01 November 21
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But now a lot will need to go exactly according to plan, an influential climate model suggests.
One year earlier, at the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the United States committed to reducing its emissions by 42 percent by 2030 if an international agreement could be reached. President Barack Obama left Copenhagen without such an agreement, and his first midterm election came and went without a climate bill. Since then, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have reached 415 parts per million for the first time in 3 million years. The last time there was this much carbon in the air, forests grew in Antarctica, the Greenland ice sheet did not exist, and sea levels were more than 50 feet higher than they are today. Our species did not yet walk the earth. The U.N. now describes climate change as “code red for humanity.” Heeding the scientists, the Biden administration has revised the Obama targets upward, setting a goal of reducing U.S. emissions by 50 to 52 percent compared to their domestic peak in 2005 by the end of this decade.
And right on cue, Manchin, now a senator, is once again taking aim at key climate policies moving through Congress. According to the New York Times, Manchin killed the Clean Electricity Performance Program, part of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which would have been the primary driver of emissions reductions from utilities. The Times reports that a proposed fee on methane emissions, which would reduce the concentration of a potent greenhouse gas with 84 times more short-term warming potential than carbon dioxide, is also in Manchin’s crosshairs. This leaves about $300 billion in tax incentives for clean energy to do most of the heavy lifting of decarbonization in the reconciliation bill.
That’s enough, according to some. The Rhodium Group, a research firm founded by former Obama administration officials, says that it is still possible for congressional legislation, federal regulations, state actions, and market forces in combination to cut emissions in half by 2030. Whether or not you and I find this plausible isn’t immediately relevant. It’s our only shot. What is relevant is whether the world leaders assembling for the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, this week find all of this believable enough that, like Biden and the majority of Democrats in Congress, they are willing to bet their political and economic fortunes on such a story coming true.
“Closing the emissions gap will be one of the most challenging things the US has ever attempted,” reads the recent report by the Rhodium Group, which has been read by key advisers in the White House as well as Senate and House leadership. “Putting this gap in context,” it continues, “that’s the same as zeroing out emissions from the entire state of Florida every year for the next nine years.” The American economy has only achieved those sorts of cuts twice in nonrecession years: 2012 and 2016, the report notes. A lot of things will need to go right if the nation responsible for the largest share of historic greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution is to rise to this challenge.
First, according to Rhodium’s model, Congress would need to pass the Build Back Better Act without Manchin or any other Democrat picking off further climate policies in the legislation. In addition to tax credits for wind and solar, Congress would need to keep incentives for an array of clean industries: electric vehicles, distressed nuclear plants, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen fuels, and upgrades to make buildings and homes more energy efficient. Lawmakers would also need to ensure that direct spending to support electric vehicle charging stations, rural electric cooperatives, building electrification, reclamation and remediation of abandoned oil wells and coal mines, soil conservation, and reforestation all remain in various parts of the Build Back Better Act and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act also being considered by Congress.
Second, Rhodium says that the executive branch will need to use every tool at its disposal to rein in emissions. Under Administrator Michael Regan, the Environmental Protection Agency will need to impose strong rules on power plants. This strategy echoes the approach taken by Obama, whose Clean Power Plan mandated that power plants reduce 2005 emissions levels by one-third by 2030. The Supreme Court stayed that regulation in 2016, though it was revived by a lower court earlier this year.
According to Rhodium’s analysis, the EPA would need to put the Clean Power Plan on steroids, reducing power plant emissions by 80 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2030 while also writing these new rules in such a way that the now 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court couldn’t stop or hold them up. On Friday, news broke that the Supreme Court would hear appeals from coal companies and Republican states challenging the EPA’s constitutional authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. Even if the courts don’t strike down such rules, actions to remand or delay implementation of regulations will only make it harder to cut emissions in half by 2030. If the Biden administration can pull this off, the president and his party would effectively become the lucky owners of the death certificate for American coal power.
Third, according to Rhodium’s study, states need to aggressively pursue policies to reduce pollution. The Rhodium report identifies nine policies the 25 states that are members of the U.S. Climate Alliance can pursue to this end. First among them is a clean electricity standard — the utility sector policy more recently called the Clean Electricity Performance Program in the Build Back Better Act. Other policies include aiming for all new vehicles sold to be zero emissions by 2035, laws to reduce car travel, as well as regulations to cut pollution and waste in the agricultural sector.
All of these measures would need to be significantly more ambitious than the ones passed by Congress, the idea being that, hopefully, green disruptors in deep-blue states like California can balance out gas-guzzling Luddites in red states like Texas, netting a Florida-size emissions reduction every year for the rest of the decade.
Fourth, and I’m reading between the lines of the Rhodium report a bit here, the invisible hand of the market will need to be a helping one. Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and other clean technologies will need to keep getting cheaper, outcompeting fossil fuels on cost. And it probably wouldn’t hurt if dirty energy, for one reason or other, also became more expensive. Here, larger government and corporate actors could help by using their purchasing power to increase demand and drive down costs of clean alternatives.
And when the law cannot compel large companies to reduce pollution, certain firms might help the climate, if not their bottom line, by doing so voluntarily. Google, for example, is aiming to run entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030. (To cite another example closer to my ideological vibe: More than 1,100 employees at McKinsey recently signed a letter calling on the elite consulting firm to disclose its clients’ emissions.) Automakers and buyers will also need to make the transition to electric vehicles quickly. According to the International Energy Agency, zero-emissions vehicles would need to account for 60 percent of new sales by the end of the decade as part of the global effort to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Research by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that based on current trends, electric vehicles will only account for 56 percent of new cars sold by 2050.
Finally, technologies to capture carbon pollution from power plants and factories as well as directly from the atmosphere will need to be deployed at scale. The Rhodium analysis assumes that carbon capture will grow at a rate comparable to utility scale solar in the 2010s and wind farms in the 2000s. According to an industry report, existing and under-construction projects to capture carbon had the capacity to store 40 million tons globally per year in 2019. By 2030, according to Rhodium, the U.S. alone will need to be able to store nine to 10 times that amount. It would not be hyperbolic to say that the atmospheric detritus of the Industrial Revolution will need to be cleaned up by a new one.
There are other steps Rhodium acknowledges policymakers could take that did not factor into the group’s model. First, according to the Build Back Better framework released by the White House on Thursday, the $150 billion that would have gone to the Clean Electricity Performance Program, before Manchin shot it down, will likely be redistributed to other important climate priorities, like clean energy transmission and storage and incentives for clean industries. If passed as proposed, those stopgaps would turn the loss of a linchpin policy from a painful defeat into a partial one. New procurement rules requiring the federal government to use its power as the single largest consumer of goods and services to buy low-carbon products could also help drive down costs in new green markets. More experimental approaches, like using Section 115 of the Clean Air Act to create a national cap-and-trade system, could also, at least theoretically, help — though as Rhodium notes, that is an untested idea, legally speaking.
In sum, a lot of stuff, beginning with the Build Back Better Act, will need to go according to an elaborate plan.
While this undoubtedly heroic effort to rapidly transition to clean energy will likely create more jobs than it destroys, in the economy that Biden, Democrats, and Rhodium envision, there won’t be many coal miners, oil workers, or even backyard mechanics of hoopties and hot rods. Manchin knows this. He made a fortune off coal, grossing $4.5 million from coal investments since taking office, according to an investigation by Type Investigations and the Intercept. In spite of that, or more likely because he has his finger on the pulse of the bituminous power at the heart of West Virginia’s cultural if not economic life, he won reelection as a Democrat in a state where President Donald Trump got nearly 70 percent of the vote in both 2016 and 2020.
Climate advocates better hope that elsewhere, maybe in places where the annual college football rivalry game isn’t called the “Friends of Coal Bowl” or in jurisdictions where the senior U.S. senator hasn’t gotten rich off the black stuff mined and pumped out of the earth, Manchin’s instincts aren’t just wrong. For all of this to work, the Democrat from West Virginia and politicians in his mold need to become a dying breed. And with 48 of 50 Senate Democrats seemingly prepared to pass Biden’s full climate agenda with few qualms, maybe he already is. “I’m totally out of sync with 48 other Democrats,” Manchin told attendees at a dinner party held at Cafe Milano, a restaurant in a tony Washington neighborhood popular among D.C. power brokers, this week. “I’m so, totally out of sync.”
Protesters take part in the Women's March and demonstrate against Texas's S.B. 8, a near total ban on abortion, in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 2, 2021. (photo: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty Images)
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Texas Abortion Law
Throughout U.S. history, lawmakers have given legal tools to private citizens to undermine constitutional rights
Texas’s law has been described as “unprecedented” and “inventive,” as if the state’s legislature had broken new ground by granting private citizens the legal power to stifle constitutional rights. But these labels miss important historical context: Throughout American history, laws have been enacted to license private parties to suppress the constitutional rights of others by filing a lawsuit and bringing the weight of the state to bear on rights-holders. Such measures have been repeatedly used to keep down subordinated groups. They are far from marginal and their sheer frequency suggests S.B. 8 is no outlier but an indication that our Constitution has an Achilles’ heel when it comes to individual rights.
S.B. 8 may tap into people’s desire to think they are vigilantes, boldly enforcing their morality in defiance of Supreme Court precedent. But vigilantes typically don’t rely on the legal system to achieve their goals (though local laws may shield them from punishment).
A more precise early historical analogue than vigilantism of the sort practiced by the Ku Klux Klan and its ilk would be the two infamous Fugitive Slave Acts passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850. These undercut Black citizens’ Fifth Amendment right to due process and the habeas corpus right to challenge government deprivations of liberty. Under these acts, enslavers could hire agents to search for people who had escaped to free states from slavery; they could then turn to the courts — or later to “commissioners,” appointed by federal judges — to condone the rendition back south of their “property.” (They could also turn to the courts as a first step before a seizure.) Unsurprisingly, these schemes resulted not just in formerly enslaved people but, notoriously, many free Black citizens being seized and transported to the plantation and the whip.
Even when these acts were passed, no one seriously disputed that free Black Americans had constitutional rights to liberty — and much of the contemporary opposition to the acts was couched in constitutional terms. Yet the procedures created by the Fugitive Slave Acts were purposefully designed to circumvent the liberties of even free Black citizens. Under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, for example, proceedings were ruthlessly compressed; an alleged enslaved person could not speak or testify on his or her behalf; a commissioner got $10 when finding for the owner but only $5 if he ruled for the alleged enslaved person; and there was no judicial oversight. It was an arrangement designed to elicit swift decisions in favor of the enslavers, circumventing constitutional protections.
S.B. 8 likewise stacks the deck in favor of the people filing lawsuits. Among other things, it does not require a plaintiff to prove the defendant intended to help someone obtain an abortion; it places critical burdens of proof on defendants; and it awards not just “damages” of at least $10,000 to a prevailing plaintiff, but costs and attorney’s fees, too. (Defendants, however, can’t get any costs or fees covered if they win). This farrago of biases creates a broad chilling effect even before a lawsuit is filed.
There are other historical parallels. After the Civil War, and the abolition of slavery, former enslavers turned to private tort and contract legal remedies to undercut the promises of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Southern states enacted a network of contract and tort laws to keep Black labor in its woeful antebellum place. Many agricultural employers, for instance, required free Black workers to sign annual contracts that tethered them to their fields. A Black laborer who violated a contract could be arrested at an employer’s behest and then sent back to the plantation. These contracts often made the workers responsible for the cost of rations and “lost time” due to sickness, an arrangement that would often leave workers in debt — at which point they would be obliged to keep working so as to service their new financial obligation. (In a variant on this pattern, White landowners often falsely accused Black agricultural workers of fraud, had them arrested, paid their fine, and then forced them to work off the ensuing “debt.”)
Echoing S.B. 8, these laws also targeted third parties as a means of cutting off Black citizens’ constitutional rights. “Enticement laws,” for instance, forbade other employers from bidding on Black labor, while “emigrant agent restrictions” imposed financial penalties on Northern employers who attempted to recruit in the South.
The 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, protected citizens’ right to vote from being “denied or abridged … on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Yet of course that was intolerable to many Southern Whites, who set about inventively thwarting that goal — through local law, violence and, importantly, by giving private White actors legal power to deny Black citizens the franchise.
Consider the approach of Texas Democrats. By the end of the 19th century, Texas was a one-party state, meaning victory in the primary translated directly into political power. In 1923, the state legislature barred Black Texans from voting in the Democratic primary. When the Supreme Court struck down this measure (and a successor law), the Texas State Democratic Party simply passed a resolution barring Blacks from membership. Because state law still mandated a primary, and Democrats predictably controlled the only one that counted, the party could leverage the law to effectively disenfranchise all Black voters. Initially, the Supreme Court deflected a constitutional challenge to this arrangement. It wasn’t until 1944 that the Court changed course and ruled that Blacks in Texas could not be robbed of their vote by that dodge.
In yet another instance of right suppression using private law, real estate contracts kept racial segregation alive long after it was ruled unconstitutional. In 1917, the Supreme Court issued a surprising decision invalidating Louisville’s zoning law mandating racial segregation, and placing racial zoning laws out of bounds nationally. Drawing on a model developed by the Chicago Real Estate Board, real estate agents responded by adding clauses to deeds barring the sale or rent of real properties to Blacks, Jews, Chinese people, Japanese people, Mexicans and other members of minority groups. These clauses were a way of turning contract law into a mechanism for nullifying the constitutional bar on state-sponsored segregation. Once again, the Supreme Court initially found no constitutional problem (in 1928), only to change course to invalidate such contracts in 1948. By then, of course, racial residential segregation was well entrenched in cities around the country, because of these restrictive covenants.
S.B. 8, this history suggests, is just the latest example of a practice with a long and ignominious history: Using the instrument of law to deprive others of rights while evading and thwarting constitutional review — and in particular harnessing the avarice and malice of private parties to stamp out others’ constitutional right. In many cases, such efforts have been successful — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. The Supreme Court’s response to such challenges has typically been muddled and delayed (in some cases because some or all of the justices are sympathetic to the suppressors of rights).
If history offers the sobering lesson that the legal system has time and again been used to encourage private parties to undermine constitutional rights, it also provides little comfort that Supreme Court justices can be relied upon to vigorously push back.
'2.9% of the workforce have quit their jobs in the past few months.' (photo: Keith Srakocic/AP)
This is a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment – which gives workers an upper hand. Let’s demand better hours, pay and work-life balance
In other words, we are living in what labor economist Lawrence Katz calls “a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment” – which gives workers a once-in-a-generation upper hand.
The potential of this cultural moment is not limited to the 2.9% of the workforce who have quit their jobs in the past few months. As CEOs scramble to maintain retention rates, those who have kept their jobs can express solidarity with resigning workers and contribute to the cultural shift by slowing the pace of productivity.
What I am proposing is not exactly a “slowdown”, but a “slow-up”.
Traditionally, a slowdown is a strike tactic in which workers remain on the job but slow productivity with the aim of negotiating for a particular objective, such as higher wages. In this sense, a slowdown is a highly localized and temporary effort.
By contrast, a slow-up must be unlocalized and permanent. It would entail a grassroots redefinition of workplace expectations – and frankly, it has been a long time coming.
In 2020, 80% of US workers reported feeling that they have too many things to do and not enough time to do them – a phenomenon known as time poverty. This isn’t just in our heads: a 2014 Gallup poll revealed that US workers clocked in an average of 47 hours a week, with more than 18% working over 60 hours a week. It would be naive to attribute these statistics to the industrious spirit of the American worker, considering that full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford an apartment in any state in the US without taking on another job.
It is no surprise that “speed up” and “slow down” evidence a cultural recognition that a fast pace moves you up the corporate ladder, while a slower pace leaves you behind. Instead, a slow up (intentionally rhymes with “glow up”) signals that slowing down can improve workers’ quality of life. The objective is not to drive down profits (though that may happen), but to uphold the ideal that everyone deserves a life of dignity, which includes rest and distance from work.
Undoubtedly, some will say that calling for a slow-up ignores the lived realities of workers or the racialized and gendered dynamics of the workplace, where people of color still have to work twice as hard to be recognized and women are still expected to do unpaid work. While such criticism is valuable, it also reaffirms the expectation that living a worthwhile life or getting a human amount of rest is a luxury afforded only to the privileged.
Moreover, such a critique intentionally ignores the work of Black activists and artists who explicitly call for a change in work rhythms. A 2019 art installation by Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, Black Power Naps/Siestas Negras, responds to the fact that 34% of Hispanics and 45% of Black US residents get less than seven hours of sleep a night. Similarly, Tricia Hersey, a performance artist known as the Nap Bishop, has convincingly argued since 2016 that rest is a necessary component of reparations.
So, while it is true that groups who bear the brunt of workplace disparities would be taking the biggest risks in a slow-up, it is also true that we would have the most to gain. We would be, effectively, stealing back our lives.
Although a slow-up is not a strike tactic, it does elicit many of the same concerns of a “prisoners’ dilemma” as workers’ strikes. Because our economic structure puts workers in continuous competition with each other, a worker who slows the pace could lose an opportunity, a promotion, or employment itself. The slow-up requires solidarity, flexibility and creativity.
Depending on the job and the worker, slowing up might mean responding to emails only three days a week, blocking out time for yourself before and after draining meetings, taking unofficial breaks, following work expectations to the letter of a company’s mission statement, or strategically engaging in untrackable forms of “time theft”.
Attending to a slower pace can also help us be vigilant against corporate attempts to rebrand fast-paced exploitation. CEOs are scrambling to create a “new normal” that mollifies workers’ desire for work-life balance while keeping existing power structures in play. While more than 70% of CEOs expect that the labor shortage will disrupt their business in the next 12 months, two of the main solutions they are implementing across the board – more flexible hours and increased diversity – fall short of the policy changes workers need, such as increased holidays and paid time off. It is not that flexible schedules or emphasis on diversity and inclusion are bad for workers, but rather that both of these retention strategies are easily subsumed into the traditional rat race.
Studies already show that more flexible hours lead to more work hours – specifically, 2.5 more hours of work a day. This is not to say that flexible hours cannot be beneficial, but that workers should preemptively find ways of slowing up to make the most of their new work dynamic.
Similarly, corporate-driven diversity efforts very quickly hit the limits of their potential, particularly given that most begin and end with “we should see more diversity in our employee base and … our leadership”. In the spirit of slow-up, we could ask: What would it mean, instead, if diversity, equity, and inclusion practices were worker-led and intended to explore labor practices that can grapple with rest as a necessary part of reparations and closing the sleep gap? What if inclusion examined the relationships that emerge from labor organizing? Or if “equity” (defined as fairness and justice in the way people are treated) responded to the many reports highlighting that the US remains an outlier in overwork?
As with any labor movement, the Great Resignation is a waiting game. The longer workers remain between jobs, the more their expenses go up – an important advantage to employers. Keeping those who quit their job afloat through mutual aid and pushing for generous paid time off and parental leave during this crucial time of workplace redefinition is also in the interest of our collective wellbeing.
Does this seem impossible? The truth is, you don’t have to be idealistic to participate in the slow-up. You only have to be imaginative. You only have to think about the meaningful things that could fill your day and imagine what it would feel like to work more slowly and feel more rested – and then strategically act as though that were already possible. In the words of Courtney Desiree Morris: “What if we attempted to live as free as the many-gendered daughters that are yet meant to arrive but we know are coming?”
A scene from the January 6th riots at the Capitol. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
"The Post investigation was based on interviews with 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings," the newspaper said in an introduction to the three-part series published on Monday. "The Post provided Trump a list of 37 findings reported as part of its investigation."
A Trump spokesman, Taylor Budowich, provided the outlet a statement. The Post said the statement was "a lengthy written response that included series of unrelated, inflammatory claims that The Post is not publishing in full."
The Post noted that Budowich said the former president “greatly objected” to all of the newspaper's findings, dismissing it as “fake news” and describing people who carried out violence at the Capitol that day as “agitators not associated with President Trump.”
The full statement the Post decided not to include also stated the 2020 presidential election was rigged, an assertion that has been widely debunked by government officials and office holders from both parties.
The Post's investigation examined the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 riot. It said Trump, his legal representatives and his political allies pushed misleading claims about electoral fraud that contributed to the events that day. It also looked at the extent to which law enforcement officials failed to adequately prepare for the attack on the Capitol.
Critics of the former president in Congress and in media have said his claims about a "rigged" election directly led to the violence on Jan. 6.
“The media’s obsession with the January 6th protest is a blatant attempt to overshadow a simple fact: there is no greater threat to America than leftist journalists and the Fake News, which has avoided a careful examination of the fraudulent 2020 election," a portion of the statement from Budowich that the Post did publish reads. "The media, just like the Democrats, do not want to see secure and honest elections. Instead of reporting the facts, outlets like the Washington Post sow division, hate, and lies, like it is doing with this story.”
Last week, The Wall Street Journal defended publishing a letter to the editor from Trump that alleged widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania, but called his claims “bananas.”
“The progressive parsons of the press are aflutter that we published a letter to the editor Thursday from former President Trump, objecting to our editorial pointing out that he lost Pennsylvania last year by 80,555 votes,” the Journal said. “We trust our readers to make up their own minds about his statement. And we think it’s news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas."
A poll conducted in June found one-third of Americans believe the election was not conducted fairly and a majority of Republicans have indicated in other polls they firmly stand behind Trump, with many saying they wish to see him run for president again.
“As for the media clerics, their attempts to censor Mr. Trump have done nothing to diminish his popularity," the Journal wrote in its defense. "Our advice would be to examine their own standards after they fell so easily for false Russian collusion claims. They’d have more credibility in refuting Mr. Trump’s."
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., speaks during the virtual Facebook Connect event where the company announced its rebranding as Meta on October 28, 2021. (photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Mark Zuckerberg’s turn toward the “metaverse” claims to put an extra digital layer on top of the real world. But Facebook’s new Meta brand isn’t augmenting your reality — it just wants to suck more money out of it.
On Thursday, Facebook changed its name to Meta, as part of a broader shift toward the so-called metaverse — a network of interconnected experiences partly accessed through virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) devices. In Zuckerberg’s own words, “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it.” The most recognizable examples of this in action are virtual office meetings with VR goggles, playing games in an expansive online universe, and accessing a digital layer on top of the real world through AR.
As owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the virtual reality firm Oculus, the holding company now known as Meta plans to create an interconnected world in which our work, life, and leisure all take place on its infrastructure — monetizing all aspects of our lives. For now, this is still the stuff of fantasy. Yet it’s also the fantasy of one of the most powerful men in the world — and for this reason, it deserves our attention.
In an influential essay, venture capitalist Matthew Ball writes, “the Metaverse will be a place in which proper empires are invested in and built, and where these richly capitalized businesses can fully own a customer, control APIs/data, unit economics, etc.” Which does sound a little creepy . . .
Meta is hoping that, by building hype around it, others will be encouraged to follow in developing the project. It’s like building a post office and a store and calling it a city. The hope is to get enough companies on board with its project that, soon enough, we will all be using it — whether we like it or not.
Headsets for Everyone
The metaverse is no bluff. It would be wrong to see it as a mere stunt concocted to shift attention away from the litany of crises facing the company. Nor is it simply a rebrand to give the firm a fresh coat of paint, in the manner of Philip Morris rebranding as Altria Group in 2003.
Zuckerberg’s company has invested heavily in VR hardware, and it wants to become the dominant player in the headset market. It’s betting that its line of VR headsets and AR glasses will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. There are estimates that the company has already sold five or six million VR headsets at a price of $300, which would total nearly $2 billion. But even this arm of the business isn’t yet making money; it has been reported that, with roughly ten thousand people working on VR devices, the company is losing between $5.4 billion and $6.4 billion in operating costs.
There’s a genuine risk that this could all just flop. Consumers have been slow to adopt VR technology, and in a few years, it might just be Zuckerberg, Facebook communications chief Nick Clegg, and the social media giant’s COO Sheryl Sandberg holding meetings in an otherwise empty metaverse. But Goldman Sachs has predicted that the VR and AR industry could reach a value of $80 billion a year by 2025, with a cumulative annual growth rate of 40 to 80 percent. By such forecasts, at least, the metaverse will be more than just meaningless PR spin to help Meta shift more goggles.
Your Life as a Service
Digital platforms create an environment in which our work, our social life, and our entertainment increasingly take place in digital contexts ready-made for monetization. The underlying idea of the metaverse is to expand the horizon of the appropriation of human life into every aspect of our existence. Meta wants to extend its reach from a mere global social network to become the digital infrastructure of everyday life.
In 2005, Zuckerberg imagined Facebook as “an online directory” that could be used “to look people up and find information about people.” Facebook was essentially a database of people that could be queried for information. But the company has also declared a social mission, which is supposedly all about transparency: Zuckerberg described how “all the added access to information and sharing would inevitably change big-world things.”
Over subsequent years, Facebook was no longer presented as a digital tool but as a way for people to connect, share experiences, and come together. Following the political upheavals of 2016, Zuckerberg started speaking of Facebook in epochal terms as providing the global communication infrastructure for a world-historical process: “This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness, and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism.”
On June 22, 2017, at the first ever Facebook Communities Summit, Zuckerberg announced a change to Facebook’s mission statement: from connecting people to building a global community. His pivot to the metaverse is the next logical step in this project. Back then, Zuckerberg spoke about providing the digital infrastructure of twenty-first-century community life through Facebook groups. This time, Meta wants to get a head start on its rivals in owning the next generation of infrastructure for the embodied internet.
The end goal for Meta is that it is no longer a service you use, but instead, the infrastructure upon which you live.
Meta Is in the Business of World-Building
Like water to fish, Meta wants to become the imperceptible medium that permeates our entire existence. It will no longer be a choice you make but rather the space within which choices are made available to you. In other words, it’s not the company sponsoring the event, it’s the stadium in which it’s held. The idea is that Meta will be a holding company in charge of a thriving ecosystem of interconnected products and services, all seamlessly integrated into a hybrid world able to effortlessly extract profit at every point in the system.
You could play games, download content, and sign up for services, and everything would be automatically deducted from your account. Banking and investment products would be integrated within the metaverse world so that a portion of your salary would be automatically transferred into this world’s currency.
Multiple companies would compete for slices of this world, but there would be an even stronger incentive to establish vertical and horizontal monopolies. Companies would place barriers against interoperable services — and it would be more convenient for customers to remain in one walled garden where everything was transferrable and connected.
The idea that platforms are neutral intermediaries facilitating transactions has always been misleading. But now, even this pretense would be a thing of the past, as metaverse companies would play a more active role in designing the digital architecture of virtual worlds. Even today’s digital platforms are complex social and economic environments that have been developed through decades of research into social psychology. But in these new worlds, tech barons will establish the rules and create vast systems to nudge users toward behavior that is profitable for the company.
Metaverse Capitalism
The most lucrative businesses under digital capitalism were essentially advertising companies. Apple did still get away with selling high-end consumer products. But Google and Facebook’s surveillance-capitalism business model instead sought to offer people free services in exchange for their data, which would then be analyzed and sold.
Metaverse capitalism will see big tech firms shifting more toward hardware and infrastructure, as owning the framework within which other services can be offered becomes more valuable. This isn’t just about collecting data, it’s about owning the servers and the digital worlds. We have already seen Big Tech starting to spend big on undersea internet cables and data centers to reduce data transportation costs. Alphabet and Amazon have each spent close to $100 billion investing in infrastructure and other fixed-value assets. Increasingly, the idea of tech firms as lean business models following in the footsteps of Nike and other major outsourcing companies is becoming outdated.
A second core change is a diversification of revenue sources and a decentering of the role of data and advertising. In the first quarter of 2021, 97.2 percent of Facebook’s total revenue was generated through its advertising business. The metaverse presents a broader range of revenue streams, from the hardware on which it operates to the games, services, and content within it. Meta can start offering subscription-based content; it can sell virtual property and experiences; and it can charge other companies for access to its world. The data-to-advertising funnel will still exist, but it will be part of a larger portfolio of assets.
Platform companies that have offered a single service will now be more likely to branch out into offering a range of services within a connected world. How the metaverse will be divided up between competing tech companies remains to be seen. It’s hard to imagine that Meta will be willing to let its competitors set up shop in their part of the metaverse or compete with them on equal terms. But others will likely be keen to invest if there are signs that the hardware starts to pay off.
Large investments in VR and AR technology will also create a greater need for precarious and poorly paid “microworkers” to train the algorithms. The engine of the metaverse will be the physical and very real world of exploitative labor — predominantly of workers in the Global South. As Phil Jones has recently argued in Work Without the Worker, the “hidden abode of automation” is actually “a globally dispersed complex of refugees, slum dwellers, and casualties of occupations, compelled through immiseration, or else law, to power the machine learning of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.”
Corporate Overkill
Will the metaverse be built responsibly? Of course not. Rather, it will be built in whichever way appears most profitable to Meta. Any problems that emerge will be dealt with as PR issues along the way while the company prints money at record pace. Who cares about the hand-wringing of a few legislators when you own not only the digital infrastructure of this world but the whole metaverse?
Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” is a world in which users move seamlessly from one corporate-owned environment to another. Facebook’s founder has assured the public that this latest wheeze will be built responsibly and in partnership with others. But in light of the avalanche of evidence of wrongdoing uncovered by whistleblower Frances Haugen, it’s hard to believe that even Zuckerberg’s closest allies believe the spin.
A demonstration in Colombia. (photo: CNN)
Three bodies shot in the extremities and face were found in the El Carmen municipality in the Norte de Santander department.
The victims were taken from their homes to the border area of the Caracoli and El Carmen, where they were killed by armed men.
The corpses were found on Saturday in a wooded sector. They had been shot in the face and extremities.
The victims have not been identified so far due to the presence of illegal armed groups in the area.
It is the 82nd massacre to be registered in the South American country so far this year, according to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz).
There has been a territorial dispute over activities among illegal organizations operating in the region.
Local authorities maintain operations to stop the advance of armed groups, such as the National Liberation Army (ELN), drug trafficking groups, and the Dissidence.
UN secretary-general António Guterres delivers a speech during the opening ceremony of the UN Climate Change Conference. (photo: Getty Images)
World leaders gathered at an international climate summit in Glasgow on Monday to discuss how to avert climate catastrophe.
“We face a choice: Either we stop it or it stops us,” Guterres continued. “And it’s time to say enough — enough of brutalizing biodiversity, enough of killing ourselves with carbon, enough of treating nature like a toilet, enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”
The secretary-general’s fiery speech comes as countries struggle with the climate disasters fueled by the more than 1 degree Celsius (roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming that has already occurred since the late 1880s. This warming, scientists agree, is the direct result of humankind burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The Earth is on track to get much hotter, too. Even though practically every country previously agreed to limit future warming to less than a total of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), back when they signed the Paris climate agreement in 2016, they are now far off track. Various analyses of current country-level climate policies and pledges to do more in the future show the world is instead on track to warm about 3 degrees Celsius, which would be disastrous.
Guterres underscored this sobering reality in his recent speech, warning world leaders that this international climate summit is their best chance to turn things around and that people’s lives are literally on the line.
“Recent climate action announcements might give the impression we are on track to turn things around. This is an illusion,” Guterres said, later adding, “And even if the recent pledges were clear and credible, and there are serious questions about some of them, we are still careening towards climate catastrophe.”
“Young people know it,” he said. “Every country sees it. Small island developing states, and other vulnerable ones, live it. And for them, failure is not an option. Failure is a death sentence.”
The only way forward, Guterres argued, is to more drastically cut greenhouse gases, to end subsidies for fossil fuels, to phase out coal, and to invest in a low-carbon economy.
"If commitments fall short by the end of this COP,” he said, “countries must revisit their national climate plans and policies not every five years — every year, every moment until 1.5 degrees is assured.”
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