Is the Ottawa trucker's protest a bit of the Metaverse that has leaked into the physical world?

James McLeod, The Ottawa protest is an online subculture flexing in the physical world, The Line, Feb. 18, 2022.

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.

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Is the Ottawa trucker's protest a bit of the Metaverse that has leaked into the physical world?