James McLeod: The Ottawa protest is an online subculture flexing in the physical world

Forget about the Metaverse that Silicon Valley marketing execs are trying to sell you. The metaverse is already here and we are already living in it.

A note to our readers: The Line is watching as the police begin operations to clear out the convoy/protest/occupation in Ottawa. Until we see how that situation resolves, we are going to keep our rhetorical powder dry, so to speak. We don’t want to write something that will be obsolete in hours. Expect our weekly dispatch to land in your inbox on Saturday.

By: James McLeod

On Friday before the crackdown, before I even got out of bed, I opened my laptop and started watching a random YouTube livestream of the Ottawa antivax convoy trucker occupation.

As I watched handheld video of somebody walking along Wellington Street past Parliament, he was pulled into a knot of people gathered on a street corner in the cold, dark snowy morning.

A francophone woman was talking to a francophone journalist, and after a few moments, the conversation became heated. The woman was yelling at the journalist about vaccines, clearly, but I couldn’t pick up the details because I only understand the bare minimum amount of French that every Canadian knows.

But because I couldn’t understand the words, my mind was free to focus on the image, and what was striking about the interaction, was all the technology. 

The journalist was holding a mic and had a cameraman shooting the interaction. But the other side of the conversation was documented too. As the protester yelled at the journalist, she was holding a smartphone that was clearly livestreaming video.

In the background nearby, another man was also shooting video of the encounter, and over the man’s shoulder another person watched — Caryma S’ad, a minor pandemic celeb, lawyer, cartoonist and self-styled gonzo journalist who posts photos and videos of antivax protesters, while asking supporters for cash donations by email. 

And in addition to all these onlookers, I was watching the interaction from a different angle, livestreamed to YouTube by one of the countless hustlers who ride the line between journalism and activism, propagandizing for the convoy demonstrators while monetizing their online content.

Everything is documented from every angle and objective truth is impossible to attain. 

I appreciate the irony that my first reaction was to take a screenshot of the tableau, and then a little while later write a Twitter post with my own observation about the hyper-documented content creation cycle.

And now I’m blogging about it too.

Forget about the Metaverse that Silicon Valley marketing execs are trying to sell you. The metaverse is already here and we are already living in it.

We don’t think of the internet as “the metaverse” because we don’t wear a headset and experience it as a three-dimensional environment, but the internet is already a fully realized world. It’s hard to describe but those of us who live our lives online can feel the geography of it, understand the borders and cultural groups, the complex weave of networks, communities and spaces.

What we are seeing in Ottawa is what happens when an online subculture flexes its muscles and starts exerting pressure in the physical world. These people are an online fandom meeting up in physical space, like BronyCon or The Gathering of the Juggalos.

The convoy occupation of Ottawa began online and still exists to a large extent on Facebook and Twitter and Telegram and other online spaces. Much has been written about the financing of the movement through crowdfunding sites and perhaps cryptocurrencies, and that’s an important dimension too. 

The livestreamers represent an important connective tissue between the physical and digital world, and what they’re doing makes sense even if they couldn’t fully articulate why they're doing it. Some of it is just chasing clout; on livestreams you often hear the host marveling at the number of viewers tuning in. And online, metrics can be monetized, and many of these people are not ideologues, they’re just hustlers trying to wring some money out of a dramatic situation.

But I think there’s something deeper, too. People stream themselves online because online is where they feel most at home. If your existence is primarily bound up in your online identity sharing memes and posting commentary in an online network, it’s cool to show up to a convention and maybe meet some new people, but you don’t want to leave that online community behind. 

All the participants are livestreaming their experience because it allows them to bring their network along, while also boosting their social capital with physical world cred.

Even two years ago, before COVID hit, technologists were talking about the pandemic. And then we spent two years shut in our homes, living our lives primarily through Zoom windows and social media apps. (Canadians more than most, thank you lockdowns!)

Each one of us now lives in two worlds, the physical and the digital, with a semi-permeable membrane in between. We adopt different identities in online spaces, but as we live more and more of our lives in the network, we cannot act like our digital identities are just a mask. How you live online is your true self, just as much as how you exist in the physical world. 

We don’t have the vocabulary yet to talk about all of this yet. We need a Marshall McLuhan for the 21st century. We cannot fully understand the picture yet, but we can see the streams of data flowing. 

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