NAB
The digital divide will lock huge swathes of the underprivileged out of
participation in the metaverse.
article here
The next generation
of the World Wide Web is being portrayed in some quarters as a battle for the
future of democracy and justice. It is being positioned as a chance (perhaps
our last one) to remodel the division of labor into something more equitable.
The idea has taken on almost El Dorado proportions among those who believe that
the metaverse and Web3 can be used to shake off the chains of capitalism and
deliver us into a “techtopian” ideal of social and economic equity.
Giles Crouch, who styles
himself as a digital anthropologist, punctures this bubble. In a blog post on
Medium, he points out that we still haven’t figured out equal access to the
internet:
“Only Norway has
enshrined access to the internet as a human right. Autocracies provide access,
but under strict rules. If a metaverse does come to exist, the ideas its
proponents put forward would only suit those who can afford to access it. This
is why it’s an ideal and hard to become a reality.”
But it’s not just
high-speed internet access that makes the socially democratic metaverse vision
inherently flawed.
“To play in the
metaverse today you need a fairly powerful computer and ideally, expensive VR
goggles and a fairly decent knowledge of how this all works and the ability to
afford the games and entertainment offered there,” he argues. “Lower middle to
lower income people cannot play in this space.”
The vision of the
metaverse and Web3 is being driven at the moment by companies like Meta,
Roblox, Epic Games, and venture capitalists like Andreeson-Horowitz, who are —
let’s face it — not exactly altruists.
“These companies
and venture capital firms are not driven by any sense of social responsibility.
If they don’t see a route to profit, they simply won’t play.”
Crouch contends
there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the path to universal metaverse
suffrage.
No comments:
Post a Comment