Proud Vulgarity

The official reason for Facebook's decision to rename itself Meta Platforms Inc is its commitment to the metaverse: a virtual reality environment that represents the next stage in the evolution of its walled garden approach to social interaction. The unofficial reason, offered by the corporation's critics, is Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to deflect attention from Facebook's predatory and antisocial behaviour. Some have even classed it, along with the space programmes of Elon Muck and Jeff Bezos, as a billionaire's self-indulgent desire to slip the surly bonds of Earth. I think this is wrong, confusing a high-risk commercial strategy with expensive toys. The risk to Meta is that Zuckerberg's imperial ambition could further encourage anti-trust moves by the US government, and might even lead to the call for such a virtual environment to be classed as a public utility before it can become a private monopoly. Wiser heads calling for a focus on products rather than architecture are reflecting a political as much as a technological anxiety.

By concentrating on the assumed motive of distraction there is a danger that Zuckerberg's critics are under-estimating both his vision and the ability of Meta to realise it. It is easy enough to point out the underwhelming history of virtual reality and online spaces such as Second Life, but there's little doubt that immersive environments are the future. What we've learnt about information technology since the 1980s is that it inevitably tends towards integration and interoperability. And what we've learnt about social media since the 2000s is that the network effect - where people gravitate to the most popular platform so making it even more useful - is extremely powerful. The renaming of Facebook the corporation goes beyond the defensive. The use of the word "meta", meaning beyond or across in Greek, suggests an escalation in Zuckerberg's long-held ambition to mediate the Internet for the majority of the world's population.

So why are his critics seeing this primarily as a rebranding or even an expression of shame? Kenan Malik in the Observer provides a clue by yoking it together with the news that University College London is considering changing the name of its Huxley building on the grounds that Thomas Huxley, the Victorian naturalist, subscribed to a racial hierarchy, as did many at the time. For Malik, this posthumous criticism of a "a leading liberal of his age" is excessive and a distraction: "It is difficult to know what the renaming of Huxley Hall would add to our understanding of the man, of his age or of racism. It is equally difficult to know how it would take away anything of the actual racism that black people face today. What we end up with is a Zuckerberg version of history in which symbolic gestures come to replace material change and in which rebranding becomes an all-purpose tool to avoid serious discussion". 

It's obviously galling that an Observer columnist should be decrying symbolic gestures after that paper's role during the 2019 general election campaign, particularly its promotion of tactical voting, which helped the Conservatives win a number of marginal seats, and its advocacy of a second referendum, which meant that the serious discussion of material change was marginalised. Its dismissal of Labour's manifesto as unrealistic has been shown up by subsequent events but this hasn't stopped it lecturing the nation on what must be done, most recently on the climate, let alone decrying political inaction over material change. To add insult to injury, Malik sees an obsession with form over content as a symptom of a wider malaise on the left. As a long-time critic of multiculturalism and identity politics (you can take the boy out of the RCP, but ...) he fears that "struggles for equality and social justice have become even more centred around the cultural and the symbolic, whether tussles over identities or controversies over statues, rather than on wages, housing or material deprivation."

This is hardly a novel claim, but then the house-style of the Observer has been the tedious repetition of the same arguments for decades, from Will Hutton's europhilia to Nick Cohen's leftphobia. With socialists marginalised in Labour and the party increasingly adopting conservative rhetoric on economic and social matters, it is once more safe for the paper's liberals to thunder about inequality and exploitation. According to Malik, "both politicians and activists often worry more about cultural domination – think of the constant spew of controversies over 'cultural appropriation' or offensive speech – than exploitation; the struggles for the material changes necessary to improve our lives have too often become subsumed by demands for symbolic gestures." Of course, the group that actually worries most about cultural domination is neither politicians nor activists but journalists and commentators. They also have a tendency to find arguments against thorough-going material change when it suits them.

Implicit in Malik's analysis is the idea that those who fret about cultural domination are not merely misguided but are consciously turning away from the harder issues that society faces, which is why the parallel with Facebook is so useful. But to make this equivalence work, you are obliged to see the name change as nothing more than a cosmetic exercise, rather than a statement of intent about the future of the Internet, which is at odds with the Observer's longstanding belief that Facebook is a malign actor that threatens not only traditional media but democracy itself. Did Carole Cadwalladr lose her marbles for nothing? Ultimately the forced parallel between Meta and identity politics doesn't work, but Malik's insistence on making it flushes out his belief that the "culture wars" are essentially the fault of the intolerant left who have rejected Enlightenment values. The reason he didn't mention journalists in respect of "cultural domination" is because they are overwhelmingly rightwing and their ideal of "free speech" is the liberty to patronise and offend minorities and the powerless.

A more thoughtful analysis of the relationship of the left and the amorphous culture wars was provided by the Czech political scientist, Ondřej Slačálek, in Eurozine (in translation): "For the left, the age of culture wars becomes a trap. It’s not that traditional socioeconomic issues are disappearing; it is rather that amid the battle between liberals and conservatives, they tend to pop up somewhat blurry, or in an unexpected form: such as when poor people vote for the conservatives, ‘against their class interest’, just to retaliate against the liberals for their moral complacency." This restores liberals to the dramatis personae (you can be confident the UCL report that bothered Malik was mainly written by liberals) and also notes that it is the left's agenda that is squeezed: "The left is under fire from two different directions: should it stand up for human rights together with liberals, or for social cohesion and solidarity together with conservatives? Either way, the left quickly loses persuasiveness. If it used to be characterized by its proximity to the working class, and therefore also a certain proud vulgarity and anti-establishment appeal, it now seems to be losing both of these attributes to the far-right."

Where I think Slačálek is mistaken is in thinking that the left has lost that "proud vulgarity" and anti-establishment instinct. That's certainly true of the parliamentary left: consider the sorry tale of Angela Rayner's apology for calling the Tories "scum". But outside of the mainstream politico-media space, there is no shortage of derision and disrespect towards both conservative and liberal elites, notably on social media. That those elites are apparently hell-bent on criminalising it, under cover of the ludicrously misnamed Online Safety Bill, is evidence both of its prevalence and its effectiveness. The reason why the press have largely greeted the Meta launch as something between an admission of sociopathic guilt and a joke about Silicon Valley awkwardness is that the fears stoked by the UK's referendum on Brexit and the election of Trump have now abated. In their place is a more visceral hatred of public criticism and a growing sense of impunity. The Zuckerbergian metaverse will, like any mediating abstraction, have structural biases and de facto censorship. That's something the press understand and are very comfortable with.