Why is the concept of the Metaverse going to explode in 2021?
Viruses don't read almanacs
Liu Qing: Lin Yao is a very powerful scholar. He is active on the Chinese Internet and is very thoughtful. He writes various articles and writes very fast.
He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, his Ph.D. in Law from Yale University, and is now back in China as a teacher at NYU Shanghai.
I have known him online for almost 10 years, and he is a young man I admire very much.
In our circle of political philosophy, Lin Yao is very respected, because he is very young, born in 1983, and everyone has high expectations for him.
Some of my friends may know that I write an annual report on the Western intellectual community every year. The first 18 years are collected into a book called "The West Since 2000".
Every year around this time I start to get anxious about writing something new.
Usually, I have to submit the manuscript before and after the Spring Festival, and there is still more than one month this year.
Now that I have some ideas, I would like to exchange with Dr. Lin Yao about major events or feelings and trends in the world.
We're talking rambling, without a particularly rigorous structure or a particularly clear point of view.
First ask Lin Yao, 2021 is almost over, what is the thing, or tendency and opinion that you feel the most about?
Lin Yao: Why is the new crown epidemic not over yet?
!
From the beginning more than a year ago to the present, there have been several times in the middle that everyone felt that the epidemic was about to pass, but soon they learned that a new virus variant had appeared. It seemed that the end of the epidemic was still in the future. and regions, posing a very big challenge to all.
Including our family's decision to return to China, the epidemic is also a very important reason.
Because I have been separated from my parents for more than a year, there is no way to go back to take care of them.
Life is even more difficult for other people from all corners of the world, especially those who need to constantly go out to work and make a living, and cannot stay in the study to do research and write articles like us intellectuals.
So I think the epidemic has continued to the present, and the global industrial chain, logistics chain, and everyone's previous imagination of normal life and normal politics have all been broken.
What should I do next?
How should human society rethink?
How to reorganize?
I think it's a very tough challenge.
Liu Qing: I feel the same way.
Due to the existence of the epidemic, I think the boundary between 2021 and 2020 seems to be unclear.
I started writing that report, and the first sentence was - "Viruses don't read almanacs."
It connects you as if there was a long 2021 that carried over from 2020.
And there is a feature that you said that except for a few intellectuals and scholars, in fact, it is mainly liberal arts intellectuals. Everyone can just sit at home and read books, but many engineers and scientists need to work in groups, especially factories. are very large.
This also brings a feature, that is, there are waves of viruses or epidemics, from Alpha to the present Omicron, there are several variants, but most people do not have particularly accurate knowledge of them.
Within scientists, sometimes they have some preliminary judgments about a new trend, and there are some disagreements or disputes between them, such as what medicines work, what vaccines work, and to what extent they are effective.
We live in a world where events that have a direct and significant impact on our own lives have no particular way of understanding how they are, as if living in ancient times.
Especially after globalization, we don't even know if there is a way to grasp and regain a sense of control for those things that have a particularly powerful force and have a direct impact on us.
I have been trying to figure out all the problems of the virus for a while, and it took me a while, but it was really difficult.
Lin Yao's undergraduate course is biology, so it will be easier for you.
Lin Yao: Not really.
Professional virologists are very confused, and there are many internal disputes, not to mention a scientific research deserter like me who runs away halfway.
In fact, I think as Mr. Liu said, this epidemic has posed a very big challenge to various fields, including the public's trust in scientists.
I just returned from the United States. In the past nearly two years, the debates and back-and-forths in the policy and scientific circles in the United States have actually further strengthened the political polarization of the United States in recent years.
Why do Americans not trust scientists?
Lin Yao: Now many people ask why Americans don't trust scientists?
But if you ask, they will say, "Why should I trust scientists? When the epidemic first arrived in the United States in March last year, the head of the CDC said that you don't need to wear masks, because they think masks will prevent this kind of disease. The virus is not very useful, just wait for a vaccine, or stay at home.” If you go to the website of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after the last SARS epidemic, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention said that wearing a mask can Epidemic prevention, etc.
But around 2015 and 2016, I don’t know why this article was removed, and no reason was given for the removal.
But in fact, after SARS, scientists in East Asia did a lot of research, because SARS was mainly prevalent in East Asia at that time, and they found that masks can effectively reduce the spread of the epidemic.
This also reflects that the scientific community, especially American scientists, has neglected the achievements of East Asia for a long time.
Therefore, after the epidemic began in China in 2020, many Chinese Americans in the United States began to send masks to China, or they began to stock up on masks, but they were attacked by many racists in the United States.
As soon as they see someone wearing a mask, they say "you go back to Asia" and that sort of thing.
In April and May, people from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to say that "everyone should start wearing masks."
But the first round of information that you don't need to wear a mask has been accepted by many people, so they will feel that you are back on your word.
Then you say we're going to get vaccinated, or we're going to stay home, and so on, why should I believe you?
Coupled with the long-standing anti-science and anti-intellectual sentiments in the United States, a very powerful anti-vaccine movement has been set off.
So by the end of 2020, although the vaccine in the United States has begun to be produced, after a year of hard work, the number of people who have been vaccinated has not increased.
There are differences between regions. For example, Connecticut, where I lived before, is a so-called dark blue state, and a more progressive state has a higher proportion of vaccinations.
Going to a conservative state is about 50%, so the United States has never been able to achieve herd immunity through vaccination.
After missing the window, that is, after missing the delta variant, the current Omicron variant, only two shots of the vaccine are no longer enough, and it needs to be boosted.
Because the epidemic itself is a very complex phenomenon, it is related to the gathering of population in large cities in modern society, and the rapid spread and mutation of the virus is a unique challenge in modern society.
Well, for the challenge itself, the group of scientists is trying very hard to understand it and deal with it, but this requires a process, and mistakes will be made in the process.
But for ordinary people, he cannot understand that the scientific community can also make mistakes.
Liu Qing: It is a process of trial and error.
Lin Yao: Yes, in the past, it was the same in every country, thinking that scientists can solve problems and are the embodiment of justice and knowledge. How could they make mistakes?
So when you compare it with reality, it will make people doubly skeptical.
Liu Qing: We can continue to talk about the epidemic, but this is not our specialty.
We are standing in 2021, looking at the epidemic from the perspective of the future.
It is not only a problem of the epidemic, but also changes the way people communicate, as well as people's feelings about reality and expectations for the future, and the economy has also undergone many changes.
In fact, I feel that under such circumstances, in recent years, everyone has more or less uncertainty about the world.
First, because of globalization, our entire life has transcended locality.
When your life is affected by many variables, there are many changes.
Everyone is already in uncertainty, and the arrival of the epidemic has exacerbated this feeling.
In the midst of uncertainty, there is fear and dissatisfaction.
And its impact on people is not evenly distributed among all different populations. We know that in quite a few places, it has a greater impact on disadvantaged groups, such as those with lower economic income and education.
At this time, everyone will think about the current state of the world.
On the one hand, the epidemic is a cause of the current situation, but it also exposes the problems of the social structure itself before the epidemic, those problems that need to be solved.
It's just that the epidemic has exacerbated these problems, or it has exposed them more fully and sharply.
In this case, I feel that 2021 will have a tendency, or emotion, to imagine another possible world.
Is there a utopia to escape from?
Liu Qing: As far as I can imagine, for example, the reason why the Metaverse is so hot is that on the one hand, technology companies are promoting it. Some are driven by the development of technology.
Of course it also has other commercial interests, but it will mobilize ordinary people.
For example, the metaverse is not exactly the so-called virtual reality, a kind of VR, but it is particularly related to VR.
It builds on VR, which used to be a gamer thing.
Now a lot of people say: "The world is so bad, I can't even think about it. Then give me a different metaverse, an alternative, an alternative world, where can I live better and think about things? I will be successful, or I will stay there most of the time, and then when I have to go to the real physical world to solve some basic problems, maybe eat a meal, sleep. The sense of meaning I can get is mainly in the freer, A more creative metaverse." This is a very attractive and seductive idea.
I think the reason why the Metaverse has not only caused such a big repercussion in the scientific, business, and financial circles, but also attracted many ordinary people, they would say, "Huh? Do we have a utopia where we can escape?" It is an imagination of the future world, what do you think of this matter, Lin Yao?
Lin Yao: I think that's right. As you said, when reality makes people feel very lost and confused, everyone hopes to have a place to escape.
So when the epidemic first started in 2020, games like Animal Crossing became popular for a while.
As if social distancing, we can find that connection in the game.
But whether it can replace hugs in reality and face-to-face conversations in reality, I am quite confused myself.
When it comes to technology, I am a person with a conservative imagination, such as the Internet. I have always felt that since the rise of the Internet decades ago, and then the rise of social media, it seems that each time it can bring a lot of hope to everyone at the beginning, but Developments in reality often turn out to be the opposite of these hopes.
Liu Qing: They have high hopes.
These things are also two-sided.
Lin Yao: Hmm.
Because the tech company wants to profit from it, it wants to understand every aspect of your life through algorithms and data mining, and then sell your data to advertising agencies.
If a tech company can't make money, why should it engage in social media?
Why engage in the metaverse?
What did we give up in the process?
This may be something I think we all need to be constantly vigilant and thinking about.
Why is the concept of the metaverse exploded in 2021?
In fact, I think it has something to do with Facebook's antitrust investigation in the United States.
Because when Biden was campaigning, everyone knew that if Biden was elected, he would definitely appoint my young and promising buddy at Yale Law School, Lena Khan.
She graduated several years earlier than me, but she is actually much younger than me.
She is now in her early 30s and has been appointed chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States by Biden.
Why is she famous?
Because she wrote a paper when she was still a student at Yale Law School. Her famous book "Amazon's Monopoly Paradox" proposed that these modern companies emerging because of the Internet, from Amazon logistics companies to Facebook technology giants , their monopoly mode is different from that of traditional business groups.
So if she ever steps into politics, she'll have to approach the antitrust business from a whole new angle.
So when Biden was elected, big companies such as Facebook and Amazon immediately sent a large number of lawyers to challenge the court, asking the court to issue an injunction prohibiting Biden from appointing Lena Khan as chairman of the Trade Commission.
The reason they gave was that Lena Khan had a conflict of interest, she wrote essays criticizing these companies at such a young age, and she must have been biased when she took office.
Therefore, when faced with political pressure and anti-monopoly investigation pressure, these technology companies began to try to preemptive measures. For example, Facebook first changed its name to Metaverse, and then all assets or data could be transferred, and then the investigation would be split. shed its remaining empty shell, and it has already shed its shell.
At this time, the business of social media can also be slowly abandoned, because if the metaverse trend can be brought up, mining data, using algorithms, and handing over with advertisers can be carried out through another set of concepts.
At that time, if you change someone and then investigate the anti-monopoly, it will take more than ten years of lawsuits.
A metaverse utopia may be a fantasy
Lin Yao: So I think there are a lot of realistic profit calculations behind it.
I saw a picture on the Internet, with a strong metaphor, of Zuckerberg - the CEO of Facebook - walking among a group of people sitting in chairs, and he was walking there with a smug face, sitting Everyone there was wearing VR goggles, enjoying what game they were playing or looking at, only Zuckerberg was like the man behind The Matrix.
So I think that if the Metaverse is not properly regulated, it will become such a future - the data of every move of ordinary people will be further excavated, and technology companies will feed people such spiritual opium in a targeted manner.
In reality, you still have to wake up from the metaverse, you still have to go to work and work, and you have to go home and lie down, but you can't rest when you lie down, because you have to enter the metaverse.
Liu Qing: What is the definition of the metaverse now?
How many definitions are there?
There are many different sayings.
And especially the fanatical supporters of the Metaverse, they may say that Lin Yao does not understand the Metaverse at all. What he is talking about is not the Metaverse at all. The Metaverse is not the kind of investment from the previous company. virtual community.
Due to the blockchain, distributed computing, Bitcoin, and the current technological threshold, we can finally create a small metaverse community, a utopia that we like, which can be separated from the domination of big companies, because This threshold is getting lower and lower.
The imagination is still there.
But I'm thinking that the metaverse might be free to play when it's young, but when it's big it might have you included.
Because what the Metaverse invents is nothing more than various game rules for the entire community. In fact, it requires a lot of imagination, political philosophy, and the lowest level of building a community is something like a charter.
If you do it better and attract more people, those big metaverse communities, maybe companies will bribe them, recruit them, and they will still be strong in the end.
In addition, can the metaverse be like the beginning of the Internet, people will think that a kind of self-governing community, a life of real democratization of negotiation has arrived?
While we have seen some realizations, some social media or platforms, a considerable part of which has become like a garbage dump of discourse, the quality of the dialogue is very low, no quality at all, no real exchange of opinions, bickering, indifferent all have.
There may also be this duality in the future.
Of course since it's a new thing now, who's going to push it?
How to develop?
In what direction?
We can't tell yet.
There are some limitations that need to be paid attention to. As Lin Yao said just now, in fact, these big companies already have a very favorable position in this new thing, and they can occupy a position with sufficient advantages to manipulate and control all this.
In addition, the state will also have a very strong ability and possibility to intervene and intervene.
You think of the Metaverse as a fully autonomous utopian community, but it has many limitations.
You can still think about ideals, and you can still work hard.
But first, I just said that the entire business logic is there, the company has an advantage in technology and market share.
Second, the state is still very powerful, and if you want to be a completely decentralized community, even in a virtual world, it will definitely accept strong constraints.
Because: 1. The Metaverse also has its own "flesh", and the Metaverse must have a physical cornerstone.
It has to rely on the entire infrastructure of the Internet.
In any case, you have to go through the Internet, and people can't be connected that way by mysterious telepathy.
Second, you need at least a power supply.
Both of these things have to be organized in the real world.
Then, in the real world, the entire power government, legal and administrative system, and bureaucratic mechanism in the traditional sense all operate here, and all have to function, so the utopia of the metaverse may be an illusion.
But the part of realizing the game may not be particularly difficult. You can play all kinds of games, but whether it can become another world to resolve our current anxiety, depression, and frustration, at least a big question mark.
Translating Heidegger's Migrant Workers Is Valuable
Question: Some time ago there was a migrant worker named Chen Zhi, who even translated Heidegger.
This matter has actually caused a lot of discussion among our academic circles and scholars. I wonder what you two think about this matter. Is there anything you want to talk about?
Liu Qing: The "alienation of work" we are talking about means that work should become labor and the first need in our life, but we now feel that work is impossible--of course, it does not refer to all work, nor does it refer to large-scale jobs. All moments of partial work - but there are many jobs and many times when we feel that labor is just a means, a tool for earning a living.
How are we at this time?
Some people say that leisure is very important until this alienated labor is over.
Because leisure has opened a free territory for you, having free time to explore the possibility of freedom.
But now the situation is often that work has exhausted us physically and mentally. When I come back from get off work, I am not developing my love, but anesthetizing myself, such as drinking and doing very low-level entertainment to relax myself, such as watching fun videos, especially It's funny, it's very relaxing.
Some people say that things like the translation of poems by migrant workers are abnormal.
Not really, it's very valuable.
He may not have been able to translate particularly professionally, not necessarily at the level of publication.
He looks like an ordinary migrant worker, but he doesn't waste time indiscriminately. He cherishes his leisure time very much and uses it for intellectual development. He wants to become a better person, which is very touching.
If he spends a lot of time sleeping, joking with everyone, drinking and playing cards and wasting time, of course it's okay.
But he didn't, and in that sense, he was outstanding.
Lin Yao: This incident reminds me of the movie "Lion Boy" I just watched two days ago. I strongly recommend watching it if you haven't seen it.
What the movie is about is that the working child gave up his dream of lion dance for the sake of his livelihood, his family, and to help his father who was injured at work to pay medical bills.
The film finally gave a slightly brighter ending. The protagonist finally returned to participate in the lion dance competition and won the championship.
But after winning the championship, he realized his dream and still wanted to work.
If we don't have a good social safety net, many people will fall through the cracks of the network and struggle with the most basic livelihoods.
In fact, he has no leisure, no way to pursue these dreams.
It may be in the movie, or the media stumbled upon one or two shining characters and reported it.
In fact, this exception just proves the norm, right?
In fact, for many migrant workers, even if they can't read Heidegger, if you give them a basic living guarantee and opportunities, so that they can have more leisure time and give them more ways out, they can actually do a lot of things.
For example, "Rising Sun Masculine", which was popular for a while a few years ago, they also play musical instruments and sing.
Therefore, social policies need to give them more support.
finishing / rain station