But if it’s hard to imagine more internet pumping through the veins or on Earth’s surface, tech and gaming companies promise this in the coming decade with increased augmented reality and virtual reality offerings.

To make that kind of technology work, especially the more immersive you go, these companies often need even more of your body. The technology needs to understand how those eyes move, how far apart they are, the way your head might be sized or centered, how you smile (to give “a richer sense of presence,” as Mark Zuckerberg has put it). A Microsoft design director explained in 2019 the company has a data set of 600 heads to understand how to calibrate the company’s HoloLens 2. The technology also needs more information about where your body is, like the size and shape of the room you’re inside (so you don’t fall down some actual stairs). To feel realer, basically, more of the real world is needed. “I think the metaverse is this embodied internet,” Zuckerberg has said, “where instead of looking at the internet, you’re in it.”

Even if there’s a deep financial stake in all this, there really is something to this idea of the “embodied internet” and the concept of embodiment itself in 2021. What if the only way to resolve some of the worst aspects of online life is to submit more, to give things that “richer” presence and reduce the strain. There’s this strange dynamic of putting all these pieces into a phone, and the warmth, anxiety, and strain of that action flooding back into the body, without most people’s humanity coming through in total complexity online. The difference between knowing and feeling something and merely being aware of it sometimes does not overcome the gap between real life and internet life. If that’s the world we live in, what’s the alternative?