The metaverse could be just another Silicon Valley moneymaker. Or it could be a zone for citizens to experiment with
From Muus Collective.
There’s much about the metaverse that’s coming to us through our various networks. We feel that our interest in the old Czech dissident notion of a “parallel polis” meets this phenomenon of populated, vibrant, enterprising virtual worlds.
From our cosmolocal and new politics perspective, this is more than a neat metaphorical parallel. Remember our reach for “virtuality” during Covid’s lockdowns, the bolting together of our family, friends and sense of community through digital networked tools - Zoom, Google Docs, Miro? As far as the epidemiologists are telling us, our trajectory on climate disruption will bring even more virulent, street-clearing bugs to our part of the world.
So the requirement for a zone whereby citizenship can keep going, online and realtime - where our plans and schemes don’t just peter out, for lack of a local meeting-room or public square - isn’t just geeky-to-have, but urgent, or at least resilient.
The “parallel polis” in the 70s and 80s was samizdat, underground, furtive, holding out a semi-utopia of intellectual and artistic idealism. We have much better tools for a PP - but we should be equally ready to activate it, and defend civic and progressive practice within, when we are chased inside again by an angry biosphere.
So here’s a few straws that came us on the metaverse wind this last month - one an indication of how the pleasures of material life may be paralleled in a persistent virtual world. And the second two a musing on how politics itself might manifest in this zone.
First up is a strongly femme digital business that is aiming at an obvious behaviour in a metaverse. If you are an 3D avatar there, spending time being sociable/productive/playful… Well, what are your avatar’s fashion needs? Answering them is the Muus Collective.
The first term is an obvious pun - and fits their mission statement:
Unlearn labels
In a reality that makes space for every style and self-expression, conventional labels are meaningless. Muus Collective looks beyond labels to empower women, non-binary individuals and all crypto-curious creators to add value to the virtual world.
Build the metacloset
The next internet is here, and whether you call it “web3,” “the metaverse” or “the house that crypto built,” it’s where we as users own our content. Muus Collective gamifies the experience to make digital fashion a playable platform for engagement, inspiration and ownership.
Do good with style
Muus Collective inspires positive impact through play. We foster a safe and rewarding open-access environment. We learn, earn and have fun together. And we use creativity as currency to support causes we care about.
The “collective” part is obvious from scanning the personnel involved, and the organisational culture that’s articulated around them. It’s intriguing to us how collectivist and participatory values are often prioritised in Web3/metaverse projects (very reminiscent of the dot-communism of Web 1.0) - never mind an explicit “play ethos”. (See our post in the next few days on RadarDAO as an exemplar of that).
Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash
Yet there are pretty hard-ball power politics in the metaverse. This piece from Politico begins with an experiment that the newsite Buzzfeed did - which was to create a Q-Anon obsessed space in Meta/Facebook’s Horizon World, and wait for Meta’s moderators to find it and take it down. They took long weeks to do so. Politico suggests:
The experiment, if you think about it, suggests a reason for optimism: it’s possible that an immersive 3D space could slow down some of the most damaging aspects of our current, screen-anchored information landscape.
Buzzfeed’s little Q-world was a very isolated bubble. Information might actually spread more slowly, and to fewer people, in a digital world meant to imitate our embodied one.
“As a VR avatar, you can’t easily speak with many people at once. You might have to have to stand on stage to be seen, and shout to be heard,” said Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
Duffield, one of the few think-tankers who focuses on content moderation in the metaverse specifically, feels cautiously optimistic about the differences between how information is transmitted in the two types of spaces.
“Your speech will still be local and ephemeral, and even recorded interactions may be hard to search for,” he suggests. “In this environment, fashions, gestures, and phrases are more likely to go viral than author-linked content.”
In some ways that shrinking of the discourse has already begun in our current text-based milieu. What is the constellation of far-right-focused social media apps like Parler, Rumble, or even the former President Trump’s Truth Social if not a sort of metaverse unto itself, closed off both literally and epistemologically from mainstream public discourse?
And lest one start to think a politically captive virtual audience is unique to the right, consider French President Emmanuel Macron’s dedicated Minecraft server-slash-campaign-headquarters.
These spaces all represent, in their own way, how metaverse media could be different from our current environment: Closed-off spaces for the like-minded to congregate and converse in, without the social-media mechanism of a central “timeline” or news feed to hijack public attention en masse.
“You can govern [or moderate] through these worlds architecturally in ways that you can't on Twitter, or another text-based platform,” Duffield said.
Right now, these conversations are mostly speculative — platforms like Meta still have their hands full with the political fallout from past social media moderation policies (or lack thereof), and early “metaverse”-like platforms like Minecraft and Roblox are more concerned with protecting children from harmful content than with misinformation or extremism, given the average age of their users.
The way the metaverse impacts politics and media will be very different from how our current, 2D internet does, just as much as that was from old-school broadcast media. It might not yet be clear what the inevitable problems will be, but it’s a good bet they won’t be solved by applying the rules built for our current ones.
Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash
Another piece this week from the technology critic Paris Marx, in Real Life Magazine, puts the liberatory language of the metaverse’s promoters in a familiar Silicon Valley context. It’s the next money maker!
As Brian Merchant observed last October, Silicon Valley “is in need of a new framework, a new apparatus, not just a product or a service or a new sector to mine for enterprise contracts.” With social media growth slowing — as evidenced by the recent selloff when Facebook reported a drop in daily active users — and bets on smart cities and “Uber for X” services failing to pay off, influential venture capitalists and tech executives want the metaverse to fill that void.
It seeks to provide companies an opportunity to further extend digital technology into our physical reality and new ways to commercialize what happens in the expanded “online,” while creating an infrastructure that will grant the company that controls it power over everything that interacts with it. As much as they would like it to look like a shift from one interface paradigm to the next, as when mobile succeeded desktop, it’s more an attempt to usher in another stage of the internet’s corporatization.
Apple’s control over the App Store has become a lightning rod for key metaverse players, existing rules prevent the metaverse from existing on the Google Play Store and on iOS. Zuckerberg claims Facebook’s metaverse transaction fees will be lower than Apple’s 30 percent cut from apps on the App Store; he imagines a billion people generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue in the metaverse in 10 years — with Facebook taking its smaller cut of all of it.
Yet despite the language about tearing down monopolies and empowering creators, the metaverse does not offer a meaningful alternative to existing business models and their collateral damage. As recent patents suggest, it would extend the current platforms’ modes of commercialization, surveillance, and data extraction.
The metaverse is just another platform like the ones we already know: a means for bosses to better control workers, for retailers to have more information and leverage over shoppers, and for advertisers to have the data and space to target people with more ads.
Boosters like Zuckerberg and Sweeney may claim that the metaverse will be built by many companies, but it’s quite clear that it will have to be a centralized platform. For Facebook’s vision of the metaverse to work, it would have to be hosted on its servers, along with every experience that connects to it, and everyone who makes them will have to conform to the technical and visual standards set by the company to enable the seamless porting of digital assets.
Thus in practice it will be about enclosing much more of what we already do under the Facebook (or Meta) umbrella. Similarly, despite Sweeney’s self-styling as a consumer advocate, his company would immensely benefit from the weakening of Apple’s App Store rules, and he’s already advocating a unified store (otherwise known as a monopoly) where everyone will have to buy their games and software regardless of the platform they’re using.
These efforts are in keeping with the monopolistic ambition that virtually every Silicon Valley firm has ingrained into its core directive, in part because investors won’t back any venture that isn’t seeking to take over the world.
That centralization also means the metaverse will suffer from similar challenges as existing platforms. We already know how terribly Facebook has failed at moderating and managing its social media platforms, and there’s little reason to believe its ability to moderate virtual environments will be any better.
Indeed its own CTO, Andrew Bosworth, admitted that virtual reality can be a “toxic environment,” particularly for women and minorities, and despite his desire for “almost Disney levels of safety,” moderating what people say and do “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.”
Recent reporting has borne this out. The Washington Post found that Horizons Worlds is full of children despite it supposedly being for adults 18 and over, and Buzzfeed was able to create a world packed with right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories without moderators detecting any violation of the company’s content policies [second story above].
Silicon Valley has succeeded in getting users to adopt many of its new products and services in recent years by underpricing hardware, as in the case of smart home devices like Alexa, or vastly subsidizing the cost of services, as with ride-hailing and food delivery apps.
But it’s not clear that commercial enticements will be enough to get people to sit at home every day wearing a “wretched headset,” as Facebook’s own president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg called it as he struggled to drink his (physical) coffee.
Facebook will happily spend to buy some prominent “creators” to bolster its new platform’s credibility, but whether users and developers will be willing to subject themselves to the degree of control Facebook or one of its other metaverse competitors will command is another question.
Tech companies have always overstated the benefits their technologies will grant us and understated how much they serve their own ends of power and profit. The metaverse will be no different, especially since it’s unlikely to arrive in the form currently being sold to us.
But the concept builds on the pressures that have shaped the internet’s development since its inception: the need to control the people who use it and find new forms of commercialization to generate profit. While capitalism persists, so too will those driving forces.
Silicon Valley’s technologically deterministic approach — one that asserts technology is all that’s necessary to improve society and address social challenges — has already failed us countless times, and there’s no reason to believe it will suddenly produce different results. We should learn from the past and not fall for the latest campaign to sell us an even more commercialized future.