At the risk of being a bit too “grad student,” I’ll start with a reference to Walter Benjamin’s “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” In that overcited work, the Marxish philosopher writes of the historical arrival of iron, the first “artificial building material.” Slowly, but surely, iron’s utilitarian applications in locomotive rails and iron-frame structures gave way to its appropriation for ornamental use in the Parisian arcades, which, in turn, bricolaged new and old urban forms to great aesthetic effect. “These images,” Benjamin notes, “are ideals, and in them the collective seeks not only to transfigure, but also to transcend, the immaturity of the social product and the deficiencies of the social order of production.” Taken as a technological development, the Metaverse appears to represent a similar historical process. The functionalism of the internet, long on the wane, has entered an effusively baroque period.
Oceans of ink have been spilled about the Metaverse. A few critical eddies of note: it is nothing new (see: Second Life); it’s classist because of its high barriers to entry (that’s the point); it’s a libertarian playground (ditto); it’s shitty pop-dystopian escapism (not wholly dissimilar from the incipient fantasies that underpinned the “information superhighway”); it’s filled with bad architecture (more on that later). Of course, it bears mentioning that the Metaverse is far more boring than most commentators admit, and what’s more, it is almost exclusively “populated” by obscene dullards. But by harping on such features, we miss what underpins this very annoying phenomenon.
The Metaverse emerged at a very particular juncture in the life of the crypto “economy.” In recent years, crypto has become a free-for-all, with new currencies squirming into existence and then expiring with bewildering rapidity (see the recent demise of ostensible “stablecoins” TerraUSD and Tether). Though there exist particular vendors that allow crypto purchases in Bitcoin and Ethereum—making them “shadow” reserve currencies—these are marginal. The simple fact is that crypto wealth remains largely speculative and its translation into fiat currency (USD, Euro, renminbi) exceptionally rare. Consider also the basic exchange of money for a title that defines a crypto “purchase”: that fiat money is committed to a capital firm (or several firms acting as brokers), meaning that in a vacuum there is a declining purchasing power on the part of crypto investors unless they continue to derive capital elsewhere. For this reason, we can say that crypto is largely a terminal purchase. One coin may be exchanged for another per the prevailing exchange rate, but this entire speculative market has a tendency to extreme volatility. The Metaverse is then an elaborate answer to the problem of declining liquidity in investors and also an attempt to furnish crypto opportunities for further purchases, transfer into bespoke microcurrencies, and stabilizing monetary velocity.
There is a historical parallel to be drawn with suburbanization, in that both are processes by which an enormous investment frontier for capital accumulation was created more or less out of whole cloth. In the first half of the 20th century, dramatic productivity gains in auto manufacturing required a mass consumption capable of absorbing this staggering output. This was accomplished with an increase in and stabilization of real wages from private employers working in coordination with the federal government, in the form of unprecedented subsidies.
We may say that crypto-capital has in the Metaverse finally been given an outlet by which it may function more fully as capital as traditionally understood. Like the suburbs, the Metaverse may become a “new frontier” of investment—a jarring new horizon of monetary policy fixing. As of November 2021, there was $1.3 trillion value of existing Bitcoin, but opportunities for transferring that wealth into real (US dollar) gains lag far behind the absolute expansion of hoards. That value needs to go somewhere, as the scions of the crypto universe well know. Taken together, the Metaverse may dictate a new direction to production, urging the sudden flowering of physical (headsets, fiber optic cables) and virtual (digital land ownership, more crypto) capital investments. In this new virtual arena, the Schumpeterian entrepreneur, armed only with a vision and a trove of liquid capital, sets about creating a suitable arena for consumption on their own terms.
At least one of those entrepreneurs is, as fortune would have it, an architect. Back in 2015, the Czech politician Vít Jedlička established the Free Republic of Liberland on a sliver of heavily forested and uninhabited land along the Danube River, between Croatia and Serbia. When it came to promoting his republic, Jedlička called on the services of Patrik Schumacher, a principal of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in London. Schumacher is a typical libertarian nuisance armed with an architect’s questionable, but overconfident, grasp of philosophy and political economy basics, and who seems to spend the bulk of his time generating “provocative” headlines by arguing against social housing and work-hour limits in design firms. He alleges that “there is no better site for a progressive and forward-looking project than the most competitive contemporary business.” In his role as World Diplomat of Liberland, he has produced a few bewildering tracts of a lukewarm ideological tenor and chaired a couple architectural competitions, with the overall intention of artificially pumping Liberland into the online press circuit.
In April, however, Jedlička and Schumacher launched Liberland Metaverse to test run the micronation in a wholly digital space. The project was undoubtedly born from the utter failure of Liberland-sur-la-Danube to materialize in the seven years since its founding. (The entity still doesn’t have diplomatic recognition.) Schumacher insists that its Metaverse incarnation will function as a “spearhead” for further development while simultaneously serving as “the go-to-site for networking and collaboration within the burgeoning Web 3.0 industry, i.e. the metaverse for metaverse developers and the crypto ecosystem at large.” In this way, he casts Liberland in the mold of other libertarian projects like seasteading colonies and Peter Theil’s Praxis Society that envision utopian communities of visionary entrepreneurs, who observe a world on fire from a safe distance.
Promotional images of Liberland Metaverse attest to the evident tension between blessed liberation from the structural constraints that have long plagued parametricism-in-practice and the imprecations of Schumacher’s own wagon-circling demands to be taken seriously as an architect. Many press notices have circulated the designer-CEO’s wounded sniping at video game and graphic designers, who, he says, should leave the design of meta-spaces to the experts. It’s a position that he seems to think is a principled one, but which rings mostly as wounded mewling about a loss of professional work.
That’s because the Metaverse represents a revolutionary opportunity for architecture and design work, especially for “architects as architects” like Schumacher. It comes down to the simple fact that the Metaverse allows for a total divorce of design services from the messy obdurance of construction labor. On any given project, architects assume a role akin to that of the foreman in the manufacturing process—not the boss but a boss, directing vast amounts of capital goods and workers. The notion of digital architecture or Metaverse-building dramatically shrinks the scope of any given project while racheting up the possibility and directness of exploitation: basically, instead of Schumacher imposing his will on hundreds of itinerant laborers in Qatar, where ZHA designed a stadium for this year’s World Cup, he instead only has to lay his metaphorical whip upon his own employees in his London office. Perhaps, taking this narrow view, letting the architects enjoy their little dalliances in the Metaverse is not the worst outcome.
There is no secret, emancipatory frisson to be found in the Metaverse. There is no redemption, no transfiguration, no transcendence—precisely because it is not a technological innovation at all. What the Metaverse offers is, like crypto, like securities, like any number of self-sustaining (or not) financial products, the possibility of growth qua growth. Keep in mind that all of the above can only make money by drawing vast pools of social wealth produced elsewhere into their ravenous maw; unlike typical consumption goods, the price of financial products (and thus profits for certain holders) increases with the number of purchases. What better way to appeal to the anxious small investor or disposable-income nerd than by serving up an aesthetic experience “as a service”? That the service is an unnecessary one, a gothic contrivance over and above the simple communication of capital from one owner to another, does not mean it is necessarily vacuous, as most “left” critics claim. After all, if you’re going to deride one creative product for existing solely as a vehicle for money and profit, what does it matter if it’s made of pixels instead of concrete and steel?