Social Media is Our Collective Shadow

AltspaceVR eliminating public areas and the media response show we still haven't fully appreciated what we're doing online- or off.

Used by Carl Jung to describe the repressed part(s) of ourselves, The Shadow is a concept that Robert Bly defines as a metaphorical bag; From, A Little Book on the Human Shadow:

The Long, Invisible Bag Behind You
“When one or two years old, most of us had 360-degree personalities. We were literally balls of energy radiating from all parts of our body and psyche. But as time went on, we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. “Can’t you sit still?” Or, “It isn’t nice to hit and bite.”  

To keep our parents love, we started an invisible bag, and we put in that bag the parts of us our parents didn’t like. By the time we got to school, our bag was quite large. There, we added our teachers’ comments. “Play nice with others, don’t be bossy, don’t be so self-centered, and don’t get angry.” So we take our anger, our sense of self-importance, and put it in the bag.

As teens, we do an extraordinary amount of bag-stuffing in high school. This time it’s no longer the evil grownup that pressures us, but people our own age. So the student’s paranoia about grownups continues.

I so maintain that out of that round globe of energy the twenty-year-old ends up with a slice. Let’s imagine a man who has a thin slice left—the rest is in the bag—and we’ll imagine that he meets a woman. Let’s say they are both twenty-four. She has a thin, elegant slice left. They join each other in a ceremony, and this union of two slices is call marriage. Even together the two do not make up one person!

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed. Suppose the bag remains sealed—what happens then?

…

Microsoft announced that they’re eliminating public spaces to focus on safety. From The Information:

But getting rid of public spaces, in particular, is a drastic move. It demonstrates that no tech giant has quite figured out how to create safe, welcoming spaces for potential millions or billions of users in VR—something that will become even more necessary as we move towards anything resembling a metaverse-centric future.

AltspaceVR’s move follows similar action by Meta earlier this month, when it announced a new default “personal boundary” system for Horizon Worlds. Many were quick to criticize Meta for not having been more proactive with a default boundary system before launching Worlds into a public beta. But AltspaceVR has nearly identical patterns of harassment. While it introduced a  similar “Safety Bubble” feature years ago, it’s only now becoming a default.

I don’t have any personal experience with any of the aforementioned products, mostly because they’re stupid and I’m not an early adopter. I don’t see the merging of my identity with an online avatar to be a healthy evolution for my psyche or for anyone else’s. Yet the engines of capitalism must turn, so here we are. The cash cow that is the Microsoft Office productivity suite is now empowering the least productive endeavor in all of human history, with the sole possible exceptions of the Donner Party and the collected works of Michael Bay.

It is my contention that “no tech giant has quite figured out how to create safe, welcoming spaces for potential millions or billions of users in VR” precisely because the anonymous online world is a collection of our shadow behavior, which by definition is the stuff we don’t broadcast offline. We broadcast it only when we can’t be shamed for it. In the woods, in a crowd, anonymously online.

Why would Microsoft need to automatically mute new attendees in virtual events if there wasn’t a 29 year old child complex screaming obscenities into the microphone? Had only the child been heard and allowed to speak, there would be no need for shouting in the first place. But instead, the child can finally poke his head out of the bag- and straight into the metaverse.

Part of the internet’s magic lies in the fantasy that it’s an escape from our mundane, uninspired world. And yet it only seems to function smoothly when it turns into that same mundane, uninspired world.

With this latest move, Microsoft is ensuring that we’ll have our same old offline identities brought into the metaverse via multifactor authorization; the escape will be gone and we’ll once again be bringing small slices of that ball of energy into our daily interactions.

The problem isn’t the internet, the metaverse, or web3.0. The problem is in that long, invisible bag behind you. I’d recommend you give it some air today. What’s in there might not be pretty, but I guarantee you it’ll be useful.

Be well and do good,

Pete