The Metaverse is a Contested Territory
- While contemporary conversations about the metaverse often revolve around the sale of new products, to focus on one particular piece of hardware or software would miss the network for the nodes.
- “We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called ‘technology’ at all.”
—Ursula K. LeGuin
- It’s not about the tool, it’s about how the tool is used.
- When talking about the metaverse, we should look past the existing or forthcoming tech and instead consider our own stake in the future’s development. What do we, as netizens of the evolving virtual world, want it to be?
- In many ways, virtual reality—and the metaverse by association—pits the future defined by its citizens against a future defined by for-profit corporations.
- The artist and educator Melanie Hoff questions, if we’re able to build a new world, a new way of connecting with others, why would we only replicate what we’ve seen before? What pushes people to imagine is the need to imagine: a survival mechanism to find release from the pressures of your current reality.
The words by Ursula K. LeGuin are fascinating. “We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer, or a jet bomber deserves to be called ‘technology’ at all.” We have come to an era when we have the ability to push the boundaries of “what the tool can do” in such a rapid way that we constantly forget about the significance of talking about “how the tool is used”. We soon adapted to the new name of Facebook, Meta, and go along with the way that tech companies are constructing a virtual world. However, when talking about the metaverse, like said by the author, we aren’t just talking about realizing a “hard” science fiction by following the hardware developing timeline. Instead, we all deserve a break that allows us to slow down and think about what is means for the public, people of different nations, sexes, and classes, to jointly construct a virtual world. Is it replicating what we are experiencing in reality right now or imagining a new way how race, sex, and labor are interpreted? For instance, I was struck by the fact that one of the characters Aech (a black woman) in Ready Player One assumed to be a white cis male in Oasis to have more agency of her own. Does it presume that the race and gender hierarchy in the real world still exists and is being strengthened in the virtual world eventually? This is probably not what we want to see. That in turn proves that importance of constructing a free and autonomous metaverse that is liberated from those who set the rules of the internet right now and setting up new standards for a freer community. Technology is defined as “the application of conceptual knowledge”, and it definitely shouldn’t be confined to the development of software and hardware. We as the users and players also have the agency to define what directions that the metaverse is going technological wise by applying a better general will to the future community that we might live in.