METAVERSE AND THE CONTROL OF THE BODY

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.

***

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

***

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.

***

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

***

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