# Spinoza's Metaverse By [Kevin Werbach](https://paragraph.com/@kwerb) · 2022-01-23 --- ![ A metaphysician for the metaverse?](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/fada787c70fdd63388281335a8cee64f66dada6cf252efa2394c647442ca68d9.png) A metaphysician for the metaverse? Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century rationalist philosopher, seems an unlikely candidate to explain one of the hottest technology trends of the 2020s. Spinoza is known for many things—his [bold criticism](https://newrepublic.com/article/103063/book-forged-hell-spinoza-treatise-steven-nadler) of religious dogma, his [contributions to the Enlightenment](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/books/review/18bloom.html), his conflation of “God or nature,” and his [prescient description](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/books/chapters/looking-for-spinoza.html) of human emotions. However, though he contributed to an important technology of his age by grinding lenses for telescopes, his philosophy appears to have little relevance to the great technological constructs of our era. In a way, however, Spinoza is a patron saint of the internet. His metaphysics provides us with a language to describe the metaverse, which has made a sudden leap from science fiction trope to brand marketing imperative and digital platform battleground through the miraculous intervention of Mark Zuckerberg. Many people find the concept of the metaverse frustratingly confusing. It has burst on the scene as, we are told, an inevitable future that will change the way we work, interact, and live. Venture capitalists are deploying huge sums around metaverse investment theses, while the great tech titans declare their commitments. Yet what, exactly, is it? A game? Virtual reality? Immersive social media? A bastard child of all three? And what do cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens have to do with it? It’s much easier to [slap the word metaverse on something](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-18/microsoft-to-buy-activision-blizzard-in-69-billion-gaming-deal) than to explain what actually makes it so. One can be forgiven for viewing the metaverse as merely the latest empty meme to emerge from the Silicon Valley VC/PR/influencer complex and saturate our consciousness. That would be a mistake. The metaverse is overhyped, and often poorly described. Big companies are pouring marketing and staffing resources into it for selfish reasons of their own. The metaverse is neither inevitable nor entirely positive for humanity. Yet it’s real, and a big deal. > **Understanding the potential futures of the metaverse helps us conceptualize the present of the internet.** The key is to recognize the distinction between substance, mode, and attribute, concepts which happen to lie at the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Among Spinoza’s greatest contributions was to remove God from His place at the center of pre-modern conceptions of the world. Spinoza did not just declare God dead, as Nietzsche later did. He dismissed the entire concept of God as understood in any Western religious tradition. Yet at the same time, the poet Novalis was right to describe him, famously, as a “God-intoxicated man.” The bulk of _The Ethics_, Spinoza’s magnum opus, and especially its early sections, are entirely about God. Yet Spinoza’s God is notoriously obscure. In the words of [Albert Einstein](http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/spinoza.html), Spinoza described a God, “who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not \[one\] who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.…” Spinoza’s God has no form, no consciousness, no will, no morality, and no power. Instead, adopting a term from Aristotle and Maimonides, Spinoza describes God as “**substance**.” Substance for Spinoza is that which is “in itself and conceived through itself.” There is but one substance, and nothing but substance, for anything else would cabin this ultimate self-determination. Substance is a kind of metaphysical cosmic background radiation, always there and everywhere. Yet even though we—and everything we experience—are all, by definition, comprised in substance, the universe is more than undifferentiated white noise. That is where Spinoza’s two other categories come into play. “[**Modes**](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza-modal/)” are particular characteristics of substance, such as thought and extension (corporeal being). Unlike substance, they are not self-contained. They can only be conceived through something else, which is substance. Modes allow substance to have distinct and necessary manifestations, while still being essentially unlimited and undifferentiated. Finally, “[**attributes**](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza-attributes/)” are ways to understand the essence of substance. God—or nature—may be beyond comprehension; attributes are the imperfect efforts we are bound to make nonetheless. (This brief summary is not meant as a scholarly analysis. Philosophers still argue about what Spinoza meant by his three terms, and how they relate to one another.) > Now, three and a half centuries later, **substitute Internet for God.** Though some have [equated the internet](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/teilhard/) with the spiritual global consciousness that the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard called the noosphere, I make no religious claim here. The Internet—the capitalization here is intentional—[occupies a similar role](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/026327640602300241?casa_token=iqAgfcKh_KsAAAAA:vhlo2wrE-Np3YpFYKvUTgU5zHQqqXf34n8wNqdR-nYOWDRj4h8sbeDF8UFCm4dzR7uQW1_ix5abSsw) in our contemporary communications, informational, and commercial universe as God does in Spinoza’s larger universe. It is substance. Not fully in the universal sense of Spinoza’s God, of course. We can conceive of things independent of the Internet. However, the Internet occupies a place in the ontology of the digital world that God does in the world of reality. It effectively connects everything that matters. It has no center, no manager, no personality, and yet everything else can only be described through it. The Internet-as-substance must, however, be understood in terms of modes and attributes. One mode is the internet (lower case), a network of interconnected computer networks employing protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP, DNS, and BGP and a complex array of hardware, software, and networking equipment. That physical connectivity _is_ the Internet, but [not its only mode.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310020) The Internet also manifests as a global communications environment often described as cyberspace; as a foundation for applications and interfaces such as the World Wide Web (which itself is a foundation for other activity); and as the soil in which grew the great economic platforms of Big Tech. Similarly, the Internet admits of infinite attributes: Is is the information superhighway, a global shopping mall, the [new home of Mind](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence), a sphere of geopolitical conflict, and far more. > Now at last we come to the metaverse. **The metaverse is a mode of the Internet**. When we talk of the metaverse, we emphasize a certain dimension: social, immersive, persistent, possessive, experiential. Unlike internet-as-physical-connectivity, this mode does not admit of a single descriptive vector. Immersive comes closest, but leaves out a great deal. One reason the metaverse is so hard to define is this “know it when you see it” uncertainty. Games are [similarly difficult to pin down](https://www-jstor-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/stable/40231265) as a category, but we’re sufficiently familiar with them that we typically don’t notice. Describing the metaverse as a mode has important implications. The metaverse _is_ the internet, and necessarily so. Yet it is not identical to the internet. Nor is it the “next internet” or, using the idiom of the day, “Web3.” Despite our enchantment with the new and penchant for versioning, everything in technology isn’t sequential. It’s far easier to slap a numbered label on a development that succeeds as a marketing exercise than to defend it in a serious way. Which is not to say the state of technological development doesn’t matter. We could describe the metaverse in the past, but we couldn’t realistically talk about building it. It is a mode that is only important within a particular technical context, which may or may not be just around the corner. Without the requisite computing horsepower, interfaces, and devices, the metaverse shrinks to a collection of uninspiring corporate promotional videos. (The grand realization was still quite imaginable before, which explains its prevalence in science fiction.) While the metaverse is a mode, we understand it through attributes. These attributes represent conceptual templates that shape our perspectives, and in their finite form, particular examplars such as Meta’s Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, or Roblox. They are different, perhaps at times conflicting, yet not mutually exclusive. The metaverse is hard to understand not only because it is a mode with multiple descriptors, but also because it admits of attributes that lead in different directions. This is where Spinoza’s concepts can help. People conceive of the metaverse in different ways because people’s minds are different, and our minds are good at latching onto associative frameworks. Like the famous elephant confounding the blind observers, we must appreciate the phenomenon at different levels of generality. > **Four important attributes of the metaverse are online communities, video games, virtual reality, and digital assets.** Each has a history an a language of its own; the metaverse is the point where they intersect. It is each of them as well as the union of all. * Online communities—from Usenet to multi-user dungeons (MUDs) to the Well to Reddit to social networks—are the tree from which grew the Facebook/Meta version of the metaverse. Social online spaces, increasingly rich and increasingly interconnected, have always been a part of what made the Internet so significant. The metaverse is resolutely social; it is space through which people will live, work, and play together. * Video games have been around for nearly five decades, and are a massive global phenomenon. They generate more money, have more cultural impact, and attract more time commitment than movies, music, or other more familiar media. Yet they remain under-appreciated and too-frequently dismissed as nothing more than a waste of time. The metaverse inherits all the engagement power and whimsy of games, but also their difficulties and dangers. * Virtual reality has a similarly long, yet troubled history. Immersive technologies involving goggles, gloves, screens, and other gear have gone through cycle after cycle of excitement and disappointment. A parallel timeline of [ubiquitous computing](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~djp3/classes/2012_09_INF241/papers/Weiser-Computer21Century-SciAm.pdf) and augmented reality has played out with less over-the-top hype. The metaverse brings them together. It is not reality, but it is realistic in a way that pure games are not. Realism means more than fidelity in rendering pixels; it also means activities that are more than games, such as work and commerce. * Digital assets are the most recent attributes of the metaverse to develop. While the idea has a long history, the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 provided a working example at sufficient scale to matter. Cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have since exploded into a vast chaotic amalgam of worldwide activity. Virtual assets matter for the metaverse because they have ownership cryptographically secured to a distributed ledger, and can embed software code that executes on that ledger. Money, property, and contractual arrangements supercharged the development of human civilization, while also giving birth to many of its pathologies; digital assets will do the same for the metaverse. The metaverse does not reduce to any of these attributes. They have various points of overlap, while remaining distinct ways of understanding what might be happening. There are certainly other attributes; infinitely many. Most, however, are not useful, at least now. The attributes of the metaverse that matter are the ones that can serve as lenses for evaluation or prediction. > **To conceptualize the metaverse is not to understand it, let alone to evaluate claims about its importance and trajectory. But it’s a start.** The book in which Spinoza worked through his framework of substance, mode, and attributes was called _The Ethics_. It was intended as a manual for how to live. We can only determine how best to live in the world if we perceive that world accurately. For Spinoza, that effort necessarily started with God, or nature, or substance. In the more limited context I am proposing by analogy for the metaverse, it starts with a similar ontological exercise of mapping and conceptualizing. The next step is asking how we should act in relation to those concepts. For the metaverse, that is more prosaic than the ethical inquiry Spinoza pursued. We must evaluate factual claims, observe current developments, make decisions about deployment of capital or time, and give appropriate consideration to uncertainties and dangers. We have a great deal of work to do, as much in the realms of law, regulation, ethics, and governance as in market development. By describing the metaverse in the same breath as Spinoza’s God, I make no judgment about its ultimate significance. Maybe the Facebook/Meta-fanned era of the metaverse will fade away as quickly as the virtual worlds hype wave a decade or so earlier, typified by Second Life, or the earlier failed eruptions of virtual reality excitement. Squint, though, and you will find elements of those earlier failures in today’s transformative successes. It is important for us to understand the metaverse even if we do not entirely believe story we are now being told. Spinoza’s apparatus can help. Spinoza was a radical monist: he rejected Descartes’ distinction between mind and body, a line between religion and science, or any other attempt to limit substance. The scientific enterprise of breaking the complex down into its constituent parts, and then breaking them down into still-simpler components, is ill-suited to an idea as all-encompassing as the metaverse. Only after we step back and consider the whole clearly can we step forward again. --- *Originally published on [Kevin Werbach](https://paragraph.com/@kwerb/spinoza-s-metaverse)*