of clickbait-wondering through the digital rabbit holes of YouTube or Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest, are at best limited, like pornography to real intercourse.

Consider the school, as you may have been forced into new ways since March 2020. Learning takes place not just in the classroom, but in the playground and the cafeteria, in the interactions and negotiations with peers about who plays where, who tags whom, where to eat lunch, racing to your home or a friend’s. The impact on kids of remote learning is clearly devastating, but also a laboratory on the effects of life lived primarily in a metaverse void of human interactions.

Disconnection from each other leads to a disconnection from ourselves. With the despair and depression that accompanies that loss. How many times do you get emails that contain sharp and nasty comments that you know the person would never say in person? it takes effort to overcome that, to avoid the fast food of the metaverse for the home cooking of the humanverse. Because it’s easier doesn’t make it better. Clearly elements of the metaverse have already and will continue to embed themselves within our daily reality. It is the balance between the two worlds that demands attention.

The metaverse fuels the isolation of the skeptical and the affronted –– when there is no need to negotiate with different viewpoints since it’s so easy to be surrounded by the same. Polarization is effectively alienation from the mean. The online back and forth of indignation and anger rebounds into a resonance frequency that is not disrupted by anything outside of itself, each input adding to its intensity, until it erupts, whether in attacks on societal norms and institutions, or confrontations around challenges to identity rooted in the association with a group that is driven by grievance to near or actual violence, to endlessly finding reasons to be self-righteous that reinforce separation from others.

There is no middle ground in the metaverse. While in the human verse one has to cross the street.