Arendt in the Metaverse: Four properties of eXtended Reality that imperil factual truth and democracy

Introduction

Building on her groundbreaking 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), Hannah Arendt’s political-theoretical work from the 1960s and early 1970s explored democratic freedom and what conditions might impede it. The rise of anti-democratic forces in Europe, Latin America, and the United States has led to a renewed interest in this part of Arendt’s work (Applebaum, 2022). These political developments are, according to some scholars, partially attributable to large, platform-operating technology companies (dubbed ‘gatekeepers’ by the European Commission (2023b)), and their strategies of individualization on, e.g. social media platforms. Such strategies, the scholars argue, enable the propagation and amplification of misinformation, distrust, division, and polarization (Farkas and Schou, 2019; Howard, 2020; Kubin and Von Sikorski, 2021). These ‘gatekeepers’ have now turned their attention toward the XR (eXtended Reality) and metaverse markets. In response to this recent industry turn, this article argues that when the current, financially incentivized individualization of users is applied to XR technology, it has severely detrimental effects on democracy because it blocks the emergence of what Arendt calls factual truth by disrupting the social co-construction of a common reality.

After an overview of the XR terminology used throughout the article, this main argument begins unfurling with the explication of two prerequisites for a functional democracy in Arendt’s theory: The co-constitution of a common reality and the factual truth that emerges from it. Moving toward an Arendtian analysis of XR technologies, I demonstrate Arendt’s relevance in this context by showing how the societal power held by the ‘gatekeepers’ and their platforms resemble the state and social powers she is concerned with. An overview of the ‘gatekeeper’ platforms’ initiatives in XR introduces the main argumentation, consisting of an analysis of four specific tenets of XR technology and metaverse content: hypertargeted personalization, false memory creation, reality indistinguishability, and predictive processing. For each of these properties, I show how they work to impede the co-construction of a common reality and a shared recognition of factual truth, which imperils democratic processes, according to Arendt.

XR terminology overview

As an umbrella term, XR (eXtended Reality) covers three media forms: augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). Though other definitions of these terms have been offered before (Milgram et al., 1995), there appears to be a consensus forming between users and the industry that the following definitions are valid: AR devices overlay a digital experience onto what seems like a direct, sensory experience to the user. For example, AR glasses resemble ordinary eyewear but can superimpose digital elements onto the reality that the user sees through the lenses. MR devices strive to achieve the same goal but use camera feeds that are treated digitally and shown on screens inside a headset rather than letting the user look at reality through eyewear lenses. MR can thus be seen as a solution to achieve AR-like experiences with currently available technology until AR glasses become sufficiently advanced. By contrast, VR devices produce an entirely separate reality into which the user enters as an avatar. To produce this effect, VR devices rely on separation and replacement, isolating the users’ senses to the widest possible extent and instead feeding digitally-produced content into the user’s sensory apparatus in place of any sensory input the user would experience without the device. Partially spurred by Facebook’s name change to Meta and the company’s pivot to XR, the use of the term metaverse (Stephenson, 1992) has spread widely and is used concurrently to denote an immersive virtual space accessible through VR, or an interoperable network of such spaces, which might also include MR and AR experiences (Ball, 2022).

Arendtian theory, common reality, and factual truth

In 1967, Arendt recounted the following anecdote about the World War I-era prime minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, in The New Yorker:

The anecdote serves as a fitting illustration of Arendt’s conception of truth: There are many forms of truth, and even the truth most closely linked to the historical record can rarely be discussed using absolutist terminology pregnant with certainty. Overall, Arendt was skeptical of modernity’s reliance on rationality as a mode of truth production. She accepts rational truth statements such as the ‘mathematical truth’ of the statement ‘The three angles of a triangle are equal to two angles of a square’ (Arendt, 1968: 240). What Arendt calls factual truth, however, is very different. Factual truth is established pluralistically, as it ‘is always related to other people’ and ‘exists only to the extent that it is spoken about’, making it, in Arendt’s conception, ‘political by nature’ (p. 238), that is, a product of human deliberation.

This is why Clemenceau, though he did so cautiously, could state a historical fact without consulting sources: German troops crossed into Belgium on August 4, 1914, and not the other way around. Multiple eyewitness accounts and much documentation support this factual truth, and it has been uncontested for so long that to convince the world’s population otherwise or change the historical record would ‘require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world’, as Arendt writes (1968: 239). However, she then provides a caveat that is crucial to the argument made in this article: ‘But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters’ (p. 239). Passing away in 1975, Arendt did not live to experience any power monopolies over the entire civilized world, and yet, knowing the nature of totalitarianism, she does not rule them out. Could the technology platforms of the 21st century constitute such power monopolies?

When society is platformized, the individual relinquishes power and control in an increasing number of areas to centralized platforms (Culpepper and Thelen, 2020; Van Dijck et al., 2018). This type of surrender of power to a central entity is also at the heart of Arendt’s democratic and political theory, which makes it an appropriate theoretical framework for the argument presented here. In Arendt’s work, the central entity in question is most often the state, but I will argue alongside Deleuze (1992), Zuboff (2019), and many other scholars that the power and influence of the platforms in question can be state-like in some areas. There are multiple parallels. Arendt describes a totalitarian regime as an ‘onion, in whose center, in a kind of empty space, the leader is located; whatever he does-whether he integrates the body politic as in an authoritarian hierarchy, or oppresses his subjects like a tyrant-he does it from within, and not from without or above’ (1968: 99). Hence, while a totalitarian regime can encompass authoritarian or tyrannical practices, these practices are adopted by the population through mass mobilization. Unlike in tyranny and authoritarianism, the population will tolerate or accept the presence of oppression in society and often participate in these oppressive practices. The individual becomes a part of one of the onion’s layers, seemingly acting in oppressive ways of their own free will but is, in practice, being coerced through means of propaganda, misinformation, and the terror of one’s reality not conforming to dictated ideological or social norms. Some scholars believe that the application of these very same mechanisms to dominant social media platforms and search engines helped enable the successful right-wing mobilization efforts in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Farkas and Schou, 2019; Howard, 2020), as well as the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol building (Clayton et al., 2021; Van Swol et al., 2022). Arendt writes that when media and other institutions are used to mobilize people around a totalitarian ideology, to create the layers of the metaphorical onion, ‘…ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a “truer” reality concealed behind all perceptible things’ (1973: 470–471). This corresponds to the widespread behavior identified by Suler (2015), where Internet users dissociate from reality in favor of their own (often solipsistic) construction of ‘reality’ as presented by Internet platforms. Till (2021) argues that propaganda efforts on social media exploiting such dissociation can destabilize perceptions of reality and be used to recruit users to further engender alternative, misinformation-based perceptions of reality useful to the propagandist. In other words, even before the emergence of XR, online platforms have been shown to facilitate individual dissociations from a common, shared world, arguably with less force than XR is capable of with its reality-altering approach.

Arendt describes analogous dissociations that impede the emergence of factual truth through deliberative communication per the Clemenceau example above. For Arendt, the breakdown of democracy begins with the disruption of the people’s ability to co-constitute a ‘common and commonly recognized reality’ (1968: 236), which I refer to in this article as common reality. Without agreeing on what is real, the people’s capacity for deliberative political interaction is inhibited, and they can no longer agree on what is factually true. This leaves factual truth open to be defined by a totalitarian movement or authoritarian political figures through, in Arendt’s terminology, substituting reality with an image. Fortunately, Arendt writes, we carry the antidote within us. Drawing on Aristotle, Arendt argues that a person should strive to become a ‘political being,’ thereby realizing the potential for at least two human capabilities: Judging and common sense. Arendt writes of the former that ‘the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability’ (1968: 221). Hence, judging is a political being’s capacity for inner, pluralist dialog, that is, the ability to make a judgment ‘not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present (p. 221). The ability to orient yourself as a political being ‘in the public realm, in the common world’ (p. 221) is what Arendt calls using common sense. The common sense is what enables a person to engage with their fellow humans in the co-construction of a common reality. Arendt uses Hegel’s reading of Plato’s cave allegory to show how powerfully the denial of communicative interaction inhibits the co-constitution of a common reality: A philosopher who has discovered the truth of an ‘objective’ reality of the world outside the cave cannot discuss this discovery with the cave-dwellers, as they do not understand his new perspective, and that same new perspective disables him from describing it in terms they understand. Arendt describes the philosopher as being ‘outside the political realm’ (1990: 100), having ‘lost the common sense needed to orient himself in a world common to all’ (p. 95). With this example held aloft, Arendt warns that the disruption of democracy has occurred ‘…when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them’ (1973: 474). This loss of contact causes humans to lose their ability to distinguish fictional realities (the aforementioned ‘image’) from a common reality shaped by factual truth: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist’ (p. 474).

Platforms and their power

From the vantage point of Western democracies in the 21^st century, which entities might possess the power to disrupt the discourse between humans in which a common reality can be co-constituted? Who might replace it with an ‘image’ or an ideological truth that is ‘truer’ than what individuals can observe themselves, per Arendt? A majority of people in the world now use platforms owned by the ‘gatekeepers’ and only a few other companies to communicate (GWI, 2023), of which several have a history of enabling the spread of political misinformation (Pickard, 2019). Those platforms appear to be capable of both the discourse disruption and the presentation of ideological truth in the place of factual truth. As Van Dijck et al. (2018) argue, ‘gatekeepers’ are ‘deeply penetrating every market and public sector of society’ partly because they wield ‘near-monopolistic powers over essential infrastructural services’ (2018: 147–148).

The power concentration of platforms with a history of enabling democratic disruptions has been a concern of democratic confederations such as the United States and the EU in recent years, leading to new legislative initiatives. According to the European Commission, ‘democracies around the world are facing a proliferation of false information, which may have the potential to destabilize their democratic institutions and undermine the trust of citizens’ (2021: sect. 7). In response to this threat, the EU implemented the Digital Services Act (DSA) in November 2022 as part of the larger European Democracy Action Plan, which seeks to ‘empower citizens and build more resilient democracies’ (2021: sect. (2) in part by gaining greater oversight and aligning VLOPs and ‘gatekeepers’ with EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation. As part of the implementation process, the European Commission named 17 VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms) that would be subject to special regulations and obligations under the DSA (European Commission, 2023a). The owners of the 17 VLOPs overlap substantially with seven corporations designated by the European Commission as ‘gatekeepers’ of the digital economy, ¹ that is, Samsung, Bytedance, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, and Amazon (European Commission, 2023b).

That some ‘gatekeepers’ possess powers that mimic those of nation-states is perhaps best exemplified by Meta. 3.01 billion people interacted with one of Meta’s social platforms daily in Q1 2023, with 3.81 billion using a Meta product once a month during the same period (Meta Platforms, Inc., 2023). Out of the world’s 8 billion people, only 5.3 billion people had access to the Internet in Q1 2023 (International Telecommunications Union, 2022). Excluding China and Russia, where Meta’s products were banned in Q1 2023, the number of possible Meta users in the world stands at 4.14 billion. In other words, trusting Meta’s own Q1 2023 usage statistics, 91% of all people in the world who were able to use Meta’s products did so at least once a month, and 72% did so once a day. If Hepp (2020) is correct that digital media now define our understanding of (and interactions with) the world, Meta’s global presence and influence certainly resemble a form of Arendt’s ‘power monopoly over the entire civilized world’ (1973: 439). Thus, it would not be an unfair characterization to describe Meta’s corporate power as being impossible to disentangle from social power and some powers traditionally attributed to governments in democratic systems, such as the facilitation of political deliberation and voter access to information. The same is the case for other ‘gatekeepers’, for example, Google’s semi-monopoly on information-seeking platforms and Apple and Google’s global duopoly on smartphone platforms. Following Arendt, it is ‘far from being inconceivable’ that the ‘fate of factual truth’ is tied to these global monopolies and their ‘power interests’ (1968: 239). As Farkas and Schou (2019) show, even a purely financial ‘power interest’ on the part of the ‘gatekeepers’ may become ideological by proxy if their revenue is tied to replacing a co-constituted common reality with ideology.

Main argument and analysis

Conclusion

In July 2023, the European Commission presented its official strategy towards the metaverse and virtual worlds (European Commission, 2023c). The strategy is, in part, informed by a citizen panel and a comprehensive report written by 15 academic scholars and industry experts (Hupont Torres et al., 2023). In their considerations of the challenges and potential harms of XR and the metaverse, none of these strategy statements and reports identify the main problem discussed here, i.e., XR-enabled disruption of deliberations between people due to the breakdown of a common reality. The expert report does consider centralization brought on by platform power concentration but focuses on how such centralization may impede interconnectedness and interoperability between platforms. The experts acknowledge that ‘Firms will still leverage data-driven network effects to lock-in or capture users’ (Hupont Torres et al., 2023: 64), but the report does not consider how individualization through micro-segmentation may provide the locked-in or captured user with XR experiences that are singular to that particular user.

Furthermore, neither the EU strategy nor the reports that inform it engage with the psychological issue of indistinguishability between AR content and reality outside the AR device. Concerns about misinformation voiced in the strategy indicate that the policymakers and researchers seem to believe that misinformation largely appears in XR as it does on social media. Adding digital objects to physical reality or altering the appearance of the world to a user with AR is generally not considered misinformation in the classic sense and is thus woefully understudied by scholars. But if factual truth is contingent on a co-constructed common reality per Arendt, then such directed misperception is also a form of deliberate misinformation, that is, disinformation. As I demonstrated through the analyses of the four XR properties above, and as shown by the empirical studies referenced, this disinformation is likely to have a stronger effect than, for example, social media misinformation because of the experiential-perceptual nature of the media involved.

This cannot reasonably be separated from the fact that the ‘gatekeepers’, who already facilitate most of the mediated communication in Western democracies and control the infrastructure enabling it, are pushing to dominate the XR market. If the multiple ‘gatekeeper’ executives referenced above are correct that AR glasses will eventually replace the smartphone as people’s main information technology device, then surely the ‘gatekeepers’ are likely to adopt the same revenue generation strategy as with smartphones: Incentivizing the individual to use their device as frequently as possible through ‘lock-in and capture,’ thereby becoming the main platform for information-seeking. The ‘gatekeepers’ and their VLOPs have pursued a strategy of individualization through micro-segmentation, both because it ensures a higher degree of ‘lock-in’ and because it increases potential advertising revenue. Why would their strategy be any different in XR? Above, I argue that this poses a significant risk of increased individualization in XR experiences, which, as empirical studies have shown, can impact reality outside XR. Arendt’s theory tells us that such mass individualization of reality perceptions is antithetical to democracy. Arendt also warns that when entities possessing massive social and economic power (like the ‘gatekeepers’) have an incentive to push a different reality ‘image’ or narrative than what people would otherwise experience (such as the economic incentive for the ‘gatekeepers), society has started to move toward totalitarianism.

The lack of attention to these issues among law- and policymakers (as demonstrated by the European Commission strategy) shows that the contribution made by this article is a significant one. Any regulator who is concerned about the democratic threat of mis-/disinformation must recognize the challenge of individualized reality misperceptions such as those made possible by AR glasses. To ensure that the issue is considered in future policy discussions, it is incumbent upon XR scholars to explore the issue further by, for example, expanding empirical studies beyond those referenced above. Furthermore, this article takes a high abstraction-level approach, and it is crucial that future studies consider how race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability interact with XR individualization effects and Arendt’s common reality concept overall. As such, the article is merely intended to provide a theoretical foundation upon which such future studies may build.