On somatic accountability, interface$, and metaverse gaslighting
 

In summer 2021, finally vaccinated but still very much tethered to home and videoconference interfaces, I imagined being in the body of Breonna Taylor. I imagined the depth of her sleep, the weight of her body at rest against the mattress, the bedclothes tangled around her legs. I imagined the warmth of the air entering her nostrils and her breath settling around the dewey skin of her face.   

“Don’t abandon the wisdom of the body” is a note that I wrote during Embodied Antiracist Practice, a workshop by Practice Progress that Arcos Dance hosted in June. The note may have been a quote, but I was careless about citing. It sums up the workshop, and why I took it. Language and rhetoric, the public discourse, and logic all seemed to be failing in major ways. I felt called to attend on a preverbal level, somatically. 

The workshop was held over Zoom, and the only place I had to do it was the bedroom, in the small spaces between the bed and the desk, and, on the other side, between the bed and the closet, with no place to stretch my arms out perpendicularly when lying on the floor. When we had to locomote, I paced back and forth around the perimeter of the bed like a caged animal. In one exercise, the other participants and I took on the individual postures we assume when we’re feeling our most commanding and righteous, then exaggerated them until we became grotesque caricatures of ourselves, revealing the truths in those postures. I marched around the bed like Popeye, chest puffed, chin leveled, eyebrows raised.  

It was during this workshop when flattening first became apparent to me as a lens. In ballet, we flatten the body, learning to do pliés in the space between the wall and the barre. In so many white dance and spectator traditions, we take movements from Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latin cultures and flatten them onto the proscenium stage. Capitalism makes speed a mechanism of oppression, steamrolling any ways of being or points of view in the way of the fastest profit. Centrifugal force flattens us against the walls of the spinning ride. I flatten against the wall during conflict, invoking my privilege to not engage. Hands up, the police shout, or they don’t, either way threatening to flatten human bodies into a subhuman, impossible shape. 

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At one point during his keynote for Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook), which was posted in October, Mark Zuckerberg sits in front of a presumably fake bookshelf containing a presumably fake typewriter and presumably fake books, all in hues of beige. This is the kind of decor you might buy at Hobby Lobby, but the background appears to be virtual. Zuckerberg seems real, but as the keynote progresses through various virtual backgrounds and avatars, it becomes difficult to tell if the Zuckerbergs are real or fake. It’s hard to imagine that there’s no motive behind the books-and-typewriter vignette, or that it’s intentionally ironic. It seems more plausible that the people at Meta designed the background through visual rhetoric that panders to an audience they think is worth pandering to. 

In the 90-minute video, Zuckerberg lays out his vision for a “metaverse” in which our real and digital experiences will be further blended through augmented reality (AR). He illustrates the concept through a series of vignettes in which real people have virtual backgrounds—often majestic views of fake nature seen through large windows—and cartoon people are avatars of humans. AR technology is real and important, but this vision is frivolous. There’s nothing about education or healthcare, two areas of high promise for AR. For all its happy cartoon people, fake costumes, and games, there are no senior adults, children, or teens. And yet Zuckerberg seems mostly concerned with the adolescent pursuits of gaming, building apps, and “connecting with friends.” 

There are a lot of smart people who don’t take this vision seriously. But with over 3.5 billion people currently using Meta apps around the world, this work, however conceptual, drives culture that influences the experience of being human. Past behavior predicts future behavior. Facebook and Instagram broaden our worlds only until they flatten into echo chambers and become overrun with ads. Connecting with friends is rewarding until the tradeoffs of “connecting” with “friends” become too unsatisfying, or harmful.

My own experience of the internet is media-centric and verbal, a reflection of myself as a reader and writer, a progress junkie, and a stormchaser of quiet awe. My internet is already a metaverse, because it relates back to itself. Unless I work hard to prevent it, my metaverse flattens into a sick amalgamation of circular ideas from people alike in race, education, philosophy, generation, economic status, voice, tone, and lexicon. Whereas a universe is always expanding, metaverses are always imploding, collapsing into themselves. 

One of Zuckerberg’s big ideas in the keynote is interoperability—companies working together to make sure, say, your avatar can wear a digital outfit you bought to any digital party you want, just like in the real world. But based on past behavior, we can predict that companies will play nice with each other only to the extent that it helps them commandeer users’ attention, the commodity. The metaverse, by and large, will be designed and governed by Meta. 

Based on past behavior, we can expect the dissolution of place and commodification of connections and experiences. Based on past behavior, we can expect that the interface won’t disappear; it’ll loom large and become a less extricable part of our identities. We can expect that Meta will pay effectively zero attention to what’s happening to our kids. We can expect that as companies buy our attention, we’ll again marvel at the idea that we can be everywhere, while in fact we lose our here. 

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A motif throughout the keynote is a look of awe on human and avatar faces when they’re oriented toward a virtual view or, at one point, a work of digital art. They say “It’s so beautiful,” but the thing is, it’s not. It’s not! A fake-book-and-typewriter vignette says to some, “we’re just like you,” but they’re not. Breonna Taylor lives on in her legacy and archetype, but she doesn’t. 

Early in the Practice Progress workshop, I was frustrated by a lack of feeling in my head. We undulated our spines, deepening our sensitivity by imagining an ocean-bottom searchlight illuminating each vertebrae and disc. Despite my searchlight focus on the highest vertebrae, my skull remained numb, an empty bucket. It was only as the participants and I, each alone in our Zoom rooms, imagined the physical presence of others, embodying the slight shifts in weight and breath that make real space for emergence and listening, that I could feel my head again as part of my holistic being. And that is the here that I want, and that I want for others—to feel our bodies, to feel our brains and souls, to feel them in space together and connected for real, to listen, to somehow pass these feels on to our kids so they will always know a here that isn’t an interface. 

Here’s wishing you space for reflection and a new year full of reals and feels, and justice for Breonna Taylor. 

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I hate to sound all newsletter-y, but if you’ve read any of my five letters this year, the year that I picked this experiment back up and took it on a road trip, hey. Thanks. As always, if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it. Ya’ll are the best.