Kevin Jae

THE METAVERSE:

AN EXPANSION OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM?

By Kevin Jae

THE metaverse entered into public consciousness in the year 2021. Facebook rebranded itself into Meta and tech giants all over the world, from Microsoft to Alibaba, announced their interest. Attention by the general public quickly followed.

What is the metaverse? In Mark Zuckerberg’s own words, the metaverse is an “even more immersive and embodied internet” where “you’re gonna be able to do almost anything you can imagine—get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create—as well as entirely new categories that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.” 1In Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, users in the metaverse, represented by avatars, will engage in a variety of activities in the virtual world, with full 3D telepresence mediated by VR and AR technology. One can refer to existing projects like VRChat as an example.

Understandably, there is a large amount of excitement about the possibilities of the metaverse in public discourse. However, technologies shape us and our society as much as we shape our technologies—as with any technology, we must be aware of potential dangers and societal risks. The article will briefly explore these risks as a way to introduce another frame with which to think about the metaverse: the metaverse, as this article will argue, could be seen as an expansion of surveillance capitalism. It is a way for tech companies further extract user data and manipulate user behaviour.

As is the business model of a large number of tech companies in recent years, the metaverse is a platform. According to Nick Srnicek in his book Platform Capitalism, 2 the platform model is a response to the growing value of data in contemporary society. On platforms, two or more users interact and produce user-generated content, while platform companies have a privileged position from which to record and extract user data. And as Shoshana Zuboff notes in her breakthrough work, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, selling user data is the business model for surveillance capitalist firms—users are the raw materials and the real customers are other companies.3

The metaverse environment will be owned and controlled by tech companies—they will not be spaces of democratic control by users. In the undemocratic and privately owned spaces of the metaverse, design is not just a means of creating positive experiences for users. Instead, design is a mode of authoritarian control: Facebook and other tech giants can unilaterally impose changes to the metaverse environment for their own benefit. These practices are already existent. Shoshana Zuboff describes three categories of behavioural manipulation through design: tuning,

NOTES:

1 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/everyone-pitching-the-metaverse-has-a-different-ideaof-what-it-is/ 2 Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Wiley. 3 Zuboff, S. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books. 4 Zuboff, S. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.

5 https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/ 6 https://www.insider.com/does-social-media-cause-depression 7 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/metaverse-will-bring-facebooks-privacy-problems-toworkplaces-whistleblower-says/

herding, and conditioning. 4Tuning forces minor modifications in user behaviour through “nudges”; for example, the size, shape, and colour of two options could nudge users towards purchasing an Amazon Prime membership.

Through herding, tech companies control individual behaviour by modifying environmental factors. The immensely popular AR mobile game Pokemon Go was able to herd large numbers of users to a location with the appearance of a rare Pokemon. A similar principle could be used in the metaverse. Finally, conditioning refers back to B.F. Skinner’s work in operant conditioning, in which users are subjected to a „schedule of reinforcements,” a controlled delivery of rewards, recognition, and punishments to produce certain behaviours reliably.

Tech companies utilize and optimize these strategies today. Criticisms have been levied against social media companies like Facebook for creating addicts for their products and services. It is now well known that social media companies optimize their products and services to release dopamine and keep users hooked and producing more behavioural data.5 The results have not been positive, to say the least: social media addiction is linked to depression in both adolescents and adults. 6There are early warning signs that the metaverse will continue the trend. According to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse has the potential to be “extremely addictive, and they encourage people to unplug from the reality we actually live in.”7 The dopamine addiction cycle created by current forms of social media could be supercharged in the more immersive metaverse virtual environment.

The metaverse is not just an opportunity to create a cool new product—for tech companies, it reflects the next frontier of surveillance capitalism. Through the metaverse, tech companies like Facebook will extract even more complex forms of behavioural data and a greater portion of human existence will be commoditized and sold to insurance companies, advertisers, and other, potentially nefarious parties. Data extraction will be accompanied by active interventions—tuning, herding, and conditioning—to control user behaviour.

However, the metaverse is not destined to be antagonistic to the public interest. Through a critical engagement of the technology, the public can still proactively shape a metaverse that contributes to the public well-being.