Real life: the next level

We are living through the most profound change in human living in nearly 10,000 years and no one is really noticing.

All the individual components have been minutely discussed, of course. The internet. Remote working. Video calls. MMORPGs. Social media. Being extremely online. That’s the problem. The discussion is about the minutiae.

The three realities

For most of its existence, homo sapiens has been just one more species of mammal among many. It was undoubtedly a smart animal, but then, so are chimpanzees, gorillas and orang utans. None of them have ever amounted to all that much in planetary terms.

It uses tools, but again, that’s not that unusual. So do otters, crows and octopuses. Bumble bees can be taught to use tools.

No, for most of its existence, homo sapiens was a hunter-gatherer, just as many other species are. Functionally, it was just another animal. This was our first reality.

Just over 10,000 years ago, homo sapiens took a unique step forward. It turned to settled farming. This first agricultural revolution changed everything. Humans were no longer defined by nomadism. For the first time, they had a concept of permanent location. This wasn’t just a matter of new agricultural techniques. In the same period, animals were domesticated, pottery was invented and polished stone tools were improved.

It should be noted that the benefits of settled farming were not immediate. Human nutrition got worse, not better, after settled farming began. Those who remained nomads must have been nonplussed. Very possibly, they regarded this new way of life as inferior.

Nevertheless, settled farming was a whole new way for humanity to live. It really was a revolution. This was our second reality.

Fairly shortly afterwards (in the grand scheme of things), humanity developed a third way of living. Just under 10,000 years ago, we discovered urban living.

This urban revolution was closely connected to the first agricultural revolution. Indeed, it would have been impossible without it. With the accumulation of food surpluses, humans were able to specialise permanently. The concept of a trade was invented, and with it the idea of living an urban lifestyle rather than subsisting off the land.

At the time, the idea of some humans not making any contribution to the production of food must have seemed extraordinary, parasitical even. Being so disconnected from real life would have been shocking.

At the start, urban life was probably very much second best. In lean times, farmers would no doubt hoard, leaving those who had no direct access to food at risk of starvation.

Still, over millennia the concept of urban living took hold, allowing for the development of hierarchies, states and what we call civilisation. Indeed, now even almost all people who live in the countryside live in an urban manner rather than through subsistence farming. Food production has become just another activity, rather than the animating activity of all human life. And so humanity had three forms of reality: nomadism, settled farming and urban living.

Those have not really changed to this day. Modern day accountants could probably recognise patterns in the work day of a Mesopotamian clerk, even if the tools used were very different. Life is very much easier nowadays, but the differences between then and now are one of extreme degree rather than of kind. The structure of this third reality was described long ago by men like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It is based around concepts like comparative advantage.

There are still nomads today. They are a rarity, found in such out of the way places as the Sentinel Islands or deep in the Amazon. Subsistence farmers are more common and you regularly hear of eccentrics adopting it as a way of life even in the developed world, at least for a while. For a long time, however, most people in the developed world have lived their lives in the third reality.

The fourth reality

“Where can we live but days?” asked Philip Larkin. We have found an answer that does not require the services of priests or doctors. It’s time to talk about the extremely online and “internet addicts” and consider whether they might in fact be onto something.

For something like 20 years, we have seen increasing numbers of mostly young people spend more and more time on a gadget of one form or another. At least, that’s what it looks like to those from a third reality background.

That’s not how it feels to participants. They’re debating, forming friendships, participating in communities and playing games with friends. They may be exercising (OK, Peloton). They may be being educated. They may be building careers. They can be doing this with other people who may live anywhere in the world. In short, they are living online.

Far too often, the implicit assumption is made that if someone is online they’re not doing useful stuff in the “real world”. As more and more of us spend more and more time online, we should know that is not necessarily or even usually true.

One of the biggest impediments, however, to recognising this fourth reality as a reality is that it is, well, all just a bit rubbish at present. Sitting in front of a computer screen doesn’t feel like a very fulfilling activity at present. Video calls are still nothing like the quality of sitting face to face with someone. We aren’t yet at the point that we can fully immerse in what’s going on on-screen, not by a long chalk.

The same was true, however, of the second and third realities at first. It also seems highly likely that the first settled farmers continued to hunt and gather initially and that the first urban dwellers continued to farm initially too. The full flowering of each of these new realities took time.

The mistake here is to look at the now of the fourth reality and not think about what’s coming next. All the ingredients are already here. Virtual reality is improving all the time and when it becomes truly usable, the fourth reality will be transformed. The moment is coming when living online will not feel like an ersatz life: it will be another fully realised form of real life. In that real life, we will be able to fly instead of walk, we will be able to change the laws of physics and we will be able for many things to abolish traditional concepts of scarcity. That moment is imminent.

Web 2.0: the overhyped phenomenon that turned out to be underhyped

The key step was not the internet itself, though that has changed so much of our lives and it is an essential component of our fourth reality. In function, if not form, the internet had antecedents in shopping catalogues and libraries.

No, the key step was one which was ballyhooed at the time and at the time was equally derided: Web 2.0. When users could start talking back, the internet moved from being a resource to a metropolis.

But not instantly. That was one of the problems with Web 2.0 — it got too hyped too soon. Amara’s law states that “we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Web 2.0 is one of the very best examples of this.

In 1999, MSN messenger had just started, but Facebook would not be founded for five years, Twitter was seven years away and Instagram would not turn up until 2010. Web 1.0 endured for a lot longer than the Web 2.0 hypesters imagined. Second Life, which was also founded in 1999, was a clue as to what might be possible. It was far too far ahead of its time. Today, it looks like the future.

The challenges of the fourth reality

The fourth reality looks very different from the first three. Access to much of it, indeed the very rules of the reality itself, will be controlled by creators. They will be able to charge for access, in theory at least. They may charge for access by tiers. They may set other less tangible methods of restricting access.

However, the fourth reality is not a finite resource in the way that farmland is, or city real estate is. New world creators will be able to establish themselves readily. So market leaders will need to defend their position aggressively and follow market trends frenetically. We have seen this already. Myspace came and went. Facebook is passé among the younger generations (the company itself has thrived by buying rivals such as Instagram and WhatsApp). Twitter has yet to work out how best to monetise what it offers without losing what makes it special to users.

What all this means is that reality creators are unlikely to be able to make their money by charging substantial sums for entry to their worlds. They may be able to charge a fixed entry fee, just as you have to pay to buy a game, or they may be able to charge a monthly fee, like Netflix. But push those up too high and rivals will step in to fill the gap. The benefits of network effects will allow reality creators to benefit from user inertia up to quite a point (as Google+ shows). But beyond that point, their demise might be very sudden.

Instead, reality creators will in general make their money by advertising and by offering paid-for high status goods. The fourth reality’s economy will owe more to EA Sports and to Reddit than to Apple.

Once in, fourth reality dwellers will, within the confines of the reality’s rules, live in a world of abundance. (This will not make them feel better. Humanity pockets its successes without thanks. In the developed world, people are in general well-fed and housed far more comfortably than their predecessors, with access to a wide range of technology designed to make their lives easier: beyond a certain point, this does not noticeably make them happier.) People will take for granted that they can fly, change appearance, change sex, change shape, travel the world instantaneously, swim underwater, paddle in volcano magma, sing flawlessly, create vast mansions and decorate them harmoniously without all the tedium of dusting, hoovering and gardening.

We shall continue to be driven by valuing scarcity. So desirable new designer outfits, desirable new avatars, works of art, curated experiences, resources that are not easily replicable and so on will all retain value.

Many of the triumphs and challenges of the fourth reality will be the triumphs and challenges of Web 2.0. The rise of disinformation has been spread by voluntary segregation along ideological lines — Bernie Bros, QAnon, Corbynites, Leavers, Rejoiners, trans activists, gender critical feminists, lockdown sceptics and anti-vaxxers have all coagulated online into their own little groupings, allowing for the ready transmission of useful truths, comforting half-truths and emotionally desirable falsehoods among believers already softened up to be susceptible. That is all a product of the fourth reality.

We shall not be able to live wholly in the fourth reality, at least not in the short to medium term. We shall still need physical locations and to be fed. Many of our physical needs, however, including the amount of physical accommodation that we require, may well diminish sharply. If you can explore whole universes in the fourth reality, you will only need as much space in the third reality as you require to include your fourth reality set-up with comfort.

Energy requirements, however, are likely to continue to rise. The fourth reality needs power to exist. Similarly, demands on cloud computing are likely to accelerate. The likes of AWS can look forward to even faster growth.

What are the next steps?

It’s all very well identifying what B looks like, but how will we get from A to B? As with the internet, porn is leading the way. Virtual reality porn is, I am told, already remarkably realistic.

Work-related programmes are, however, coming on stream. This account in Wired shows how close we are to fourth reality workplaces. We aren’t yet at the point of being to conduct efficient VR meetings, but we are not that far away. The technology is years away, not decades. We need to start preparing for it now.

So online companies with Web 2.0 capabilities and thriving communities should be able to make the transition to the fourth reality with some ease. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Has it realised just how well-placed it is to lead off into the fourth reality?

Summary

There is a lot of hype about a lot of technological innovation. Much of that hype is rightly discounted. Every now and then, we discount hype that is entirely valid. We are doing that now.

There is an assumption that living online is somehow less valid than physical reality. It is implicit in terms like virtual reality, being extremely online or internet addiction. They all imply a hierarchy of lifestyles, with only physical reality representing a completely fulfilled existence.

In the future, I expect that the idea of physical reality as the only or even primary form of existence will seem archaic. This fourth reality is very much real life, in many ways more real than the physical world. We need to get ready for it.

Alastair Meeks