Accompanying these virtual objects would be a regulatory apparatus that allows for voluntary connection between experiences and that could defend privacy and other social norms. The preservation of a robust and user-friendly commons is vital to allowing users to determine their own forms of exchange and ownership. This would harness the spirit of the generation of early adopters who have often freely shared their expertise and creations using creative commons licensing in a bid to undercut the profiteers who hope to make a more extractive metaverse. One solution could be the investment of the public sector in maintaining a repository of high-quality, free, open-access virtual assets that users could use to build and maintain their own publicly hosted virtual worlds and experiences. “I Have No Idea What China Would Do With Information From People in Montana” Why Doing a Workout You Suck At Might Be Exactly What You Need The Horrific Content a Kenyan Worker Had to See While Training ChatGPT In a recent interview with Wired, Rosedale described the picture Meta marketing materials paints as a “very, very bad outcome” for virtual worlds. Facebook already tracks what users respond to through scrolling, clicking, and sharing content, but in interactive VR, this could mean anything from measuring how long they stare at something to sharing data on what brand affinities their avatars suggest to mining their hand movements during intimate moments. Whatever the company is able to extract off the top of sales in this marketplace will presumably be bolstered by the behavioral data it can capture from gaze, voice, and gestures in immersive environments. At present, Meta is encouraging users to freely create and share their creations in its own free basics world creation application Horizon Worlds, but it’s highly limited, suggesting that the purpose is merely to whet an appetite for a more sophisticated marketplace of user-generated worlds in Meta in the near future. To this end, Zuckerberg and other metaverse evangelists have pushed the idea of Web3, a decentralized form of commodification reliant on blockchain technologies that would serve as verification of ownership, such as with nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. That requires an economic and regulatory system that is favorable to the enclosure of virtual spaces in order to create property. By this time, much of the speculator frenzy had died down, as did media attention toward the platform.įor Zuckerberg and Meta, the metaverse is a pitch for political and technical changes to the way we think of the internet itself. By the early 2010s, it was being used to exchange for Bitcoin and other burgeoning cryptocurrencies, a scheme some charged could facilitate money laundering. You could exchange linden for dollars, leading to fluctuations in value, as well as other virtual currencies. As early as 2006, Second Life saw an influx of real-world companies pushing promotions and advertising into the virtual space. As Au’s book chronicles, the period from 2004–07 saw an increase in speculators enclosing virtual space and selling virtual goods in hopes of realizing a profit on what had originally been marketed as a commons. What had been a space premised on self-actualization and escape rapidly became a place with ownership rights and an in-world currency, called the linden. Within a year of its founding, the number of users expanded to about 15,000 and the real-world relations of property, money, and speculation began to encroach on Linden Lab’s dreamworld. As Web 2.0 was contemporaneously being born in fits and starts, Second Life promised its users arguably the most ambitious form of social networking and user generated content. People were able to live in Second Life and alter it by doing so, opening up possibilities for new kinds of sociality and getting closer to a presumably less dystopian version of the virtual experience described in Snow Crash’s Metaverse. Persistent spaces with highly customizable and manipulable avatars in effect meant time and space meant something in this virtual world. In his book The Making of Second Life, journalist Wagner James Au describes the ability to collectively be in a place and create in real time as the thing that set Second Life apart from its analogues. This meant every user was in effect experiencing the same thing at the same time, should they be in the same part of Second Life. This all took place in an integrated space that was stitched together across servers rather than copied in multiple instances.
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