Smartphones are nearly everything. It’s an alarm clock. An investment tool. A banking tool. A camera. The way clients keeps in touch with employees. And any other thing app developers build for it. It’s a lot to put in a little rectangle in your hands. A malfunctioning phone causes a huge ripple effect on productivity and general management of many’s lives. but they have a high cost and are produced, distributed, and monitored by large private companies.
Now consider your whole reality being under a centralized Metaverse. Ads modify the very reality around you. Server downtime is world-ending. In pursuit of profit, these centralized companies create artificial scarcity and paywalls. That’s why it’s essential the Metaverse is decentralized, democratized, and diverse.
The Metaverse is a prime location to really shift away from so many of today’s current social problems. Our avatars can reflect who we are inside. Trans identity can be respected through one’s avatar. Geographical borders fade away in virtual worlds with shared communities and economies. Every user can vote on ways to modify their world for the better in a democratic way.
But with a centralized Metaverse, the very opposite occurs. As we’d all be on it, advertisers would see it as the ultimate real estate. Our data would be even more detailed. Our every movement recorded. Advertising agencies, instead of breaking prejudices, will often feed them instead in order to psychologically influence people towards a product.
Instead of advertisements being confined to little squares on screens and billboards, our whole environment becomes ad space. Forced product placements would be everywhere. Paid services would be shown in action at every street or room you enter.
Prejudices and unconscious biases – they become replicated by whatever the advertisers create. As of today, the Metaverse doesn’t have a specific agenda or political identity, but with a privatized infrastructure, it will.