As Paul Murray's waist chopped avatar soon discovers:
"The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world ..." [1]
I.
My friend Catherine, who has an academic interest in the topic of torture and capital punishment, will doubtless know that one of the favoured methods of execution in ancient China involved the condemned being cut in two at the waist by someone wielding a very large blade.
Thankfully, in the modern world this practice has been abolished - unless performed by a surgeon as a life-saving last resort [2].
However, if you ever decide to enter the so-called metaverse - an immersive virtual environment - you may be shocked to find yourself (or, more precisely, your avatar) without legs, genitals, buttocks, or anything else below the waist, having effectively been given a digital hemicorporectomy the moment you don your VR headset.
That's certainly the case in Mark Zuckerberg's derisible first attempt to establish a techno-utopia, despite his investing huge - HUGE - sums of money [3] in a project which the Facebook founder sincerely believes to be the future for human interaction and digital socialization.
Known as Horizon Worlds, it's been described as a desperately sad and lonely space; like an abandoned shopping mall or theme park. Certainly not the kind of 3D cartoon world anyone would willingly choose to hang out in for very long - even if they are eventually promised legs! [4]
II.
"It's hard", writes Paul Murray, "not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow ..." [5].
That's true: and what it's symbolic of is (i) once you enter the metaverse there's no running away and (ii) Zuckerberg wants us to exchange the sheer intensity of lived experience - the full-life of the body, it's forces, flows and desires - for the mere simulation of such.
D. H. Lawrence was alert to the danger of this almost a century ago:
"The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real love, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All the emotions belong to the body, and are only recognised by the mind." [6]
Today, to paraphrase Lawrence, many people live and die without having had any real thoughts, feelings or experiences, even if they've spent many long hours chatting on social media or hanging out in a virtual reality.
For they've effectively been cut off at the waist and become creatures for whom everything is in the head and "whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downward from the mind" [7].
Mark Zuckerberg likes to present himself as a liberator, but really he's just another executioner ...
Notes
[1] Wallace Stevens, 'Esthétique du Mal', in Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, (The Library of America, 1997), p. 286.
[2] Hemicorporectomy - or trans-lumbar amputation as it is also known - is an extremely rare (and extremely radical) procedure, used, for example, to stop the spread of aggressive cancers in the spine and pelvic region, or other uncontainable conditions. Apparently, the key to surving such surgery is having sufficient emotional and psychological maturity to cope - as well as the physical resources to undergo intensive rehab. So not for everyone then - and certainly not for me (even having eyestrain or a toothache makes me ponder if it wouldn't be better to be dead).
[2] In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo reports that Zuckerberg has invested staggering sums in his metaverse project; tens of billions of dollars in just a couple of years. See 'My Sad, Lonely, Expensive Adventures in Zuckerberg's V. R.' (4 Nov 2022): click here.
[3] Meta promises that its Horizon avatars will be getting legs sometime this year, so you'll not just have to float around with half your body missing. (Apparently, legs that move in concert with the user are very hard to get right in virtual reality systems, but the technical engineers are working on the problem.)
[4] Paul Murray, 'Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland', New York Magazine (13 Mar 2023): click here for the online version in Intelligencer.
[5-6] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 311.
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