I happen to live near what may be the best bureau of motor vehicles in the United States, which is not saying much, for me or for the institution. But because other DMVs leave so much to be desired, and I usually approach them expecting the dehumanizing experience that has met me so consistently at other DMVs, I tend to leave this one floating on air and congratulating the employees on their excellent workplace.
What leads to this buoyant mood is the logical flow of the space. When you enter you are greeted by a pleasant greeter standing behind a counter, who is intended to keep you in the lobby of the building if you can do what you came for at one of the self-service kiosks in that lobby. This is frequently true, and even when there are no greeters and the main branch is not open, the kiosks stay open 24 hours so that you can renew your watercraft registration at 2:30 am if the need arises.
If you are like me and showing up with a duplicate title for the car you bought in another state because your credit union lost the original (title, not car; bought the car, not the title; I cannot be bothered to explain this situation one more time), your task is sufficiently complex to merit the attention of the row of professionals. You enter the main room and take a number, and then someone waves you over. You quickly finish your business and walk out having never once been disoriented.
This is largely the case because of the clear use of space—a space that ushers you along—and defined goals made possible by that space. By the time you arrive at a DMV, you really do have to be there for some reason, and the physical arrangement of this space makes it possible for you to achieve your goals. My DMV stands out in particular because normally when one visits such a place one is setting logic aside: you could be there for three minutes or three hours, you may or may not have the right documents, and it is unclear where to go or what to do. By setting aside all these problems, designing a space that works well in a specified and limited logic, my DMV succeeds.
Victorian houses also have a certain spatial logic. Currently I live in a house that dates from 1900, which seems like it was a more logical time. In a Victorian house, the kitchen has usually been added on or built in since its earliest years and is unpleasant to be in, so people do not gather in it when you throw large parties—they go to the dining room and the living room, which are for dining and living in, and you can cook in the kitchen undisturbed. This division of labor adds order to a dinner party, and to everyday life when you want to leave all the dinner party’s dishes in the sink.
Upstairs in my house, there are three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a hallway. Downstairs, there are six rooms, each with a specific purpose: a library, a bathroom, a dining room, the aforesaid kitchen, a living room, and a work room where I spend hours on end sitting in the chair where I am currently writing this piece. When I step into my house, it ushers me along with the same kind of confidence and decision that the DMV does. You’re tired; go sit on the couch. You’re hungry; rummage through the fridge. There is a plant wilting; water the plant. My house presents me with affordances that are both limited and sorted. You can approach it with goals and carry those goals out.
A Victorian house, like my cheese grater, encourages doing one thing at a time: work in the work room, dine in the dining room. It gives your days a certain directedness that is missing from the palatial open-floor-plan homes of the rich and famous that you can see on Netflix. I prefer mine: when you can be doing anything anywhere, it’s difficult to do anything in particular.
In an interview with Joe Rogan last week that was well-publicized for very different reasons, Mark Zuckerberg presented an enthusiastic vision of his new “metaverse.” In the metaverse, said Zuckerberg, you could live anywhere you wanted, because you didn’t need to live close to your work and you didn’t need to live close to your family: “hopefully you’ll just be able to teleport in and basically just show up as a hologram and work remotely and live wherever you want, be with your family wherever they live, but just be able to show up in whatever place—I think that that’s gonna be pretty awesome, and I think that we’ll be able to do that pretty well.”
Now, to be fair, I think he partly meant that one could live closer to family if one did not need to be as close to work. But he didn’t say that—he said you could be with your family wherever they live, not where you live. Where, then, do you live?
Maybe you don’t live anywhere: you spend your life just ready to “show up in whatever place.” In the logical extreme of the metaverse, there is no need to be anywhere. In this way, the metaverse is the opposite of my DMV and my house. The DMV and my house offer you direction. The metaverse seems to be designed in part to take that direction away.
Videos that have been posted of people experiencing the metaverse through their at-home virtual headsets and Meta’s program Horizon Worlds show legless torsos floating aimlessly, moving erratically, and staring into space. Directional conversations are not quite working yet. The experience is somewhat lawless. (Many of the participants in the metaverse are underage, despite the “rule” that one must be 18 or older to participate.) When viewing footage, it’s difficult to tell from visual cues whether the floating legless torsos are attempting to participate in conversations, zoning out, or trying to accomplish some sort of in-game goals. Especially at this early stage of Horizon Worlds, it seems that most people are just, well, being there.
And being there, in Zuckerberg’s metaverse, is being nowhere. It’s laughable now, because the technology isn’t working well, but in an ideal world where the technology works, the aimlessness people experience in the metaverse would be contagious. The total disorientation of a legless avatar could be experienced in what Zuckerberg and others are increasingly insisting that we call “the physical world,” previously known as the real world.
In a fully-functional metaverse, you don’t even need the DMV, because you don’t need to live or get to anywhere at all. In fact, I’m not sure where you might decide to live except close to the grocery store—though maybe you wouldn’t even need to worry about that now that Walmart has started flying drones.
Much ink was spilled a few years ago about the moving-ness of modern American life, at least in relation to Europeans. As this piece from The Atlantic pointed out in 2016, “the national mythos” of America includes moving: not only in the 1980s movies that the piece cites, but also in the Oregon Trail, the Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark. Almost every American has some story of the journey by which their family got to where they are now.
The expectations of most Americans coming of age in the aughts and 2010s probably involved moving for a job. This is the script of modern American life: you move to where you can be best paid. You move for new possibilities, romantic or cultural or professional. You move to reinvent yourself or to experience new things. For better or for worse, America still has deep cultural memories of being the land of opportunity.
But this drive for movement also lends a transitory quality to our days and our lives. Americans have suffered, culturally and personally, from the lack of what Wendell Berry called “the place that you belong to,” lacking communities with permanence and shared values. Perhaps for these reasons among others, the rate of Americans moving has been on the decline.
So, if the metaverse succeeds, where do you live, where do you go, when you can experience anything anywhere at any time? The prospect brings the American-dream ethos to the brink of an abyss: there is no reason to be here, there, or anywhere else. You are in a totally directionless space. Even now you can achieve your goals from your couch, without walking across the room, let alone moving across the country. Perhaps this leads to endless, frenetic wandering. Perhaps at that point America despairs.
But there is another possibility. The best-case scenario for the metaverse may be that it encourages Americans to stay where they are—and when they become bored of viewing the Sistine Chapel or playing virtual poker, they go outside to see whether anyone is nearby to share with.
Come back next Friday: to find out how bullet journaling is like the Divine Comedy.
In honor of: Taylor’s “Midnights” album announcement, here’s a podcast episode from Switched on Pop on “the oeuvre of Taylor Swift.”
Shout out to: my 6 new subscribers this week, especially Danny Rognlie of Rognlie and Incorrectly, and a special shout out to the Washington Review of Books, which Substack informs me generated 4 subscriptions this week. I don’t know what that means, WRB, but please continue. Welcome to everyone here for the first time!
You, like WRB, can spread the word: by sharing this post with your friend who always gets to the DMV before it opens.