The hauntology of business

Meta’s vision for the metaverse is ugly and boring

The constant stream of news about the conflict in eastern Europe and the Balkans and the deteriorating USA-China relationships was interrupted this week by the internet at large howling mockery at Mark Zuckerberg. The reason was not one of his usual whimsical appearances.

Amusing as those might be when they happen in his garden or terrifying when they take place in the court of law, this time, the internet took issue with his latest creative endeavours.

Meta’s boss uploaded a screenshot celebrating the launch of Horizon Worlds to Spain and France, Horizon Worlds being a virtual reality video game serving as the bedrock of Meta’s metaverse ambitions. The issue? It looks terrible. Zuckerberg’s uncanny avatar stands in the middle of an empty field, staring soullessly in front of two poorly rendered buildings, one resembling the Eiffel Tower and the other Barcelona’s Tibidabo Cathedral.

When I first saw the picture I was convinced that I had seen better graphics in Warcraft 3, a 20-year-old video game. Even if memory does not serve, Warcraft’s graphics were at least more charming compared to the sterilized and corporate appearance of Horizon Worlds (which by the way is a larger issue). The internet and Forbes agree with the above. It is clear that this world is unacceptable to the users it aims for the most.

What if I told you that this decaying corporate aesthetic (for which, among other things, Meta spent 10 billion in 2021) is not the problem, but a symptom of our terminal condition? Sure, the graphics can (and will) be improved, but this will not change our trajectory, of a future that is not uncertain but doesn’t exist at all.

In this article, I will demystify the underlying condition of Meta’s ugliness symptom. In doing so, I will use tools that lie beyond the conventional strategic management quiver. Having studied for my bachelor's, master’s, and currently PhD in a conventional business school, I have a great appreciation for conventional management tools but I am also familiar with their limitations. When it comes to the future of business and the world at large, we need to look for trends and truths that lie beyond our comfortable cupolas of airconditioned office floors and trading rooms.

It’s not only Meta

Meta is not alone in this ugliness and idleness. Have you noticed how unimaginative most attempts at envisioning and defining the metaverse are? I came to this realisation while working on an upcoming report for the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum which necessitated my going through numerous such efforts by the allegedly brightest minds in the business: Big Tech and Big Consulting.

Beneath the glossy pages of their reports that outline the opportunity for total vertical and horizontal business expansion, lies an unmistakable sense of emptiness filled with nostalgia. We are compelled to put on our headsets and escape in a high-fidelity digital world, uncannily similar to ours. In this world, cartoonish faces with features reduced to a minimum atop floating torsos and disembodied hands (we can’t accurately render full arms in commercially available VR machines) engage in all too familiar activities: playing chess or tennis, standing in front of landmarks, concert going, or otherwise socializing.

Why has Big Tech and Consulting failed to capture a new vision where novel technology offers more than just an interactive medium through which we experience what we have, and are already experiencing? Why is “the future” reduced to a high-fidelity more interactive present?

The naive and the cynic arguments

I see two dominant answers to this question, a naive one which attributes this lack of imagination to some resource limitation, and a cynical one, which blames it on profit. Or, more accurately, the ease with which the beneficiaries of metaverse’s success can profit. Both are wrong, although the latter is less so.

Let’s examine them in further detail to see why, before I provide my own reading. First, can this lack of imagination be attributed to a lack of funding, data, influence, access to talent or some other business resource (the naive argument)? This claim does not survive even the most rudimentary confrontation with reality. When success is a matter of resources, Big Tech and Consulting dominate absolutely, as they have done to an alarming degree in so many other industries that depend on such resources. In that sense, this failure of imagination is something deeper than a lack of access to money or talent.

What about the cynical theory? One might claim that Big Tech and Consulting don’t need to be imaginative or visionary. They can simply follow the recipe of the remakes of Hollywood, video games, and pop music, or in other words, of profiting by simply rehashing the past. On the surface this theory holds ground. Metaverse-induced digitalization works to their advantage: Its rise incubates increasing financialization which in turn, will lead to even more profit without production and digital goods with negligible marginal production costs will dominate the metaverse marketplace, displacing expenditure for physical goods and increasing profit margins¹. As gatekeepers of the metaverse, Big Tech and Consulting are the beneficiaries of those (massive) profits, without necessarily having to come up with something entirely novel. Thus, the cynical argument can be reduced to “why even bother innovating if high profits are guaranteed”².

While this is true to an extent, this argument does not survive the reasonable question of the first-year undergraduate in management: “Why don’t Big Tech and Consulting pursue a ‘blue ocean strategy’, where they envision an entirely new uncontested market which renders competition irrelevant and creates new demand thereby increasing profits even more?”. Elements of that certainly exist in the plans of Big Tech and Consulting, but those are far removed from a coherent strategy for envisioning and building something new, a blue ocean. Why can’t Big Tech and Consulting imagine the future? My answer to this is simple: they can’t.

The hauntology of business

The cynic’s view is closer to reality but nonetheless misses the bigger picture. I claim that the situation of Big Tech and Consulting resembles that of today’s creatives who are comforted with the dilemma between doing what they know works and innovating. Would you release a remix of a ’70s ballad with ’00s hip-hop elements and ’90s aesthetic, guaranteed to sell out, or go in an entirely new direction? Would you remake Warcraft 3 and sell it to an overly nostalgic audience or spend millions developing a new game? The same notion applies to movies, fashion, visual art, and an array of other industries. At the same time, it is true not only for established players, who are compelled by contracts and shareholders to guarantee stable returns, by placing “safe bets”, but also for new creatives who feel that they can’t simply waste their “one chance” doing something that might fail.

What on the surface appears as a free choice, the choice between innovation, and moderation, is in reality, not a free choice at all. In the above example and through the predominance of the doctrine of the rational economic actor (the homo economicus) we are compelled, to abandon innovation. We abandon it so absolutely and consistently that we end up abandoning the notion of having any choice at all. We thus arrive at Mark Fisher’s hauntology, the inability to imagine any and all futures.

Unfuture and Web 3.0

What happens when this hauntology, the cancellation of the future, metastasizes from finance, responsible for making the world go round, to culture, then back to finance? A destructive death spiral of positive reinforcement. A feedback loop, where the finance doctrine of guaranteed profits undermines imagination, to the point that only moderation remains, only to be propagated through financing as the only option. The place of Big Tech and Consulting is that of makers and casualties of this feedback loop.

In astrophysics, black holes are surrounded by the event horizon, a boundary beyond which events cannot affect the observer. Anything that passes the event horizon collapses into a singularity, an infinitely tiny point in the centre of the black hole, it ceases to exist.

This is why the metaverse’s popular characterization as a singularity is topical. What if we are approaching its event horizon, beyond which no future is discernable, because no future exists? What if the future is cancelled, collapsed into the singularity of the metaverse, and reduced to an infinitely tiny point until it ceased to exist? What if we are next?

I want to close this article by saying that by the time we find out, it will be too late. As the adage goes, “Nothing can escape a black hole - not even light”. We need to put our thrusters on reverse now or find a way to travel faster than light. Both options require a radical break from the prevailing dynamics represented by Big Tech and Consulting. Can Web 3.0 us with the tools needed to make this change? I am both hopeful in the sense that there is good worth working for, but also pessimistic.

¹ I would like to take this notion to the extreme of post-scarcity in a separate article.

² If this argument seems convincing, consider what it means for our contemporary understanding of the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and innovation.