8 January 2022 | New Scientist | 43proposals, meaning that you don’t need
to sign up to a certain app to talk to your
friends just because they aren’t on the
same services you are.
All that swerves the real multibillion-dollar
question, however: whether we will want to
abandon our “meatverse”, where we press
flesh, touch and feel and interact with fellow
humans, for the metaverse where, the
development of technologies such as haptics
notwithstanding, we are gesturing at digital
alternatives. Even with its change in name,
Meta’s involvement may give some potential
users pause for thought, mired as the company
is in negative publicity ever since the 2018
Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which users
were targeted for political advertising.
The hype might serve to pose the question
of what we might want from expanded digital
worlds, and how that compares with the
visions of the metaverse on offer. “There’s
this idea that it’s openness; that it’s actually
expanding the possibilities of your life by
entering the metaverse,” says Kelly. “I would
argue it’s doing the opposite. It appears to be
open in the same way that the internet is open:
that the actual practicalities of who is able to
create that world is extremely unequal.”
He sees the idea of the metaverse being
coded by, and inevitably shaped in the image
of, Meta’s workers – rich, predominantly
white and based in Silicon Valley. It is a “very
constraining idea that will narrow the scope
of human lives when they spend time in this
hypothesised metaverse”, says Kelly.
When Hiro Protagonist donned his virtual
reality goggles in Snow Crash, he was doing so
to escape the horrors of his life. He ended up
finding the metaverse equally unpalatable,
populated by gangsters and ne’er-do-wells.
Social media platforms such as Facebook
have shown us how virtual platforms can end
up amplifying undesirable currents in the
world outside – with knock-on effects in the
real sphere. It is time to consider, perhaps, how
we can ensure that whatever the metaverse
ends up being, it ends up being what we want. ❚Chris Stokel-Walker is a
freelance technology writer
based in Newcastle, UKbecoming reality. The video game Fortnite
and the game development platform Roblox,
which encourages its users to build their
own worlds, have both hosted concerts by
digital representations of real-life pop stars
during the pandemic.
Some 47 million people use the Roblox
platform every day, amounting to 11.2 billion
“hours engaged” in the third quarter of 2021,
according to the company. With their
experience in building immersive worlds
and their already enthusiastic user bases,
the gaming companies could be a significant
challenge to Meta’s vision of a metaverse
built from scratch that it controls. Just as the
“format wars” of the 1970s and 1980s saw VHS
and Betamax video tapes battle for supremacy,
with one eventually winning out, so there is a
real possibility that, like Second Life, one or
several of the many metaverses now being
built will end up as ghost towns.
Hackl hopes for an open metaverse, with
interoperability between different platforms
allowing your digital avatar to leap to another
world just as we can easily travel from one city
to another. That is a model that the European
Union is already pushing for with social
messaging apps in its draft Digital Markets Act“ Some or
many of the
metaverses
now being built
may end up as
ghost towns”
Pop star
Ariana Grande
gave a concert
in Fortnite’s
virtual world in
August 2021EP
IC^ GAMES