“The metaverse carries the metaphysical promise of becoming someone else”

by time news

The Cross The Weekly : In your latest novel, you project us into a metaverse, L’Antimonde, where, under cover of anonymity, we can create avatars, Antimoi, and invent another life that seems limitless. What was the trigger to write it?

Nathan Devers : I had the idea to write this book at the time of the first confinement of 2020. I was alone. At first I believed like everyone else that it was going to be an experience of confinement. But it was the opposite: an experience of permanent connectivity, with overheated social networks, an explosion of links and digital parallel worlds. I said to myself that we were coming to a time when humanity for the first time had the technological means to do without reality. I felt a great vertigo, a very romantic vertigo.

This virtual double life is both terrifying and attractive. How can this ambivalence be explained?

N. D. : There are really two types of reaction: closing the book and telling yourself that there is no paradise except in reality. But other people have told me that they can’t wait for this universe to exist. This novel is not a charge against new technologies. I take seriously the digital promise, that of the virtual, that of social networks, to weigh it in all that it intends to bring to humanity.

I tried less to describe what the metaverse was as such than to explore its potentials. I cannot tell you if there is a real market. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will shrivel up and go bankrupt. The fact remains, it seems to me, that our society, at least in France, in the West, would be quite capable, for many reasons, of getting into it. She is already in crisis with reality.

Would the metaverse then become an escape from reality?

N. D. : Yes quite. The metaverse not only carries a technological promise, but also, clearly, the metaphysical promise of becoming someone else. What I find extremely romantic in life is not so much to spread the story of our identities and what we do with them, but on the contrary to imagine what I call our Anti-ego: all our failed identities , the individual that we could not be, either because we did not want it, or because we rejected it, or because we could not bring about this desire to to be someone else.

Is it the promise of the best version of ourselves?

N. D. : In any case, it is the other version. This reactivates the theme of the double, already very old in literature. Take the character of Don Juan. Its truth is found in Sganarelle, who is precisely its counter-model. If it were necessary to define the real, one could say that it is what slices between all these possibilities. Finally, the metaverse is, on the contrary, the absence of limits. An infinite multiplication of reality, for better and for worse.

In your Antimonde, the rule of anonymity is posed as an absolute. However, this question of respecting or not respecting anonymity will be at the heart of the reflections on these new worlds.

N. D. : It was a bit of an odd option. The only one that is really implausible in my novel. It is even a safe bet that, because of political pressure, we will come to prohibit anonymity. I really wanted to do this because it seems to me that today, when we talk about social networks, we often talk about it in the mode of narcissism. I try to take the opposite view to describe on the contrary a use of the digital which empties me of myself, which makes me insignificant and which even prevents me from showing myself.

I was keen on this rule of anonymity to show that this virtualization of existence is an anonymization of the existing. I imagine a time when humanity will have nothing more to say and when it will be, like my character, slumped at home doing nothing. Humans won’t even want to flaunt their lives on Instagram or Facebook or give their opinion on Twitter because they’ll be empty of themselves. They themselves will become antihumans.

We could end up feeling more alive through his avatar than in his real life?

N. D. : I think that the users of the metaverse will be people with a need for adventure, frustrated by reality and who are still looking for a place to start, this place that the philosopher Michel Foucault would call a “space beyond”, an atopy, a place without venue. There is a form of transfer.

My character realizes that this place is a place of absolute emancipation, that reality has been profoundly unjust and violent with him and that he will be able to literally free himself, hence the attachment he will cultivate towards his avatar. He prefers to invest in his back rather than in his place. But this emancipation passes through this primary alienation which is to renounce one’s body, to renounce being happy in an embodied way.

Isn’t the promise of the metaverse above all that of abolishing all limits?

N. D. : Absolutely. The metaverse is both the man who becomes demiurge of his own universe, who begins to imitate God, and both the one who frees himself from the shackles of his body, who becomes nothing more than his soul. . Besides, my character commits suicide from the first pages of the book.

This gesture can be explained in two ways: self-destruction or liberation, because he judges that, between his ego and his Anti-ego, it is the Anti-ego that counts, namely the pure soul. For me, this promise of being able to leave one’s body is a Christic leitmotif: to become only soul, what the Gospel would call “a glorious body”, that is to say really a body without matter. There is a dream that is almost religious in nature behind it all.

Could these virtual places see the emergence of a new religion or a reinvention of religion?

N. D. : This is a very beautiful and very difficult question at the same time. That the metaverse is an experience of a religious nature, I really am absolutely convinced. Ernest Cline’s novel Player One, adapted by Steven Spielberg for the cinema, shows very well what a metaverse will look like but completely misses its religious dimension, its spiritual drive. The American philosopher Liel Leibovitz, in his novel God in the Machine, shows precisely that the digital revolution is an experience that consists in incorporating a new divinity inside mechanization and technical innovation. It is not a question of a new religion, but of the reactivation of the metaphysical drive, or in any case of the apocalyptic desire for paradise.

I dedicate my novel to Heidegger, because all his thought of technique, especially in Theprinciple of reason, is to consider that technological revolutions always emanate from a philosophical mutation that sometimes took place even millennia before. It seems to me that the metaverse is not a form of avatar of Christianity, because that would mean nothing, but a new form of eschatology, of this discourse on the end of a world which is ours.

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