The Metaverse and Other Stories

An abridged and semi-serious history and exploration of the meta-social, from cave paintings to 'AI' content. What it means for Democracy. What it's doing. And what to do about it.

It’s a term with origins in science fiction - a new and different world that exists after, above, beyond, or derived from and transcending the ‘real’ - now given new life as marketing hype for a host of commodified digital environments.

But there’s a ‘metaverse’ that’s been around a lot longer than that - one that has morphed and grown from early conversation through information ages and into an 'AI' infatuated, present.

Understanding what it is, where it’s going and how it affects our relationships with each other is essential to building better (more sustainable) democracies.

What is a Metaverse?

In some way shape or form, there has been a metaverse for thousands of years, or at least as long as anything one could consider a ‘social universe’ has existed.

That might sound like an outrageous claim to those imagining a ‘Ready Player One’ type scenario, but let’s take stock for a moment of what is actually meant by the term.

‘Meta’ has a range of different slightly varying and overlapping interpretations. All of which, however, denote some kind of referential relationship. In the past, that relationship could be as simple as ‘with’, ‘alongside’ or ‘beyond’, implying something that was distinct but related. Metaphysics, for example, is a philosophical discipline that deals with the structure of reality ‘beyond’ physics. Meanwhile, a Metaphor carries a meaning into a different context.

However, more recently it has come to mean a more specific and complex kind of relationship – one that is self-aware and self-referential. There’s an acknowledgement that the thing includes the thing, or is inextricably wrapped up in the thing. Metadata, for example, is data about other data. Metalanguage is language used to describe language. Autologies are ‘meta’ (imagine someone screaming the word “Loud”).  And of course, when someone casually uses the term “meta” by itself, they are usually implying that there’s something that rests on references to itself and its relationship with other things, people, events or ideas.

So what is a Metaverse? A ‘metaverse’ is a distinct ecosystem of these relationships. A universe that sits atop another. Not the same. But derived from it. In reference to it. And most notably, consciously and persistently in reference to itself.

The fully immersive digital realms we imagine when the term is used might be the most recognisable examples, but they’re also narrow visions.

We’ve been building worlds on worlds forever.

Metaverse Beta

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve travelled back in time.

Back to a point long before digital landscapes, the internet or even the written word. 

Here, somewhere in the latter stages of the prehistoric, something not unlike consciousness is emerging, and the communication of information from one organism to another is just starting to break the definitionary barrier of what would be classified as physical, chemical or biological and emerge into something we would later draw a box around and consider to be social.

And boy is it already getting messy.

There’s an experience of the world and the way that experience is processed and filtered as sensory data; the way it mixes with thoughts and the structure of the mind at the time; and the way all of that is stored for later. Then there’s a process of recursive recall and memory formation, in which the process of remembering something is fed by the previous instance of remembering it. And, on top of all that, there are the evolving structures and patterns of thought based on these processes and how those structures and patterns affect whatever is being experienced and thought next.

Different theories abound for how all of this takes place, but whatever the order, that’s the gist of the ingredients.

And that’s just one person, creature…thing. Already ‘mind’ as ‘metaverse’.

Then, before you know it, after a time and all of a not-so-sudden, we’re talking, or something to that effect. In any case, we’ve taken a big step up from our biological forebears’ approach of simply hurling enzymes and rocks at each other and we’re now trying to communicate these new thoughts and ideas, with slightly more definition.

Yet what we are attempting is essentially interdimensional. It’s no surprise there would be a few challenges.

Firstly, there’s a process of translation. Both on the way out and on the way in at the other end. Thoughts are parsed through a language of one kind or another, like sounds or hand signals, and even for those with a monologue of one type or another, how it comes out is not necessarily a one-to-one match with how it is ‘thought’. And how it is heard or seen is not necessarily a one-to-one match with how it is understood. Also, we have to learn it, it develops over time, some people are more proficient than others, everyone understands it differently, and so on.

Secondly, transformation. That language itself, as a broadly understood thing, whatever it may be, is nebulous and constantly evolving and changing, in no small part due to the filtering above, meaning even if there was a momentary and hypothetically perfect alignment of thought and language and understanding between two or more people or creatures, it’s likely gone a moment later.

Thirdly, transmission. There are very real physical and biological impediments to how far it can travel or be distributed. You yell something at the top of your lungs and it travels on the wind before eventually petering out. You learn something new and tell your friend or family member about it and they can pass it on and down and around. But all communication (at this stage) happens in a localised time and physical space.

Finally, reproduction. Information can be repeated and stored in different places, but the process changes it. There are no direct copies. And the place where it is stored is other people, themselves, limited for all the aforementioned reasons. We are the medium.

The combination of those factors means that although there is a social realm of sorts, it’s still very much just us – the solitary units of the social. It’s not its own thing quite yet. Not a separate universe, so to speak.

But then, some clever person, somewhere, decided to scribble things on a cave wall.

And it got wild.

Metaverse v1.0

So now imagine you're a prototypical hunter-gatherer out for a bit of a wander.

One day you come across just about the best damn berry bush you’ve ever laid eyes upon. Looks great. Tastes amazing. Absolutely top-grade stuff. You head on back to tell others, but no one’s around, so not wanting to forget, you quickly pick up a rock, with a bit of mud on it and start etching in the walls for some reason.

It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

You do your best to try and draw the thing and where it is, but seeing as how this is the first time you or anyone else has drawn anything, it’s a bit of a mixed result. Unsatisfied, you slop your hand back down through the mud and slap it against the wall on top of your drawing, inadvertently assigning a 5-finger-star rating and becoming the first food blogger.

Now we know that cave paintings are a historically significant milestone in human development – for innumerable reasons, not least of which would be cultural development, ritual, art and the expression of the human experience, as well as the use of tools and symbols.

But what happened in those caves is significant for another reason. It was the creation of the first piece of information technology. More acutely, the first media – that is, specific information stored and transmitted across time and eventually space, independent of people.

Independent of us.

As a result of those drawings and paintings, the thoughts and ideas and aspirations of individuals living literally ages ago are able to interact almost directly with the thoughts and ideas and aspirations of individuals living in the present day – thousands of years apart. That means sidestepping the whole quagmire of going in and out and in and out of potentially hundreds or thousands of other individual minds on the way from point A to Z and instead just riding out the centuries on a cave wall.

What’s more, those thoughts can be directly re-read, reinterpreted and trigger conversations in times and places far removed from their own. The information is now a unit unto itself. Which also means that it is a distinct and persistent subject unto itself.

And so, we are no longer just exchanging information about things and people and places and ideas. We are exchanging information about coherent bits of information. About the media.

And it wouldn’t take that long before we started getting media about the media.

Which is where the real trouble begins.

Metaverse v1.5

So now let’s say you’re like Archimedes or something.

You’re sitting in a bathtub sometime in the 3rd century BCE when you’re hit with an epiphany. Out you leap and down the street you run to find the nearest tablet or sheet of papyrus, yelling all the while.

Bewildered residents peak over balconies and out of doorways. Friends and colleagues are given an earful whenever you happen upon them. Word of the discovery starts making the rounds. But the ability to transmit and reproduce this new information is limited, by space, by time, by technology and by social connectivity, among other things. If it survives the ages in this spoken format, it won’t be the same. And time compels us to get a bit picky, compressing and summarising and leaving some things behind altogether.

But this time, it’s not just surviving on the wind. This time you manage to put the proverbial pen to paper, and the idea takes root with a life of its own.

Two hundred years later, a Roman statesman named Cicero becomes enamoured with your work and references it in his own.

Two thousand years later, children are learning your principles in schools across the entire globe.

Academics study, reference and debate your work. Films, books and television shows describe and discuss your life. A story about you, written by another, with an exclamation, attributed to you, by another, has entered popular culture and appears in millions of instances, in literature, media and conversation.

Your work, your media and the media of those around you, have given birth to a new world of meta-information. Or ‘meta-media’ if you will. A world that exists independent of any single mind.

Sure, we could go back and look at what you actually wrote. We probably should, at least occasionally. But that’s not the point. This new world exists. And it exists because it was written down.

In doing so, some of those limitations on communication from before were pushed back.

Firstly, the reproduction of media is possible. It has translation issues. It’s slow. But it’s possible.

And perhaps more significantly, transmission is now detached from and begins to transcend time and space. The written work can travel, be transported and move from a bench in Syracuse to anywhere in the world.

The metaverse is in full swing. And it’s filled with nonsense and genius and hearsay and storied history. The written word, regardless of authenticity and accuracy, has taken on a life of its own.

It’s no longer necessary to believe a person. The work and the word itself can be the subject of belief.

One might say it’s all gotten a bit religious.

Metaverse v2

Flash forward a full millennium and a bit - somewhere in between what is commonly referred to as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

An industrious German fellow named Gutenberg is toying with ways to enhance existing printing techniques.

The result drastically improves the speed, accuracy and cost of mass-producing printed documents. A single machine can print more than 3000 pages a day. Within a few decades, presses are in operation in more than 200 European cities and have produced more than 20 million documents. A century later that figure is up past 200 million.

The explosion of media, which started with the invention of presses in China and which accelerated further with Gutenberg's improvements, caught everyone’s attention.

A major driving force, of course, behind this explosion, at least in Europe, is the demand for bibles. And both church and state are definitely interested.

For a good few thousand years now, information has had a life of its own, but the media on which it was conveyed, the ability to produce it, interpret it, reproduce and re-interpret it, was all rather clogged up and centralised. Limited groups of people in limited spaces.

That kind of worked to the advantage of anyone looking to centralise authority and ideas about what is and isn’t truth. In many ways, the limitations were a big reason things leant towards centralisation in the first place.

Centralisation of production + centralisation of information = centralisation of authority.

But the ability for much much larger groups of people to join in was as much a threat to authority as it was an opportunity. And so, of course, institutions sought control. The production of standardised Bibles and other texts was one part of that. Appeals to legacy were another. As were the threats and execution of horrific violence.

Yet despite the attempts, it was too late. The cat was out of the bag, down the hall, into the street and already fomenting revolution.

From the moment that media emerged, it became a tool. And not just a tool for communication, but for social and political organisation. A centre point of ideas.

Now, whether true or not, those ideas created truth. Created reality. Affected the universe that they emerged from. The universe of media and the universe of social interaction were inextricably linked.

But what happens within that universe when multiple competing centre points of truth emerge? Alternate realities? Divergent cultures and societies and belief systems?

For the most part, up until this point, the media was wedded to power, and conflict between ‘truths’ was an extension of conflict between powers and their interests.

But now, it’s a total mess. New realities bubbling in and out of existence everywhere. It’s not a fundamentally different process. It’s just accelerated and scaled. The limitations on information diminish. Not only has reproduction improved dramatically, but after a time, so would transmission – from horses to telegraphs.

More information and more media going to more people in more places, faster.

Ideas take root. Unsanctioned ideas. Ideas that lean into a distribution of information and authority. They gather momentum. Spread like fire. Topple old institutions. And form new ones.

The world is getting noisy now. And through the noise, it can be difficult to filter for truth, especially when power and the institutions and individuals that wield it still dominate.

Yet one strategy shows some signs of being able to reign in the chaos. “Let’s demonstrate practice,” someone thinks. “Let’s document the journey with testable replicable results.”

“Let’s make truth its own thing.”

It works, a little bit. And after a time it gains traction. A small mound grows into a mountain. And the ability to build stable, steady structures on top of that mountain produces results the likes of which the world could never previously have imagined.

Here is the fruit of media. A universe of information that is not only self-referential, but self-selecting and self-controlling. In its ideal, a free and open place where anyone can participate and produce so long as that production can be verified and cross-checked with the world we inhabit. So long as it contributes to a stable structure.

But things are not ideal.

The metaverse is growing. The interplay of proverbial stars, galaxies, black holes, superclusters and vast swirling dust clouds of information yet to take form, is anything but stable.

And the next technological leap, empowered by those very structures, is about to make things a lot more interesting.

The Big Bang Theory

Let’s take a step back for a moment.

Imagine there’s a funnel. And at one end of this purely hypothetical funnel is a single community with a single authority. A single shared truth. A single language. A single narrative. Information either travels outwards from a centre point or is simply known ubiquitously. It is communicated clearly and effectively. It isn’t challenged. And everyone goes on believing largely the same thing.

This social organism, representing a pure collective, lacks dynamism of any kind. It is unsustainable because it lacks the ability to adapt to changes in a shared environment.

But then something shifts. It could be that information is processed differently. It could be there’s a disruption in communication. It could be an interpretation shifts. But the funnel widens slightly. The possibilities for variation increase.

Right down at the other end of the funnel is a different pure hypothetical. Here, there are innumerable infinitely diverse and disparate individuals, with no single centre of authority. Shared truth is nowhere to be found and language might as well be meaningless as there’s no consistency at all. Every individual exists on their own, far removed and isolated from the others. The funnel is infinitely wide, to the point where it’s no longer in a funnel at all. The social universe has evaporated, suffering from a heat death of sorts.

This social organism, if it can even be called that, representing a pure individualism, lacks coordination of any kind. It is unsustainable because it also lacks the ability to adapt to changes in a shared environment.

Some way back from this hypothetical however is a different point. Here there is an enormous plurality of individuals and communities of varying sizes, with varying and shifting sources of authority – often centralised, often distributed and often both. Languages are amorphous and constantly changing. Ideas and descriptions of reality compete and ripple backwards and forwards across the surface. There are dense cores and loose peripheries and plenty of space in between. Everything tugs at everything else and it feels like it is engaged in a constant state of information warfare.

It is an absolute mess.

This social organism, representing a rather vague centre point in the battle between individual and collective, has both coordination and dynamism in some measure. Yet it is still unsustainable because it still lacks a mechanism to respond to a shared external reality. One that effectively harnesses the benefits of both individual and collective into something we occasionally call collective intelligence.

Democracy is that mechanism.

And over the last couple of centuries, it has made creeping advances in its capacities. Part of that capacity can be attributed to the ‘metaverse’ described herein – A place where information is stored in a multitude of places and flows in a multitude of directions. Where it is able to reproduce, evolve and stratify.

But it has always been shaky.

This is part of the trade-off with moving down the funnel. Variation might be destabilising as far as a particular structure or status quo is concerned but it creates the potential for other more dynamic, adaptive and beneficial structures to form. This was the pattern described in the earliest theories of historiography.

Oscillation across different social dimensions between dense cohesive cores and loosely distributed peripheries. Whether it’s physical space, political authority, or indeed the use and understanding of language itself.

More variation creates the conditions for more variation and complexity increases over time.

Media accelerated this process by introducing an entirely new dimension of reference points. And that metaverse of self-referential information expanded exponentially, so that the potential relationships between units in a social organism are not just individuals/individuals, individuals/information, individuals/place, etc. But now information/information information/place and so forth, ad infinitum. Layers upon layers.

To put it another way…

Obviously, we’re all familiar with the concept of infinity. But not all infinities are equal. There are degrees or ‘types’ – sort of. For example, there are an infinite number of integers (ie, 1, 42, 365, etc). But there are also an infinite number of fractional numbers between every integer (ie, 3.1, 3.14, 3.14159, etc). Both sets are infinite. But the total number of infinite numbers incorporates integers and everything between is infinity of a slightly different sort. Infinite sets can include an infinite number of infinite sets. This is part of what is known as 'set theory'.

That might seem unrelated. But consider what it means for information in a social environment where every piece of information within an infinite possible set (ie, the media), can produce another infinite set (ie, meta-media) and so on.

Another analogy (with a little more sci-fi flair) would be the multiverse theory, which suggests that infinite universes splay off from every moment. As if one universe isn’t complicated enough. So right now, infinite possible realities. Then from each of those realities in the next moment, another set of infinite possible realities. And so on.

Bonkers.

But that’s essentially what we’re dealing with. In very practical terms, we are creating social realities, with problems and solutions alike, at faster and faster rates than we could have ever imagined. Certainly faster than we are now capable of managing. Potentially faster than we are capable of managing at all.

And that brings us to the terrifying and incredible present.

Information Apocalypse

What if two paintings could talk?

It may seem like I’ve skipped over the internet here. And I sort of have. The internet and the digital revolution have been remarkable, but in terms of the sort of change we’re discussing here, not completely out of the box or even unexpected.

What the internet represents is scale and the further reduction of obstacles to information or ‘media’ transmission and reproduction. It can be replicated infinitely and transmitted almost instantly anywhere in the world. As a result, the world has gotten a lot smaller and that process of ‘transcending’ time and space that began ages ago has reached its virtual zenith.

We can combine the thoughts of Sun Tzu and Steve Jobs with our own and get…whatever that happens to give you. 

The sphere of public communication has grown from a cave to a clearing to a city centre to a vast digital arena, with scaled-up versions of the same social and economic forces tugging every which way. The stage is bigger now, but the play is largely the same.

Everyone being able to talk to and share with each other is great. Always has been. We just have to get better at it now. Better at managing and understanding more. Better at understanding ourselves and the world we live in.

Problems which emerge, have emerged, are emerging, stem largely from the fact that we’re unaccustomed to dealing with the scale. Suddenly being confronted with a larger more complex social reality triggers different reflexes – not all of which are positive. It also makes it harder to weave together a coherent narrative for who we are, who everyone else is and how the world works, as there are simply more threads to work with.

Furthermore, and perhaps most significantly, it massively expands the number of actors – the gravity wells, so to speak – in an information systems ‘causal domain’, fusing them into one and giving reach and opportunity to further build, support or undermine community, while changing the dynamics of politics everywhere in the process.

Yet as significant as that all is, it’s all still essentially just scale, efficiency and speed.

The problems (bad actors, inequitable power dynamics, disinformation, misinformation, diverging social realities, etc) are not new problems. They’re old problems given new life. And the solutions (provenance, quality signals, education, governance, policy, community, connectivity and diverse trust networks, etc) are not new solutions. They’re old solutions given new purpose and perhaps requiring a few new twists.

That’s not to make things sound easy. With so many moving parts, it was already proving difficult. But that was before – when the expansion of an existing trend was the only challenge.

The more significant challenge comes when we combine that massive expansion of communication with a massive expansion in automation.

It happens when it’s no longer media as independent units in an ecosystem navigated, sorted, filtered and interpreted by humans, but when media starts navigating the system itself – when ‘we’ are cut out of the picture and it’s just ‘two paintings talking’.

The explosion of so-called AI-generated content has been likened to many things. But one of my favourite analogies is that of an oil spill.

It’s visceral and it conveys the reality we already live in. A polluted environment. One that is excruciatingly difficult (nigh impossible) to clean up entirely.

While true thinking machines might be a long way off (if they ever arrive at all), the algorithmic content generation algorithms currently marketed as AI models have nonetheless had a world-shaking impact. 

Intelligence, sentience, and true comprehension aren’t even necessary.

The impact comes from the very simple fact that they (the models) consume data/media (and meta-media), produce further meta-media and feed it back into the system, without any particular outside understanding of how they do it.

Stuff goes in. The model generates a bunch of numbers and vectors and data on how stuff relates to each other, then uses that to put more stuff out. That ‘stuff’, then re-enters the feeding trough, before being cannibalised and digested again, ad-infinitum.

It’s a surefire way to, at some point, create Mad Model Disease.

Furthermore, because of automation, this process happens at an accelerated rate. While early models may have been feeding on the questionable, albeit legitimately human product of our digital social lives, successive generations can and will, as a result of their own engineering successes, be producing content less obviously artificial and therefore more easily gobbled up. That’s even assuming any distinction is attempted.

It has been argued in defence of all this – “Hey, but that’s exactly what people are doing – gobbling, remixing and regurgitating. And we don’t know how that works. We can’t see behind the proverbial curtain.”

But that argument is about as deep as a puddle. Large Language Models don’t live in the system they feed. They don’t ‘live’ at all. They have no vested interest. And their input should not be allowed to unduly impact, let alone dominate the social environment, which we in turn depend on for life.

A fish shits in the water. An oil spill upends an ecosystem.

There are also those who say the models are getting more accurate and better at passing tests or providing factual information. This also, besides being not-entirely-accurate, is irrelevant. It is, in the best possible case, introducing an additional dimension of recursive recall into an already delicate environment.

Not to give credit where undue, but human memory functions much the same in this specific regard. When we remember something, we are recalling, in part, the last time we remembered it. That’s a bug as much as a feature. And it’s something that having concrete media (like paintings of hunting techniques on cave walls and scrolls with star charts in libraries) helped us address.

Leaning into it just as we need to be figuring out exactly what’s true or not, is a terrible idea.

And that’s not even getting into the vast majority of use cases for generated content, which are not exactly detailed descriptions of scientific principles.

What we now face is a social environment where information (of the meta-media variety) empowered by algorithms and automation, consumes and grows, leaving that which stems directly from human beings – our lived experience, our social exchanges, our creative output, and anything even remotely connected by a solitary degree of separation to the real world – as a footnote.

So what happens when it does more than transcend time and space? What happens when it transcends us?

What then?

Governing the Metaverse

So firstly, apologies for taking this long to get to the point.

But it’s kind of necessary to tell the whole story. Because this is ultimately a story. A story about storytelling. And the story we want to write as we go forward.

What does that mean for democracy?

Well, the short version is that democracy has to navigate and in some way help us reconstitute and somewhat/sufficiently align exponentially expanding versions of reality – let’s call them ‘epistemic universes’ – at least enough to avoid derailing the whole project together. In other words, enough to sustain democracy.

Some folks (myself included) view this as the greatest contemporary challenge to democratic governance.

And it just so happens to come bundled together with new and interesting ways to directly threaten and intentionally undermine democracy. Where centres of power might have, in the past, relied on control (to varying degrees of success), weaponised chaos is now the order of the day.

Make enough waves and anything that floats looks like a life raft.

Suffice to say, it was challenging already when we were just dealing with a bunch of people on the internet, and it’s now in the process of getting a whole lot more challenging.

It also means we have to do everything we can to stop the metaverse from spiralling out of control and into the twilight zone where all connection and relevance to human experience in lived worlds (and yes that can include the virtual) are left behind.

To do that, we need to go further than the solutions mentioned above.

Yes, Provenance and Quality Signals are crucially important. Primarily because they’re proactive rather than reactive and reactive solutions like fact-checking have diminishing returns and are unable to keep pace with disinformation under human-generated conditions, let alone ‘AI’. Secondly, because it worked before. Referencing, bibliographic techniques and the scientific method were effective. But they need to be upgraded, entrenched in different kinds of media and made accessible to more people both producing and consuming, without going back and cross-checking every notation. Process transparency is key.

Education is also obviously important, as it drives critical thinking and our capacity, both individually and collectively, to spot nonsense - although this is often overplayed. The collective intelligence underpinning democracy works because of the collective, not because everyone has degrees. Nevertheless, we need adequate tools and practices to ground students in primary and secondary resources, not octonary or duodenary, etc. Constantly cross-checking information with as-close-to-truth as we can realistically hope to get is hard already. Banging the foundations of knowledge with a hammer to see if they still hold up isn’t sexy, but it has to be done. Scientific practice is already routinely shown up as falling short in this department, with research slipping through that clearly lacks adequate thorough review. Solutions here stack like knowledge itself. For education to work better, quality signals need to work better.

There’s also Governance and Policy. Super important. As best we can, we need to ensure that human interests, experience and activity dominate the public sphere, lest it become, well…something else. A wad of useless content. We also need to protect our data, regulate the design and use of AI models and be very careful about the ownership networks behind both.

Then we get to Community, Connectivity and Trust Networks.

The best insurance policy against bullshit is experience. If we know someone, it is harder to foment prejudice against them. If we’ve seen something, it’s harder to convince us with a fake. That’s why despite an expanding digital landscape, close interpersonal relationships have never been more important.

But more than that, and as is the case regularly made in this blog, the shape or ‘Social Geometry’ of those networks is important. Specifically, the balancing of close community with broad connectivity - encouraging closer intersections so that there are fewer jumps to make.

As it was that painting something on a cave wall, reduced the compounding error of passing it along for a few hundred generations, so too can we reduce the compounding error of all social communication by bringing people closer to each other.

“But Daniel! The internet did that and it failed! Everyone just formed groups and started tweeting nasty things at each other”

Yes, they did. Because, as has been addressed in previous posts, the sudden rush of contact overwhelmed the system. This happens when the reality of living with millions of other people is obfuscated in one way or another for tens, hundreds, thousands of years. We’re still sorting ourselves out trying to process it all. Let’s not lose our nerve.

But also, that’s not what I mean. Throwing everyone together in one big arena to fight it out isn’t the solution. Real life has doors and rooms and private conversations. Close communities are important. The thing is to make sure those communities have authentic connections (be they physical or digital) through which they can learn about each other and those beyond. Unironically (at least in my view) a little bit like an Olympic ring sort of scenario (for lack of a better visual).

The actual conception of democracy needs to expand to include network geometry.

Institutions and practices might make a government democratic for a term. But they don’t hold it together. They don’t protect it against an increasingly tumultuous maelstrom of nonsense.

That can only be done by keeping one foot firmly outside the metaverse at all times.