We’re Already Living in the Metaverse

Reality is blurred, boredom is intolerable, and everything is entertainment, Megan Garber wrote in the March 2023 issue.

Amid all the speculation about the sources of President Joe Biden’s unpopularity, “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse” provides an explanation: Perhaps he is just unforgivably boring. His show lacks entertainment value; it can’t hold the attention of its audience, those people we used to call “citizens.”

David Ogden Maxwell
Washington, D.C.

Megan Garber perfectly described one of the foundational problems underlying my frustration as a health-care provider: “Healthertainment”—everything from Grey’s Anatomy to health influencers on TikTok—has altered the effective provision of care at all levels. It clogs wait lists, weighs on every patient interaction, alters policy, and profoundly shapes the capacity for reality-based interdisciplinary action. It is breaking people and systems. Our collective intolerance of reality will continue to have real consequences until enough individuals regain a reverence for tedium.

Cymande Baxter-Rogers
Sandwich, N.H.

The postwar film, TV, and news executives weren’t just spewing distraction; they were creating “normalcy”—a normalcy rooted in sameness. Today, thanks to the glut of new entertainment, people who are different are free to share a cornucopia of new stories—and see people like themselves represented in entertainment. The ability to pursue different perspectives may have its flaws, but I hope it can also reshape and redefine what we mean by society, community, and family.

Russell Mawby
Ottawa, Canada

Megan Garber confirms that the dystopian future that Orwell, Huxley, and Postman warned us about has arrived. A culture awash in entertainment has blurred the lines between fiction and reality.

As a pastor, I have had to wrestle with what this means for my congregation and me. Since the pandemic started, many faith leaders have embraced online worship, even creating churches in the metaverse. But I worry this approach reinforces the belief that the most significant experiences in life are about consumption and entertainment. I feel I need “in person” church precisely because so much about it is not entertaining. In an embodied gathering, I am attuned to the needs, joys, and sorrows of the people around me. I lay aside my own preferences to serve others. I have conversations with real people with whom I may disagree. These are precisely the conditions under which our most meaningful human experiences of joy, love, and friendship happen.

Jeff Simpson
Washington, D.C.

Megan Garber replies

Russell Mawby’s letter captures a defining tension of this moment: the fact that the most profound and valuable element of social media—its ability to give a public voice to people who haven’t had one before—coexists with the encroaching dehumanization I highlight in my article. In my ideal world, people are the directors of their own stories, not extras in someone else’s show. I hope that the positive side of this dynamic will win out—and that in the process, just as Mawby suggests, we’ll consider the kind of people we want to be. And the kind of society we want to have, together.

The French Are in a Panic Over le Wokisme

In the March 2023 issue, Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about how France’s vehement rejection of identity politics made him recalibrate his own views about woke ideology.

As an American-history teacher who has taught in Parisian schools and universities, I wonder which Thomas Chatterton Williams misunderstands more: France or the United States.

Perhaps his most damaging assumption is that social-justice movements are “pitting groups against one another in a zero-sum power struggle.” That is antithetical to the goals of most major social-justice-education projects. Further, his description of the relationship between the French radical left—which is in no way an ideological monolith, as its electoral divisions show—and radical Islam is inaccurate. Views on religion among members of the far left range from supporting socially progressive protections for religious minorities, such as letting students wear the hijab at school, to advocating for attacks on all religious protections, including the privileged status of Catholicism. This so-called islamo-gauchisme is a hoax manufactured by the French right.

Lucas Mennella
Paris, France

As a Frenchman raising four children in California with my American wife, I find that most articles on French social issues by American journalists fail to understand the specificities of France or force an angle meant to show how events in France illustrate a broader trend important in the U.S.

“The French Are in a Panic Over le Wokisme” takes a more balanced view. Far from the usual ideological diatribes that I often encounter here in California, the article makes reasonable considerations that help inform and spur reflection on the important topics at hand.

Alexis de Belloy
Tiburon, Calif.

I agree with Thomas Chatterton Williams’s stance that neither France’s nor America’s approach to identity is ideal. But I am not convinced that an “authentically color-blind society” is the way forward. In some cases we need to elevate race in order to end racism.

I’m a 33-year-old white woman. My own identity enters the equation when I consider political events such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A color-blind approach to reproductive rights in the U.S. would ignore the fact that Black women have a pregnancy-​related mortality rate about three times that of white women and that abortion bans will disproportionately cause more health complications and deaths for this group. Ignoring race ignores systemic problems that could be remedied with an equity-minded approach. Equity needs numbers—it needs those statistics based on race and ethnicity that France refuses to gather.

Amelia von Wolffersdorff
Washington, D.C.

As a Black American Canadian living in France, I am not surprised by how French intellectuals reacted to Rokhaya Diallo’s comments on identity politics at the 2021 conference Thomas Chatterton Williams describes. I often encountered similar resistance when I worked at a German company and would point out that its product excluded Black-owned businesses. Suppressing our histories and cultures will only lead to more experiences like Diallo’s and like the one I had at work.

Our identities give us unique perspectives and insights that can enrich our communities. Why can’t we embrace our histories, our cultures, and our skin colors, while also embracing everyone else’s?

Carrington Walsh
Paris, France

Behind the Cover

In “American Madness,” Jonathan Rosen describes the failure of the United States to care for the severely mentally ill through the story of his childhood best friend, Michael Laudor. As an adult, Laudor was the perpetrator of a horrific act of violence—but he was also the victim of a system that failed to provide the kind of treatment he dearly needed. The cover features a photograph of Jonathan and Michael outside the Rosens’ home in New Rochelle, New York, where the boys first met.

— Oliver Munday, Associate Creative Director

Correction

“Arnold’s Last Act” (April) originally stated that 1.3 million people were killed at Auschwitz, about 1.1 million of them Jews. In fact, 1.1 million people were killed there, of which about 1 million were Jews. The article also stated that Block 4A at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum contained personal items belonging to Holocaust victims. In fact, Block 5 holds those items.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”