Image: Yusuf Akın Gülsayın

Lately it has become considerably challenging to avoid seeing buzzwords such as ‘NFT’, ‘blockchain’, or ‘rebuilding the internet’ during this latest craze of web3 madness. Perhaps in order to cope with the remorse of missing the Bitcoin train, many are in the race to become early adopters of the ‘revolution’ and benefit from this emerging trend before everybody else. They are all singing the song of an ‘equal future’ and of abolishing the ‘system’ through decentralisation and inviting every internet user to join their ranks. The last two statements might look contradictory, until we start to see that invitees are reserved to be seated at the bottom of a great pyramid.

For Diehl and many sceptics, web3 is nothing more than a great PR campaign to rebrand what blockchain technology represents and what it can promise — it is merely there to take the gaze away from the negative connotations of cryptocurrencies. When they first emerged, cryptocurrencies were seen as the ultimate tool for disrupting and democratising the financial systems. However, it seems like what it has become is the greatest Ponzi scheme of recent times. The use of the word Ponzi here is not to be mistaken as an accusation, for it is acknowledged and even whitewashed by the so-called crypto gurus themselves. It is of course hard to deny the success of this huge scheme, when weekly or even daily gains in considerably amounts could be achieved by the top dogs through the pump-and-dumping of hundreds of meme coins (such as Dogelon Mars named after Elon Musk and the iconic meme Doge, which also has its own cryptocurrency) emerging every new day. However, it is of great question how this technology is ‘revolutionising’ our current financial system, other than digitising the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the privileged minority all over again.

For a possible answer, we might take a closer look at the latest trend in the art-trading market; Non-Fungible Tokens, better known as NFTs. In the simplest terms, NFTs allow any artist to implement their digital artworks a set of data, such as the current and the past owners of the object, the designator for the original piece, and the mark of the original creator (Nadini et al., 2021). In principle, the area of use of NFTs are not limited within the virtual space, as any of these tokens could be assigned to any object. But there is a great issue with this system as can be seen via many memes online; there is nothing limiting any other person on the web to ‘right-click’ and download the virtual art pieces sold on NFT markets without any expense or sanction. This ‘loophole’ narrows down the segment of people that would throw considerable amounts of wealth for a mere link as a certificate for being the ‘rightful owner’ of an object, not to mention the immensely inflated values on hit NFT collections such as Bored Apes, of which the average price of a piece is standing at $261.000 as in today. It is not surprising that these limitations eventually led the NFT market to resemble the ‘real-life’ one, with 10% of the traders owning up to nearly 85% of the transactions happening (Nadini et al., 2021). Furthermore, the reign of ‘experts’ seems to live on among the NFT circles, for the pieces praised by them have been more successful (Franceschet, 2020). Moreover, a study done by Barabasi shows that the transactions within NFT circles are encapsulated in a centralised bubble, standing at the exact opposite of what was initially claimed by cryptocurrency circles.

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So, the question remains, will web3 bring about a new utopian world it has promised, or will inequality prevail once more, only time will tell.

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The seemingly inevitable centralization of this ‘decentralised’ transaction network carries many flaws behind the unseen parts of the technology. For one, in order to make the exchange complete, traders still need a financial mediator such as cryptocurrency exchange platforms, which are basically not so distinct from any bank of our age. However, there lies one crucial difference between them, for there is nothing preventing these exchange platforms from blocking the access of users to their own wallets, or not fulfilling the terms of depositing unlike a regulated bank, as Dillinger remarked. Even aside from the issue of a centralised mediator, losing the key for a personal account means an eternal banishment from one’s own savings. In a nutshell, only the privileged class of tech savvy individuals can survive in this competitive market, which again is far from democratising any financial systems.

Of course, there are many other aspects of web3 deepening the existing inequalities even more; such as the immense energy consumption related to mining or transaction of cryptocurrencies (Sedlmeir, 2020), the untraceable nature of blockchain technology enabling money laundering easier than ever, or alt-right figures making great profits through adopting the blockchain train early. So, the question remains, will web3 bring about a new utopian world it has promised, or will inequality prevail once more, only time will tell. However, until then it feels only right to remain sceptical of all the hype being created around it.

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Podcast of the Day

Don’t forget to check out this great episode of Tech Won’t Save Us on the issue of web3, guesting Stephen Diehl

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REFERENCES

Barabasi, A. (2021, May 10). Opinion | The Hidden World of NFTs, Visualized. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/nft-art-market.html

Bored Ape. (2021). Bored Ape Yacht Club. Bored Ape Yatch Club. https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/

CoinDesk. (2021, December 11). CoinDesk on. Twitter. https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1469677423423799302

Diehl, S. (2021). Web3 is Bullshit. Personal Blog of Stephen Diehl. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html

Dillinger, R. (2020). [Cryptography] Bitcoin is a disaster. The Cryptography and Cryptography Policy Mailing List. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-December/036510.html

Dogecoin. (2021). Dogecoin. https://dogecoin.com/

Franceschet, M. (2020). Art for space. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 13(3), 1-9.

Hayden, M. E., & Squire, M. (2021, December 9). How Cryptocurrency Revolutionized the White Supremacist Movement. Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/12/09/how-cryptocurrency-revolutionized-white-supremacist-movement

Jacobson, R. (2020, April 6). Crypto Was Meant to Democratize Finance, And It’s Finally About To. Nasdaq. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/crypto-was-meant-to-democratize-finance-and-its-finally-about-to-2020-04-06

Know Your Meme. (2021, December 7). Doge. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

Loizos, C. (2021, March 24). TechCrunch is part of the Yahoo family of brands. Tech Crunch. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/24/nft_users/

Nadini, M., Alessandretti, L., Di Giacinto, F., Martino, M., Aiello, L. M., & Baronchelli, A. (2021). Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks and visual features. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.00647.

Poleg, D. (2021, December 5). In Praise of Ponzis. Dror Poleg. https://www.drorpoleg.com/in-praise-of-ponzis/

Rosen, P. (2021, November 1). A meme coin named after Elon Musk rode the wave of joke cryptocurrencies in October to soar 4,000%. Markets.Businessinsider.Com. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/dogelon-mars-price-history-october-gains-meme-coins-cryptocurrency-2021-11

Sedlmeir, J., Buhl, H. U., Fridgen, G., & Keller, R. (2020). The energy consumption of blockchain technology: beyond myth. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 62(6), 599-608.

Image: Yusuf Akın Gülsayın

In October 2021, Facebook announced it would be changing its name to Meta in an effort to deflect the PR nightmare it’s been having after the platform’s involvement in electoral interventions, genocides, as well as hosting right-wing extremism on its platform. Although the name itself was implemented recently, the word Meta has been associated with Zuckerberg long before, since he revealed his ‘dreams project’ of the Metaverse. However, the word Metaverse is not an original concept, similar to many implementations of Facebook, for it is directly derived from the famous dystrophia ‘Snow Crash’ written by Neal Stephenson.

Snow Crash is set in a world that is greatly in ruin, so much so that the only escape available for the people, except for a handful of elites living behind a walled paradise, is a virtual reality world called the Metaverse. And unsurprisingly, the instrument used to connect to this virtual land is the good old VR set. While the word dystrophia seemingly does not exist in the dictionary of Zuckerberg, his passion and dreams that he’s been carrying towards the Metaverse since his childhood is finally close, thanks to the immense amount of money that his company is funnelling into the project. However, the promise of the Metaverse is much more than being a mere homage to this fictional world. It marks an important point for the codification of the body and provides a basis for future discussions around body politics.

When the ‘code was law’ famously pronounced by Lawrence Lessig (1999), he pointed to the code as the legislator of virtual space. In the current virtual climate however, I believe it would not be so far off to evolve the phrase into ‘code is life’. Through the transposition of existing physical and social structures of society into this virtual world, very similar to the criticism directed at the current state of the internet (Baym, 2015), the ‘Metaverse’ is aiming to create a simulacrum of life itself. While the privatization of virtual lands, or the adoption of currency has already begun to be implemented in these virtual lands, digitized bodies themselves are planned to be a part of them in the long run, with a connection established to these worlds through a VR set. Albeit this ‘feature’ is not expected to be implemented soon, the possible negative effects on mental health that might be caused by the idealization of these life-like personal avatars in the universe is already started to be pointed out. Furthermore, as shown in the promotional video, Metaverse is eager to fill the gap for the lack of physical proximity in office-life that has emerged during the pandemic period due to social distancing measures. With this last step, perhaps the always hidden part of digital labour, the body itself, will ‘finally’ be put in its place to be exploited to the full.

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But what is given by the code might be taken away or altered without any liabilities.

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In Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992), Deleuze suggested that enclosed spaces of labour, factories, are replaced by the unwalled reach of corporations in a ‘society of control’. In the Metaverse, enclosed office spaces are replaced by the ‘endless possibilities’ without proximity, as presented by Meta. Perhaps when Barlow (1996) declared cyberspace as the new resort of the mind, unlike ‘real life’ where the body is seized by the government and private corporations, he did not foresee that the conquest of cyberspace by the sovereign would not end until the body itself finds its place there. Every interaction on Metaverse is another piece of data to be extracted from the body itself. By combining the bodily reactions measured -such as heart or breath rate, pulse, or pressure- with the immense ‘big data’ that has been hoarded in its servers, Meta could sell these virtual bodies to the highest bidder to show the most personalized advertisements up to date. Hereby, slave auctions are digitizing and on the verge of becoming an innate part of ‘the future of the internet’.

But the real power and the danger of the code these virtual lands are built upon lies in its ability to categorize. It breaks down the individual and the masses into ‘dividuals’, and holds the mean to assign categorizations (Deleuze, 1992). What is perceived as the reality in the virtual world, is only limited by the design of code. We, as users, are already bound by what is written down on the dropdown menu to choose what gender could be best assigned to us, or what race we are accepting ourselves as closest to. The datafication of our bodily features through biometrics also already works through categorizing every individual in assigned groups, such as ‘black’, ‘male’, ‘immigrant’ (Amoore 2006, p. 339). Of course, it is not unique to virtual spaces, for the history of categorization is as old as racism itself (Rabinow & Rose, 2006). And the construction of the code cannot be separated from the context rooted in the physical world; human labour is what lies behind the hardware and software after all. Nonetheless, what is given by the code might be taken away or altered without any liabilities. And this is where the real threat of Metaverse lies. Similar to the revealed emotional manipulation experiments conducted by Facebook, it would not be out of touch to expect change on social habits, questionings on morality, or even the disruption towards reality pushed through the Metaverse’s design.

That all being said, there is still a great chance for Metaverse to be acknowledged as nothing more than Second Life v2.0, for there are many technical challenges to be solved before the full implementation that it is currently promoting. And even if the unexpected happens, and Meta comes up with solutions to many of foreseen issues; only time will tell whether this vast land of code will become another scheme to avoid unwanted traces on the informal economy similar to NFTs, a whole new experience for the forming of new social networks, or the ultimate surveillance tool that one too many dystopias have warned us about. Until then, it is crucial to keep in mind that the ambiguous nature of the Metaverse is currently leaving this virtual land in a vague situation in terms of jurisdiction, and it is up for lawmakers to act quickly before the many times foretold dystopia scenarios become the reality of our future to come.

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For those who have not seen it yet, here’s a quick rundown of the Metaverse promotion session by CNET.

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REFERENCES

Amoore, L. (2006). Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror. Political Geography, 25(3), 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.02.001

Barlow, J. P. (1996). Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace. RhetNet: A Dialogic Publishing (Ad)Venture, 3(6), 1. https://doi.org/10.37514/rnt-j.1996.3.6.21

Basu, T. (2021, November 16). The metaverse is the next venue for body dysmorphia online. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/16/1040174/facebook-metaverse-body-dysmorphia/

Baym, N. K. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age. John Wiley & Sons.

Bryant, U., & Friah, S. (2016, July 27). Facebook’s Really Big Plans for Virtual Reality. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/tosv2.html?vid=&uuid=7839c43f-5942-11ec-bd95-45616b534d59&url=L2ZlYXR1cmVzLzIwMTYtZmFjZWJvb2stdmlydHVhbC1yZWFsaXR5Lw==

Canales, K. (2021, December 8). The metaverse could let Silicon Valley track your facial expressions, blood pressure, and your breathing rates — showing exactly why our internet laws need updating. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-silicon-valley-tech-data-collection-regulation-laws-need-updating-2021-12?international=true&r=US&IR=T

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011). A New Algorithmic Identity. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(6), 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411424420

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828

Estes, A. C. (2021, December 2). Metaverse real estate is now being sold for cryptocurrency. Vox.https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/12/2/22812608/metaverse-real-estate-meta

Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (Reissue ed.). Vintage.

Kastrenakes, J., & Heath, A. (2021, October 25). Facebook spending $10 billion this year on its metaverse division. The Verge.https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/25/22745381/facebook-reality-labs-10-billion-metaverse

Kwan, C. (2021, December 7). Meta sued in excess of $150 billion for its role in Rohingya genocide. ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/meta-slapped-with-two-class-action-lawsuits-worth-in-excess-of-150b-for-its-role-in-rohingya-genocide/

Lessig, L. (1999). Code: And Other Laws Of Cyberspace (First Edition). Basic Books. Merchant, B. (2021, October 29). Why

Facebook Became Meta. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg/620538/

Meyer, R. (2021, August 5). Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood-Manipulation Experiment. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/

Rabinow, P., & Rose, N. (2006). Biopower Today. BioSocieties, 1(2), 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1745855206040014

Spotland FAQs. (2021). SPOTSELFIE. https://www.spotselfieapp.com/spotlandfaqs.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2012.01.2021&utm_term=Recode

Thompson, A. (2020, September 27). Why the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook. POLITICO. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservatives-2020-42114

Wong, J. C. (2020, December 15). Facebook discloses operations by Russia and Iran to meddle in 2020 election. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/21/facebook-us-2020-elections-foreign-interference-russia

Image: Yusuf Akın Gülsayın

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“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

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When I was preparing for my flight to Edinburgh in September 2021, I felt bleak towards my future in this brand-new city. My booking on Airbnb for the house I would be staying at during my mandatory house quarantine spanned only 11 days, and I was still searching for long-term accommodation every single day. But as Edinburgh, just like many other cities, was (and still is) in the middle of a great housing crisis, this was far from being a uniquely personal experience. The lack of housing for students and newcomers in the city was so unmanageable that the Scottish government had to step up to ensure some regulations were put in place for the main actors behind this artificial conjuncture, for which all the fingers pointed at Airbnb as the primary culprit. The question is how can a mere website disrupt the market without owning a single house? The disentanglement of the answers starts with the word ‘platform’.

According to Srnicek, platforms are ‘the digital infrastructures’ that mediate the connection between multiple stakeholders, such as ‘customers, advertisers, service providers’, or even inanimate objects (Srnicek 2016, p. 47). In order to enable these interactions, platforms afford the means of connection between these groups, instead of establishing their own market space (Srnicek, 2016). In the case of Airbnb, by only providing a common space to connect renters with owners, they hold the access to 5,6M+ accommodations around the world, far bigger than any single landlord. However, being a landlord in this new age of capitalism cannot be solely associated with the image of estate ownership.

In 2011, Sony and George Holtz had a dispute over the ownership of a PlayStation 3 unit, which was bought and ‘hacked’ by Holtz. Although he put forth that he held the means of ownership over the game console that he has bought, Sony’s claim was that he only owned the physical copy of the console itself, while PlayStation as a platform was still under the trademark of Sony. Similarly, Apple has been implementing more and more security measures with each generation of iPhone in order to prevent its users from getting their phones fixed by a merchant other than Apple when it’s broken; meanwhile, ‘the right to repair’ their own phones has been pushed by users for years now. These examples can be extended to software monopolies like Adobe, which have changed their business model from software licensing to cloud and subscription-based ones, or to Uber who provides access to a large network of personal transportation whilst owning none itself. “One reason for Uber’s rapid growth”, writes Nick Srnicek, “is that it does not need to build new factories – it just needs to rent more servers.” (2016, p. 49).

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The whole infrastructure and algorithms created through human labour are hidden behind user interfaces, similar to colonial efforts to conceal the history of exploited workers on the product.

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What these platforms have in common is that they all are commodifying the means of access to their services, rather than giving out ownership of the service they are providing to the purchaser itself (Sadowski, 2020). By gatekeeping the ownership, these platforms ‘diminish the sovereignty that comes with property’ (Kostakis & Bauwens, p. 27), and lead to what is called ‘rentier capitalism’ (2020) by Jathan Sadowski. Very similar to the relationship between a landlord and a rentier, we waive our right to own or possess something through the acceptance of this forced confinement brought by license agreements and subscription-based services. Furthermore, in this new form of capitalism, not only the temporary access to the service itself becomes the product, but also the very data that is produced by the users of the platform is converted into something to be extracted, just like a natural source (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Here, the use of the term ‘natural’ resource is intentional, for it is necessary to store and process the information before turning that raw material into ‘data’. Although Hardt and Negri (2000, p.292) defined the production of these ‘immaterial goods’ such as services or information as ‘immaterial labour’, the very materialised human effort lying behind the process is not to be overseen. The whole infrastructure and algorithms created through human labour are hidden behind user interfaces, similar to colonial efforts to conceal the history of exploited workers on the product.

Yet this brings us to another commonality with landlordship undertaken by those platforms. Through reserving the access to the stored data that they do not create, platforms are ‘reaping what they have never sowed’, as put by Adam Smith to define the landlords (1977, p. 76). Yet, via this privatization of access and the data as the new landlords, capitalism finds itself on the verge of a deadlock of overaccumulation again. Through dispossessing users of their ‘own’ products or data by binding -but never fully read- license agreements, platforms are in the pursuit of a great hoarding that is called ‘big data’, which can be summarized by words of Harvey (2003) as an ‘overaccumulation by dispossession’ (Thatcher et al., 2016). The historical answer to this quagmire has always been the displacement of the capital, as suggested by Castree (2003).  But now that the capital is transpositioning itself into dematerialized’ virtual lands, it is of great question the next possible radius of action when the overaccumulation yet again begins to restrict expansion. Two possible answers might be the pursued behind the future promised by blockchain and web3 are bringing (as lately seen with the emergence of the new NFT market), or perhaps Zuckerberg’s dystrophic fantasy world of Metaverse. Till then, as the citizens of the internet, we need to fight back to regain the right of ownership, before the doors leading us to the outside sue us all.

REFERENCES 

Airbnb. (2021, November 23). About us. Airbnb Newsroom. https://news.airbnb.com/about-us/

BBC News. (2011, April 12). Sony and Hotz settle hacking case. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13047725

BBC News. (2021, November 23). New licensing laws for short term lets in Scotland. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukscotland-scotland-politics-59393508

Castree, N. (2003). Commodifying what nature?. Progress in human geography, 27(3), 273-297.

Clements, B. C. (2021, September 27). First-time buyers struggle in Scotland’s ‘frantic’ housing market. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58684351

 Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336-349.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). The new imperialism. oup Oxford.

Smith, A. (1977). An Inquity into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth and Nations. The University of Chicago Press.

Kostakis, V., & Bauwens, M. (2014). Network society and future scenarios for a collaborative economy. Springer.

Root, T. (2019, July 3). The “right to repair” your computer and iPhone, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/3/18761691/right-to-repair-computers-phones-car-mechanics-apple

Sadowski, J. (2020). The internet of landlords: Digital platforms and new mechanisms of rentier capitalism. Antipode, 52(2), 562-580.

Smith, E. (2019, March 18). Is Adobe’s Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good? Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kgw83/is-adobes-creative-cloud-too-powerful-for-its-own-good

Srnicek, N. (2016). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Verso Books.

Thatcher, J., O’Sullivan, D., & Mahmoudi, D. (2016). Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(6), 990-1006.