Metaverse Hauntology

Daisy Alioto in conversation with Robin Schmidt.

In 2012, CityLab interviewed photographers about their drive to document abandoned spaces and buildings, also known as ruin porn. “It's romantic, it's nostalgic, it's wistful, it's provocative. It's about time, nature, mortality, disinvestment,” they concluded, citing the Renaissance painters that portrayed Greek ruins and Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris rapidly gentrifying under ​Napoleon III. 

A 2018 quote from a German tourist in Detroit Free Press shows a darker side of this attraction to abandonment: “I came specifically to Detroit for the ruins." That same year, the city’s poverty rate was around 30%. In 2024, the market forces that lead to vacant real estate aren’t limited to earth. 

According to PBS, “Humans have left a lot of junk on the Moon, including spacecraft remains like rocket boosters from over 50 crashed landings, nearly 100 bags of human waste and miscellaneous objects like a feather, golf balls and boots. It adds up to around 200 tons of our trash.”

And now, of course, we can see the beginning of ruins in virtual reality as well. I spoke to my friend Robin Schmidt, CEO of BasedAF, the “MTV of the Metaverse.” We talked about what happens when virtual building booms go bust, and how the only thing creepier than digital decay might be none at all.
— Daisy Alioto

Daisy Alioto: How much of the metaverse is actually developed?

Robin Schmidt: I think to answer that you have to come to a consensus on what the Metaverse actually is because I don't think anyone really has a solid idea of that yet.

DA: Do you have your own working definition?

RS: Yes—the Internet built by game developers. That's a decent catchall. I also think it recognises that inherently the foothills of the metaverse will be game worlds. Eventually, that becomes the QVC-like mess of modern social media but in the interim it can be a wild arena for experimentation and lots of wackiness. I also think that helps move it away from the architecture of it being this 3D space and more into just the manner by which it is experienced, using game logic and game theory to drive experience design. AI muddies the waters, but if a scaled up NPC experience is indistinguishable from a human one, then the dead malls analogy ceases to be relevant.

DA: How do parts of it end up getting built and then abandoned?

RS: Free market. Plain and simple. There's a surfeit of landmass in the metaverse—well it's infinite basically—and not enough developers to build on it so you end up with energy boiling up fast and then dying equally as fast. What I find so interesting is that unlike in the real world, digital ruins never actually decay. I was in a 1000-year-old castle yesterday up on a hill looking at all this graffiti carved in the rocks by 15th century a-holes and wondering what the digital version of that is. So you have these digital ruins that are permanently stuck in the present.

DA: It’s interesting because we always think of abandoned spaces as haunted by the past but it seems like these digital ones are more haunted by the present…

RS: Or worse…by their unintended future.

DA: Do you ever end up in one of those spaces by accident? Or is it fairly easy to avoid.

RS: Unlike the real world, there's not really a map to tell you where to go. You can't just find undiscovered countries. There are obviously metaverse-like worlds that sort of do do that and it's quite fun to explore Somnium for instance in VR and arrive on a place by random but it's always a sad experience somehow.

DA: What’s sad about it?

RS: You can feel the effort that people put into building something but nobody ever showed up. Unlike the real world there's no guarantee that anyone even saw it. I know that's true for a lot of internet content but somehow it feels more poignant when it's three dimensional.

Interview continues below

GET DIGITALLY DRESSED

DRAUP is a fashion house dressing your internet identities.

DRAUP is offering Dirt readers the opportunity to get digitally dressed in the TRASH TRENCH, a limited edition digital fashion piece inspired by TRASH.

Want to wear it? Simply sign up, and send us a picture. Our digital tailors will fit the garment to form. It’s free for everyone to wear before June 1st.

Our closet is your portal to the future.

DA: When we talked before, you mentioned the possibility that the “metaverse” could be populated primarily by AI agents rather than avatars that are inhabited by a human in real-time. Can you elaborate on that?

RS: Basically a company like Inworld that creates rich, nuanced AI characters could most likely in the future create a strong enough AI-populated metaverse experience that you wouldn't need real people to interact with. Then any world could feel built out and lived in without it needing the horsepower of real humans.

DA: That’s almost eerier than the abandoned builds

RS: Definitely, it's like the ultimate filter bubble.

If metaverse worlds are being sold as immersive then that implies insulation from external forces. That's already one step of removal. When you then add the ability to customize anything and everything entirely to your preferences that's the next step. Then you add AI's phenomenal ability to just lie its ass off about everything and it's a fait accompli.

It'll feel like theme parks for every and any niche or weird category you can imagine. And if you're an incel or an otaku or just a little bit weird and feeling disconnected from your immediate physical peer group then it's going to become really hard to return to the real world with all its disappointments.

I find it pretty tough to look at the way my kids consume media and entertainment and not feel very conflicted because my entire job and the way I work is designed to hook them and keep them invested in the screen and the stories experienced through those screens

I love storytelling, I think it's important and valuable and a treasured skill but it's also destructive and addictive and, these days, weaponised. The metaverse is a never ending story.

DA: I am thinking of this Mark Fisher quote. It’s about music but I think it also sort of relates to built environments in the metaverse, especially ones that are abandoned. That they don’t look like the future so much as a past idea of the future, and that this is exacerbated by the fact that they don’t decay: “The word ‘futuristic’ no longer has a connection with any future that anyone expects to happen… ‘futuristic’ in music is something like ‘gothic’ in fonts. It points to an existing set of associations.”

Maybe it is important for us to have ruins so that we can have truly new things as well. But I think if that’s true, a lot of technologists misunderstand that. 

RS: Oh god yes, absolutely. I think this is the weird territory that Westworld was investigating in its better episodes. If nothing decays we will never know if it had a reason to endure and be maintained. 🗑️