The Tiger & The Buffalo: On the Metaverse

In one of Meta’s first video ads after rebranding from Facebook, four people in an art gallery fixate on a painting of a tiger killing a buffalo. The buffalo is subdued: caps to the grass, it bows in deference to its predator. The tiger’s narrow pupils move to regard its viewers. In the next shot, the tiger’s tail starts wagging and the long grass rustles — the painting comes to life. The four spectators are immersed in the surrounding jungle as it gains an extra dimension, full of dancing rainforest animals. Friends and foes, prey and predator all dance together to a stuttering house beat, all creeds and colors, et cetera, ad nauseam. It’s a mind-numbingly meaningless commercial, more creepy in tone than convincing in messaging. In fact, the only text appears at the end of the ad, laid over the faces of the tiger and the buffalo, bopping together now in mechanical coexistence. It reads, “This is going to be fun.” Under the white letters, the two beasts shoot each other furtive glances.

From this ad, it’s hard to draw assumptions about the hyped-up Metaverse, defined by Oxford Languages as “a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.” Championed by Mark Zuckerberg himself as “the next chapter for the Internet,” the Metaverse is touted by its many Silicon Valley supporters as an opportunity for engaging social and material interaction in a reality-simulating 3-D space, to the end of revolutionizing human connection. Coincidentally, Zuckerberg used similar verbiage before Congress during Facebook’s hearing regarding their alleged interference in the 2016 election.

It’s worth noting that the current conception of the Metaverse is still a fantasy, not yet realized beyond small-scale demos and advertisements. The degree of corporate collaboration necessary to engineer such an immersive, continuous world is not yet here. And yet, the world’s biggest tech corporations are doing the unthinkable — collaborating — in pursuit of this shared vision. The onset of the Metaverse, in this context, feels inevitable — out of the hands of the general public but still championed by entrepreneurs and massive corporations like its technological predecessor, the Internet. But while the early proponents of the Internet sought to revolutionize humankind’s interaction with information, the Metaverse takes a step further, daring to upheave humankind’s interaction with their spatial environment and, more ambitiously, with each other.

The historical relationship between technological advances like the onset of the Metaverse and public opinion seems to be characterized by initial resistance, followed by eventual acquiescence. Plenty of consumers had their doubts about the Internet in its early days, and now its ubiquitous influence is essential to the day-to-day life of most of America. A pattern begins to emerge here: Silicon Valley tech giants make decisions for the general public, who, without fail, initially protest, then accept the new wave of the tech revolution with stifled gratitude.

This trend is the genius of big corporate tech in the age of information — a persuasive shroud of benevolence veils a well-oiled profiteering machine. Critics of “technological improvement” are immediately shot down as ungrateful — biting the hand that feeds them their newest smartphone or fastest delivery app. Human identity is, by consequence, sucked bit by bit into a system that itemizes and monetizes social interaction. Zuckerberg’s promise for the Metaverse is a system that serves the complex and sensorial needs of a whole person. In reality, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse could manifest itself in a dangerously tidy second world, where everything from protest to the natural environment to personal identity could be profit-based.

Meta’s advertisement featuring dancing jungle animals is especially unnerving in this context; nature, out in the real world, seems to be the only thing the Metaverse cannot recreate. Perhaps the corporation is compensating in advance, co-opting a jungle’s vibrant, uncurated nature to market what will likely be a meticulously curated second world.
Maybe Meta’s jungle ad is a work of evil genius. As the permafrost melts and the seas rise, it’s a nice image to return to: Flamingoes grooving, snakes gyrating, only accessible through a $300 Oculus VR headset. It succeeds in insisting on the fun of the metaverse, no matter the cost. Among the buzzwords and flashy, specially curated startup colors, it’s easy to forget that Meta and its collaborators may have self-serving, ulterior motives in developing this second world.