Will Gandalf Exist in the Metaverse?
A recently discovered psychedelic relic from the late ‘60s is a good excuse to think about Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. Or, well, whatever. I don’t know. The future, yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. The future where we can’t go outside because we’ve destroyed the planet and we are all living in the Metaverse, an invisible world of wonder and joy and other manufactured emotions courtesy of the brain behind Mark Zuckerberg’s forehead. It will be glorious, of course, because we will be Gods. Gods outside of reality, but Gods nonetheless. I hope that I can find a good plot of digital land where I can use digital bricks to build a digital home for my avatar partner and my avatar self. My nephew’s avatar can show my avatar how to build this house because of his extensive Minecraft experience. I plan to decorate my digital house’s digital exposed brick walls with NFTs. I will buy all of my digital things off of Amazon and Amazon won’t even need a drone to deliver to my digital doorstep because in the Metaverse things will appear out of nowhere like magic. You know, like The Sims.
And then my avatar will have avatar friends and everyone will meet at a digital watering hole and drink digital beers. My avatar will sit and consume these digital beers while the digital future is discussed amongst digital pals. No one will have to worry about anything, because you know what they say, “An avatar never dies!” Ha ha! Modernity! My avatar will be like being a real person except no wrinkles or gray hair or death. This is what they are currently forgetting to sell you on when they sell you the Metaverse future. It is a place where a version of yourself can live forever and ever and ever. Death ain't real. Perception is reality, baby.
There’s a cool record I discovered recently while surfing the good ol’ fashioned internet, the original Metaverse that scared some people so much that they wrote The Matrix. It’s an album called Gandalf and it’s by a band also called Gandalf. Their namesake comes from The Lord of the Rings, but this was back in 1967, long before Ian McKellen turned grey and the only indicator of Gandalf's beard length was J. R. R. Tolkien's prose. The album art is insanely psychedelic, a closeup of a menacing woman’s face surrounded by colorful butterflies and other things that are hard to describe but remain colorful. It’s the kind of album art that you can stare at for at least, like, seven minutes. Maybe longer if in the right headspace. The way her eyes move...
Anyway, Gandalf by Gandalf is one of those gorgeous psychedelic relics from the late ‘60s, a period of time where the hippy dream was still fresh and alive, the idea of the future built upon hopeful unknowns rather than madlibs tweeted by billionaires. Looking back on that time now, it’s easy to romanticize — nothing like smoking a cigarette and having long hair and wearing a leather jacket and driving a Ford pickup truck — but I like to believe that it was a special time. Some people believe in God. I believe in the '60s. I believe there was a certain sense of freedom in the air, a major reason because the trappings of modern day connectivity were yet to be discovered. The iPhone was barely a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. And that hippy spirit was the lifeblood pumping through the counterculture. Run and throw your arms out. Go west, young man. Et cetera.
An aunt of mine did a version of this. She grew up on a farm in the midwest. When she was a kid in the '50s, she watched the sun set over cornfields. She told me once that as she saw the long stretches of sun fading into the cornrows, she thought, I want to go there. In 1968 she did indeed go there, and eventually found herself living in the flat tops of the Rocky Mountains. She met a man, my future uncle, and they got married on a commune. The wedding was a potluck. Attendees wore their own handmade moccasins. My uncle likes to joke that he got married in a cowboy hat.
The point is — there was a period not that long ago where you could do that sort of thing, chase freedom and start a new life and forget who you used to be. And yet, modernity persists. The magic boxes in our pockets still trace our every move, no matter how many times you tap "no" when your phone asks to trace your location. These days, Silicon Valley needs to be told that human beings have "the right to be forgotten." Even in a cabin in the woods, Google still offers to finish writing your emails for you.
The energy on Gandalf reflects that ethos of freedom, that raging desire deep inside all of us to run, to be wild, to go west young man. The music sounds like floating through the mist of a cloud, its bits and bops of H20 molecules clinging to your skin as you feel weightless. A fluttery, flowery exploration of the space between, capturing the soul of hippy innocence. Is this what it is like to soar above a field of rainbow colors? Maybe there will be rainbow fields in the Metaverse. My avatar will fly like Neo above the splattering of colors.
Back when I was in college, I would spend my holiday breaks devouring music, so the welcoming in the new year always reminds me of searching for something, well, new. I would sit in my parents’ basement, torrent every album on the Pitchfork 100 list, listen to each at least once, and that would be that. Boom, music taste evolved. (This was back when Pitchfork had good taste.) It was heaven and I loved it. I learned so much about so many artists and each discovery felt like a jolt of electricity, powering me to the next one and the next one and the next one. I would print Wikipedia pages out and read biographies of musicians as I made playlists for my iPod, looking forward to the next semester of walking to class and thinking about things while listening to Wolf Parade.
I remember torrenting Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion after it leaked on Hipster Runoff on Christmas Day. I felt very cool as I sat in my room, looking at my childhood walls covered with sports memorabilia, understanding that there might be something bigger out there that could be accessed through music that was hard and sometimes scary to listen to. Maybe someday I would move to a big city! Like San Francisco or New York or, hell, even all the way to London! I smile thinking about my earnest naivety. An early psychedelic memory I have is staring at a panoramic photograph of Wrigley Field while pumping hazy electronic music into my ears that was created by some dude who called himself Panda Bear. I could see infinity. The future wasn’t terrifying; the future was opportunity.
Now I don’t know what to think except that I’m scared that someday the air won’t be breathable and the only thing I'll be able to stare at is an NFT through the eyes of my avatar. Yes, I’m being manipulated by the media. I know this. But it’s still my reality and I can’t help but feel weird about new variants with scary names that cause me to get another jab in my shoulder from the trustworthy friends at Big Pharma. The news frames each new wave of Covid-19 as a comic book villain. I’m assaulted by disorienting information every day. Things are bad, and then things are even more bad, and then they’re badder, and then the baddest. Whether or not to have kids is a question that gets more and more existential every day. C’mon in, offspring! Welcome to Earth! You can’t breathe the air outside, and this is a Joe Rogan coin. You need a lot of them. Good luck!
This current hellscape that we call being alive is our own creation. A bunch of morbidly obese losers dragging our knuckles into the future. Feed me my desires. I don't care what they are. Tell me what they are. The computers know. They serve it up. I will slurp up your slop and I will like it. My brain is turning to mush and I'd like to wash down whatever you think I should absorb into my consciousness with another McDouble, please.
"It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. A fat man will feel his heart burst and call it beautiful. Who knows?"
That's Hunter S. Thompson in the introduction to Generation of Swine. He said it up better than I could. But he also died before Zuck dreamed up the Metaverse. How do you find value in reality when there's another reality that does it easier and is more convenient and is what you think you want and then you die but also live forever? Who knows, indeed.
Here's Gandalf.