Culture as metaverse

Or the cultural logic of slop-italism

Over the past few years, I’ve grown deeply interested in the process of commodification and, more specifically, what it means when anything and everything can become subject to the logic of market exchange. My work on this point to date has often been somewhat speculative, and what follows is certainly no different (but, I hope, will nonetheless be interesting).

To the fair number of you who’ve subscribed recently, welcome. And to all those who’ve been kind enough to subscribe to one of the paid tiers, my deepest thanks. I’m going to be on vacation for roughly the next two weeks, but nonetheless plan to keep the lights on here with a few posts scheduled to publish while I enjoy some family time on Canada’s beautiful east coast. I’m also pleased to mention that I’m now quite deep into work on a new book which I’m excited to tell you all more about when circumstances permit.

For now, please enjoy this week’s paid post and see you on the other side.

-Luke

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In his book Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis advances the provocative — and fiercely contested — thesis that capitalism as we’ve known it has been overtaken by monopolistic tech platforms and is thus, effectively, dead. I haven’t read Varoufakis’s book yet, so am in no position to comment seriously on the ultimate correctness of his argument in its most radical form.

What I do believe is that we’re currently living through a profound transformation of both material and cultural life, and it’s the latter that primarily interests me here. Instinctively, I remain skeptical of the idea that 21st century tech monopolism constitutes a new mode of production distinct from the capitalist one. But I am increasingly of the view that a new kind of cultural production is beginning to predominate and that its implications are extremely radical.

Back in 2021, I wrote an essay for Jacobin in which I used The Simpsons to explore the uncanny way mass media consolidation is increasingly zombifying popular culture. I won’t belabour the argument here, but one thing that especially interested me was the peculiar phenomenon of real life entertainment monopolies becoming characters in their own movies and TV shows. From the essay:

On November 12, subscribers to Disney+ were treated to a five-minute short film billed as The Simpsons in Plusaversary as part of a “special event” designed to mark the streaming service’s two-year anniversary. If you’re a fan of the golden era of The Simpsons that roughly spanned its run during the mid-’90s, it’s positively nauseating to watch — the premise being a party at Moe’s Tavern where all of your favorite Disney characters-qua-properties have been invited.

After waiting in line, Homer, who has somehow been left off a guest list that includes Ant-Man, Thanos, and Jabba the Hutt, is admitted as Goofy’s plus one. The short subsequently offers up a string of crossover bits that must be seen to be believed: Darth Vader drinks a beer at the bar; Buzz Lightyear arm wrestles the Mandalorian; Barney performs the Heimlich maneuver on Donald Duck; Bart arrives as a hybrid version of himself and Mickey Mouse.

Plusaversary’s centerpiece, however, is a faux tongue-in-cheek advertainment ode to the streaming platform itself — sung by none other than Lisa Simpson — which, among other things, seems to invite viewers to invest in Disney stock.¹

What’s so fascinating about this scene is that there is no longer any separation to be had between The Simpsons as a fictional universe and The Simpsons as a cultural product. Narratively-speaking, its entire premise hangs on the fact that the real world Disney corporation now owns the IP, just as it owns all of the other IP seen inside Moe’s Tavern. The logic of commodity, in effect, has devoured everything else here — so much so that it is reflected, and quite literally voiced, by the characters themselves.

This is merely one example among many, and it isn’t even the most ridiculous. As I also notes in that 2021 essay, plenty of feature length movies now conform to same template:

In their most extreme form, some efforts in this vein even radiate a burlesque aura of quasi-ironic self-awareness…Space Jam: A New Legacy, to take [another] obvious example, replicates the NBA/Looney Tunes mashup pioneered by the original, but adds to it a plot that sees LeBron James navigating the Warner Brothers “Serververse” in order to defeat the designs of Don Cheadle’s “Al-G Rhythm” over its various cultural properties. As a result, characters from Game of Thrones, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, King Kong, The Iron Giant, Rick and Morty, Austin Powers, and Mortal Kombat all make appearances. There’s no fourth wall to be had in the movie, its parent company quite literally being another character, the antagonist being a sentient WB computer program, and the stakes consisting in the liberation of characters and fictional worlds who are, in the universe of the film itself, properties of a giant entertainment conglomerate.

It’s obviously the case that goofy mass entertainment products like these do not represent the totality of culture or even mass/popular culture. But, as the processes that generate them are further accelerated by AI, there’s no reason at all to assume the erosion of the border between narrative and commodity will remain confined to blockbuster entertainment.

The metaverse structure expresses the cultural logic of a world in which an ever-smaller number of profit-driven monopolistic conglomerates own and control an ever-greater share of intellectual property. And, much as economic and commercial life are being profoundly reshaped by monopolistic tech giants and their platforms, we must contemplate the possibility that cultural life will be steadily transformed into one giant metaverse in which the realms of fiction, fantasy, and even narrative as such are increasingly suffused and defined by the commodity form.

At this point, we can only speculate on what it would actually mean to have a culture that is at once heavily derivative in form and has largely outsourced to computer algorithms at the point of production. But, in an aesthetic sense anyway, we have already been given a partial picture through the burgeoning universe of what might be called slop.