Caroline Rodeos: Reality Bites

IN times of crisis—and I feel I don’t have to illustrate that concept with an example right now—it can be very tempting to bury your head in the sand. The flight impulse is built into us all of us. According to respected neurologists it sits right between the drive to buy absolutely anything with a 50% off sticker and the voice that says you should really order some extra chips.

Sand, of course, is quite boring and gets in all the cracks, but there are hundreds of more tempting alternatives for modern ostrich wannabes. Most of these—everything from spending days on end watching Netflix to deciding that cocktail hour should probably be brought forward to 11am— have already become well-trodden ground during the pandemic, but the metaverse, particularly from the artist formerly known as Facebook, offers a bold new frontier of ignoring reality.

What is the metaverse, you ask? As far as I can tell, the metaverse is sort of like 5G: there’s a lot of chat about how it’s going to revolutionise everything, but when it eventually arrives it’ll undoubtedly feel exactly like business as usual for most of us. One big part of the metaverse concept which feels very old-but-new is the virtual reality worlds in which people can interact socially—sort of like video gaming but without any of the fun bits. You thought Zoom meetings were bad? Wait until you’re stuck in a virtual conference room, staring vacantly at a screen on which your bored avatar is pretending to watch a sales presentation—and they can’t even fake a trip to the bathroom to earn a quick breather.

Metaworse more like

Given the name change, you won’t be at all surprised to know that Facebook is pretty interested in all things metaverse, nor that late last year it launched one of these virtual reality platforms, called Horizon Worlds. It was described as a place where you could hang out and build things with other people in a fun and trouble-free environment. Just the venue, you might think, for hiding your head in the sand.

Here’s what one of the female beta testers wrote about her experience on Horizon Worlds, as initially reported in USA Today: “Within 60 seconds of joining I was verbally and sexually harassed. Three or four male avatars, with male voices, essentially, virtually gang raped my avatar and took photos. As I tried to get away they yelled, “Don’t pretend you didn’t love it,” and “Go rub yourself off to the photo.”

Turns out, no matter how cutesy you make people’s avatars in the virtual world, you can’t escape their personalities in the real one. Who knew? Oh wait, everyone knew. Incidentally, if you read that and dismissed the author’s complaint because it didn’t happen in real life then think again. Thanks to the way virtual reality is designed, humans actually process events within it as if they were real. There is, ironically, no escaping it. Our perception is so distorted that there’s even a thing called the Proteus effect, which basically means that people’s self-perception shifts depending on how they’re represented online, and then their behaviour shifts to meet this digital portrayal. It’s the technological equivalent of what happens when a bloke puts a sock in his pants.

Yet manipulating reality, no matter how tempting, can’t solve any problems or hide the truth for ever. It’s a lesson that most adults learn sooner rather than later, which brings me neatly on to the publicly funded creche for left-wing hipster children that is the BBC.

Ruffled feathers

Charlotte Winters’ column for the Mail on Sunday recently featured the line that: “The BBC’s Winterwatch programme has ruffled feathers in rural Norfolk, I can reveal, after producers banned gamekeepers from carrying guns anywhere within the 4,000-acre estate where it is filmed. Usually at this time of year, workers on the Wild Ken Hill estate would be culling muntjac deer for the benefit of the wider ecosystem. But before the BBC descended on the area for their three-week stay, which ended on Friday, producers issued a missive clearing the estate of rifles and shotguns.”

I’m sure that to all GTN readers, an estate without guns is like a Labrador that tells you it’s had enough food, thank you very much. In other words, deeply disturbing.

At first the piece made me laugh, but the more I thought about it the more I was annoyed by the BBC’s arrogance. Yes, they pay to be there, but it still remains a working estate with a schedule, on which people have jobs to do and lives to live. Interrupting all of that to create some fantasy kingdom where real life is swept under the carpet and Chris Packham is king is the worst kind of virtual reality—especially when it comes at taxpayer’s expense. Winterwatch is, let’s not forget, supposed to be a factual programme.

The ban was, the BBC confirmed, imposed after “a standard risk assessment”, but as one local told the paper: “The BBC are so paranoid, especially in the wake of what happened on set with Alec Baldwin, that guns were completely banned for the full duration of their time anywhere on the estate, even when cameras weren’t rolling. It’s become a major talking point among locals, some of whom feel that townies have interfered with the country way of life.”

What happened in the Alec Baldwin case was of course horrific, but it’s hard to see how the two scenarios are in any way similar—unless I’ve missed previous episodes of Winterwatch wherein groups of locals dressed up and did power poses with guns in the background in an attempt to get cast as extras in the next big budget BBC drama.

The risk assessment seems to be nothing more than a veneer to justify creating a temporary version of the world the BBC seems to want—one where guns don’t exist but the benefits of management and conservation miraculously remain.

Oh, and one surefire way to tell it wasn’t a proper risk assessment? Anyone at all worth their salt would have pointed out the colossal risk to the BBC’s reputation posed by Chris Packham’s constant misuse of his platform for ‘activism’. I guess it’s too much to hope that by the time the next series is filmed they’ll have airbrushed him out of existence too. GTN