When one examines the already fading tech-corporate trend of pushing the “metaverse” as the next step in our evolving and ever-increasingly symbiotic relationship with the internet, it is difficult to imagine a point in time where this concept wasn’t used as just another in a long line of attempts to consolidate and monetize power over as much online activity as possible. However, our current landscape of vacant virtual shopping malls masquerading as community centers is, just as all things pushed by venture-capital-inflated Silicon Valley rent-seekers, not an original idea. Like countless other unwanted innovations of an industry constantly seeking to create money from thin air, the metaverse is a repurposed, hollowed-out recreation of concepts imagined in mass media from the 1980s and 90s, exploiting a vague nostalgia for a promised virtual utopia while stripping out every genuinely utopian idea from those visions of digital worlds within popular fiction and early experiments in realizing them.

Horizon Worlds

The frontier of virtual space focused ostensibly on communication and the inhabitation of a second world for its own sake has been feverishly transformed from a niche occupied by a small subset of online games and digital communities into simply another in a series of forcibly generated income streams created when the previous moneymakers of massive tech companies and ravenous investors begin to dry up, alongside and intertwined with crypto, NFTs, and generative AI technology. And just like the flailing attempts to hop on these other trends hyped as society-changing innovations, capital’s interest in these new technologies extends only as far as their ability to generate steady profit – as demonstrated by the quick divestment of funds from these high-profile “metaverse” projects after their returns on the steep costs involved have been shown to be nonexistent. 

All of this is without even mentioning the smaller upstarts in the “metaverse” field, who capitalize off of the potential of some future virtual world without even the shell of a product the larger corporate offerings provide, insisting on their ability to manifest a new virtual destiny off the back of pyramid schemes and donations. Though, these so-called projects will not be discussed any further, as any aesthetic or cultural analysis beyond the barest surface level is impossible for subjects which essentially always amount to nothing more than vaporware scams, their promised worlds existing only as bytes of laundered cryptocurrency. However, there is one aspect of the virtual world in particular that incentivises continued progress and support by massive corporations and smaller scam artists alike – the promise of a fully closed system under their control.

Naive as it may be in hindsight, the imagery and conceptualization of virtual worlds and realities conjured through media at the tail end of the twentieth century exhibited far more creativity and a genuine attempt at creating a truly new set of aesthetic sensibilities for the digital realm than the modern metaverse, typified by Mark Zuckerberg’s quixotic Horizon Worlds and the even more blatantly monetized crypto-driven Decentraland. These modern metaverses exist only as hollow shells filling out the most base prerequisites for a “virtual world” and nothing more, the “worlds” themselves being little more than pretext to sell and advertise to the users they hold complete surveillance over – or, in the case of Decentraland, as simply a support system for facilitating and justifying the purchase of digital tokens and supposedly sought-after JPEGs. Early attempts at digital worlds, while still most often intended for commercial release/distribution, were far less focused on wringing every possible dollar out of its participants than on genuinely attempting to create a community space and a new visual lexicon for this perceived next stage of our reality – even if this was perhaps less out of creative or altruistic reasons than it was because the technology to monetize every aspect of one’s interactions in these spaces didn’t quite exist yet.

Decentraland

It could be argued the most successful of these modern virtual worlds is VRChat, which while host to all manner of examples of the worst of internet content and conduct, actually managed to foster a community through catering to all manner of communities and marginalized groups – whether justifiably marginalized, such as far-right and racist groups, or otherwise such as the large portion of trans and queer people on the platform – through its open, customizable nature and lack of emphasis on monetization. Though, aesthetically, VRChat has still yet to carve out a true unique identity like its forebears, existing, like much of modern online culture, as a scattershot regurgitation of mass media iconography and references. This scattered mishmash of cultural signifiers is still infinitely more compelling than its current alternatives, the ramshackle and chaotic nature of the VRChat experience seeming to provide an actual sense of community never found in corporate, sterilized “metaverses.”

Virtual world experiments of the 1990s, such as ActiveWorlds, WorldsChat, SAPARi Community Place, and other experiences lost to even further obscurity explored otherworldly, liminal aesthetics meant to truly bring the user into another, entirely separate reality unmoored by the constraints of our own – and even in their current, mostly-empty states, these worlds have a sense of haunting beauty and a certain charm to their various idiosyncrasies which reach something more intangible than simply the novelty of their age and archaic qualities. While much of this unique visual language and abstract world-building was, of course, by necessity because of the infeasibility of creating something ‘realistic’ with the technology available to both users and developers, and while the costs and challenges involved still necessitated the involvement of corporate sponsorship and/or ownership – the structures of these now-abandoned virtual worlds were still, perhaps surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) far more democratized and open to user expression and experimentation than much of the “metaverse” landscape today.

SAPARi Community Place

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), was a file format and tool set from the 1990s for the free creation and dissemination of online worlds, with the perception of these digital spaces as the genuine next step in evolution for online exploration and interpersonal communication, perhaps the only true attempt at the creation of a commons for virtual worlds – and was a far more democratized and decentralized infrastructure for their creation and dissemination than any of the closed systems unconvincingly insisting they are still the future of the internet some three decades later, without even the people involved truly believing it, . VRML was intended to truly bridge the gap between the 2D and 3D internet, fully integrated into browsers with the full intention of an eventual full transition into an internet navigated entirely through simulated three-dimensional space. However, with VRML’s discontinuation and its quick fade into incompatibility and obscurity afterwards, it became clear to tech companies that an open, freely-disseminated system of virtual worlds intertwined with our common internet browsing experience was not nearly as profitable as total consolidation and control by proprietary services.

 Even the virtual worlds nakedly and obviously created through large corporations or cultural entities were often less geared towards monetization or advertisement (in the short term) than they were with actually exploring the new aesthetic and communicative possibilities of the medium. David Bowie’s BowieWorld, one of the first commercial virtual world projects by a figure of Bowie’s profile (and created by one of the first marketing firms geared towards the subject, Worlds.com – which is now, of course, attempting to work their way into the NFT/cryptocurrency space by peddling their connections to the years-dead artist), was conceptualized by the artist as less of a marketing tool and more of as an archive and a real medium for exchange of ideas and community and a genuine attempt to explore the potential of creating experimental art within these spaces.

BowieWorld

A testament to the unique pull of these buried worlds of the 1990s is the fact there are still small communities residing within them, a shared experience within these forgotten realms of being binding people together into tight-knit groups, with numerous (mostly exaggerated) reports of cults forming and ritually gathering inside these abandoned digital spaces. Neglected by their owners for decades, the few still roaming these abstract spaces are given free reign to to utilize the vast amount of freedom they have over the code of the world itself to shape their own, occasionally explicitly disturbing spaces twisting within and beneath the would-be virtual tourist destinations which comprise the lost hope of these worlds between stretches of empty polygonal space. There are also groups digging up the remains of lost, inaccessible virtual worlds and finding ways to make them accessible once more to modern audiences, such as Cybertown and the previously mentioned SAPARi Community Place. Perhaps above all else, these efforts show the true aesthetic staying power of these abandoned worlds – a staying power which current virtual worlds are already seeming to lack.

Even the depictions of virtual reality and digital worlds within popular film of the 1990s, which more often than not veered into the realm of the dystopian, had more of a sense of life and interiority within their small pocket universes within a larger fictional world than the mass-market realized products of Zuckerberg et. al. Robert Longo’s messy-yet-captivating Johnny Mnemonic features a virtual world writ as a cavernous, sensory-overloading rollercoaster of CGI animation and nigh-incomprehensible iconography which truly feels alien despite and perhaps because the focus of these VR sequences often being on distorted depictions of mundane tasks like sorting through files. This depiction of a world transformed into a nightmarish tapestry of jittering polygons, only one in a series of similar mass media explorations into a dark virtual frontier alongside The Lawnmower Man, Serial Experiments Lain, and various other imaginings of surreal virtual hellscapes – seems practically optimistic compared to the crushing banality of our current online panopticons. 

Johnny Mnemonic

Much of the conceptualization surrounding virtual worlds and realities in the 1990s stemmed from the broader explosion in possibilities for multimedia art the advent of the CD-ROM and advancements in consumer computer technology provided, a time where genuinely experimental work toying with the edges of this new synthesized media landscape could be marketed to and occasionally actually become successful within the general public sphere, more so than any time before or arguably even since. Artists from every discipline, from Devo and The Residents to David Lynch (at least, a proposed project with Haruhiko Shono’s multimedia pioneer group Synergy) toyed and publicly released these projects integrating as many media formsas possible with the interactivity the format provided. As the internet and online connectivity quickly became the next obvious step in our collective relationship with computers and the artistic possibilities therein, online worlds quickly became the next artistic realm to be explored and as far as the financial backers of these new media experiences were concerned, to be commercially conquered. 

However, as indicated by the numerous previous descriptions of these pioneering connected virtual worlds in this piece as lost or abandoned – these experiments were never particularly successful, either financially or in terms of shaping or even slightly penetrating the future of online communication, and were for the most part ultimately unable to withstand the precipitous crash of the dot-com bubble. In contrast to the massive proliferation and success the realm of online games, where even at their loosest, virtual worlds are structured around a set of goals and requirements, where social interaction – while having the potential to be truly meaningful – is inherently a means to a separate end, virtual worlds where the interaction and inhabitation of the space was the end failed to make any noticeable impact beyond its initial novelty. This failure, rather than the speculative potential and flurry of possibilities that took hold in the years before realization of these worlds was truly possible, is what the “metaverse” seems intent on reproding – though, seemingly devoid of any actual desire to expand or rethink online communication beyond a pretense used to generate capital.

WorldsChat

In the early 2000s, after the recovery period from the dot-com bubble began, a second, more visually sophisticated and tightly structured set of mass virtual worlds began to emerge, one which ultimately had far more staying power than the previous, and quite arguably later permutations of the concept – with Second Life and IMVU in particular finding mass success in the teenage demographic of the era and largely defining the modern perception of virtual worlds. Though not without their own aesthetic and conceptual merit, these initial successes laid the groundwork for the worst excesses of the current metaverse landscape, with their pioneering of cosmetic monetization and real-money markets within virtual space being perhaps their most lasting impact. These new, more capital-compliant virtual worlds were formed at the beginning of a larger shift within the structure of the internet which set the stage for the current landscape of tech-monopoly fueled online relations – the warning shots for Web 2.0. As theorist Tiziana Terranova summarizes in After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common: “The crash [of the dot-com bubble] did not spell the end of the capitalist colonization of the internet, as some hoped, but was followed by a new, even more buoyant phase of commercialization that injected new capital into the development of technological innovations in ways that short-circuited and bypassed the slower processes of commons-based network peer production. Already in the mid-2000s, in fact, what was left of the industry was rallying back around the Web 2.0 banner – a term that identified the winners who had survived the collapse and which were to inspire a new wave of more successful business ventures.” (p. 9) 

Second Life

A new model of extraction was formed in this bubbling well of unharnessed online profit – as Terranova describes, one which “involved the harnessing of the free labor of user participation, whose value was soon transmuted into the supposedly inert ore of the data mines stored in the anonymous bunker-like concrete blocks of server farms.” (p. 9). As this data-farming driven internet economy completely absorbed all online relations, there eventually came a point of diminishing returns, where consolidation of online life into a small set of hubs for interaction owned by an even smaller set of companies until the only way where any of these massive companies could gain any more control of people’s data was to entirely subsume the internet into themselves.

The current attempt at a ubiquitous virtual world by Meta and other global communications conglomerates is a (currently) less successful attempt to recreate the transition from disparate online networks and communities to an internet fueled by platform capitalism through a framing of this forced innovation as the natural next step in the internet’s evolution. As Terranova details the previous, more successful transition of online space into fewer and fewer hands: “The takeover of the internet by the capitalist market presented platformization as progressive and revolutionary – a universally beneficial disruption of a previous social and economic order… [which] has turned out to be more of a counter-revolution which operated a normalization with relation to the exceptionality that had been claimed for the so-called digital economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s.” (p. 11-12). The final, ultimate stage of online platform capitalism is to create an inescapable platform – to create new worlds entirely owned, controlled, and surveilled by these companies where no scrap of data would be free from their grasp, and where there would be no option for users but to fully integrate into these platforms in order to maintain connection to the broader social world once their forced normalization of this new regime of hyper-exploited social relations takes hold.

AlphaWorld/ActiveWorlds

There is an equitable and artistically meaningful path for mass virtual worlds going forward – but it is one which requires looking at our decades-old hopes and experiments with this new medium not through the lens of what can be mined for nostalgia-fueled cultural and literal capital, but for what our modern metaverses haven’t reproduced. If they wish for their work to have any real meaning or purpose, the creators of our new virtual worlds must look back at their forebears which attempted to create worlds and communities in aesthetic realms vastly apart from anything resembling the real world, instead of creating a sanitized mirror of our lives away from the keyboard. And, ultimately, these creators must look back to the tools and structures of these early virtual worlds which allowed for such creative freedom and expression and genuine long-lasting connection between their participants. If anyone still wishes to find a reason for the “metaverse” to exist at all – it must be as a supplement to our reality, a dreamscape shared with and shaped by anyone connected to it which could pave the way to new forms of social relation and connection – not as a representation and regurgitation of the same binding structures which drive people to other worlds in the first place.

OnLive Traveler

Bibliography:

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Robertson, Adi. “When the Virtual City of Cybertown Went Dark, Its Citizens Rebuilt It.” The Verge, 21 Apr. 2022, https://www.theverge.com/23032658/cybertown-revival-blaxxun-virtual-community-rebuilding-project. 

Wehner, Mike. “Inside David Bowie’s Insane, Disturbing Virtual World from 1998 That Some Fans Never Left.” The Daily Dot, 27 May 2021, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/david-bowie-world-virtual-3d/. 

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