“How do we make it safe? How do we make it secure for people? But also we’re saying, how do you make it kind, and how do you make it beautiful?”

Science fiction has been asking these questions for a long time. Technologists such as Mark Zuckerberg are pushing the concept of the metaverse, an immersive online world where we will (supposedly) live, work and play. It is also a key part of the narrative around cryptocurrency and NFTs: the currency and property of the virtual world.

But since the metaverse was invented, it has come with dystopian fears. The 1992 Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash, which coined the word to describe a three-dimensional, immersive successor to the internet, imagined it as an anarchic, capitalist free-for-all where malicious hackers use QR code-like images to infect online citizens with mental viruses that can cause real-world brain damage. A generation earlier, William Gibson’s Neuromancer visualised the “matrix” as a Tron-like online universe where immensely powerful artificial intelligences deploy humans as their surrogates in a shadowy cyber-war.

Reeves happily acknowledges their influences. She says the more the merrier in this conversation about where we may be heading.

Salama says the metaverse is still an idea at the moment – we don’t have a form for it.

“There’s a push to not have big tech controlling Web 3.0 [a hypothetical future for the internet], like a Meta, like an Apple, and that’s the conversation we’re having now, who’s building it rather than what we’re building.”

But the pair say we should start thinking now about what we’re building – “before it becomes a runaway train”.

“Is it Skynet? Is it going to consume us all without any control on our behalf?”

Reeves says it’s time to take the lessons we’ve learned from the way social media transformed our lives and relationships, “before we do this next deeply immersive thing that’s going to go deeper into our minds and bodies”.

“Before we even do that, let’s have an ethical grounding within that ... it might genuinely be something beautiful.”

That’s why they imagined a suite of virtual pharmaceuticals that can make you more intelligent, help regulate emotions, expand curiosity or nostalgia, mind-hacks that could help deal with trauma and encourage self-expression.

Loading

Reeves says empathy itself – which they imagine as a virtually injectable mental state – is the key to making the online future a better place, where we can join in acts of creation rather than just recreate our real-world conflicts and fears.

They’re using the Store – which is part of the City of Melbourne’s Shopfront Activation program giving low or no-cost space to artists, budding entrepreneurs and artisan makers – not only for the exhibition but to host weekly talks.

Reeves says: “Technology is often shortcuts: but shortcuts can be good and shortcuts can be bad. Brands will just lead everyone there – but this is a future that belongs to all of us: we have a voice, and we have a say.”

A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.