23 November 2021. Metaverse | Status

Selling the metaverse. Challenging the idea of the ‘social ladder’.

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#1: Selling the metaverse

I’m going to leave to one side here the notion that the current excitement about the metaverse is a just a bit of a branding distraction, and take it at face value. Ars Technica has a helpful piece that outlines what the idea looks like, at least if you are a tech company.

But first, I’m going to share a crisp definition of the thing from Matthew Denis at The Manual:

Technologists describe the metaverse as an enduring, shared, 3D virtual environment where people can meet for activities ranging from playing games to conducting business. The metaverse incorporates technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality to create its own world.

All emerging technologies preview themselves in incomplete forms, and we’re certainly nowhere near, yet, anything that someone who had read about the metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s novel 1991 Snowcrash would recognise as being a Metaverse.

(The Metaverse Gallery in Second Life, 2006. Image: Dean Terry/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

All the same, as Denis points out, there are some prototypes wandering around out there:

You can catch glimpses of the metaverse today in virtual worlds offered by Roblox, Fortnite, even from Second Life, which began all the way back in 2003. These applications, however, are missing two critical aspects of a ‘real’ metaverse.

(You might add Minecraft to this list.)

The two things that are missing, says Denis, are first, the idea that you are inside the world, ‘embodied’ inside it, rather than looking in via a screen. And secondly, the idea that the whole metaverse is interconnected rather than being a small walled garden that you visit, typically for one application.

So let’s move on to Ars Technica. It has a helpful list of characteristics that might let us know if we were in a metaverse or not.

- A shared social space with avatars to represent users

- A persistent "world" for the avatars to inhabit and interact with

- The ability to own virtual property as you would physical property

- The ability to create your own virtual property

- The ability to exchange and/or sell your virtual property

- A shared universe of IP from multiple major companies

- Full 3D telepresence via VR or AR glasses.

Summarised like that, of course, it suddenly becomes clear why companies such as Google and Facebook are so keen on the idea. It is the final commodification of the internet. “A shared universe of IP from multiple major companies”? Just the thing to get you out of bed in the morning.

Ars Technica adds a useful distinction between the ‘Metaverse’ (capital M) and the ‘metaverse’ (lower case):

While they sound similar, changing the article preceding "metaverse" can heavily impact the meaning. The difference has to do with control. Broadly speaking, any corporate entity or group of programmers can create "a metaverse" that meets any or all of the above criteria, just as anyone can create a social network.

In contrast, with a capital M, the Metaverse becomes more like a public space, at least up to a point:

On the other end of the spectrum is a completely open architecture, where different entities and interoperable servers connect to a single shared Metaverse—the Metaverse—via a shared set of broadly agreed-upon standards. Successes like the world wide web and email show how this is possible in the wider online world, but similar efforts to establish metaverse standards have mostly failed to catch on.

It’s also worth noting that Stephenson’s version of the Metaverse was a place of escape from grim living conditions. In the physical world, housing conditions were appalling and labour regulations made companies like Uber or Amazon seem benign.

Either way, we seem to be in a world where as Ars Technica observes, a lot of companies think that the metaverse would be a terrific business idea, if only they can get complete control of it. Yet at the same time, this business approach is likely to discourage users from venturing into it:

Absent some sort of workable decentralized standard emerging, we'll likely see dozens of balkanized metaverses fighting for mind share and market share without allowing for much interaction between them.

#2: Challenging the idea of the ‘social ladder’

There’s an intriguing article by Kate Pickett on Social Europe about the pervasive idea of ‘social ladders’—and a hint that people might be getting less happy about this as a metaphor for how our society is organised.

Perhaps this is understandable: the idea of ‘ladders’ seems to have become entwined with the idea of ‘success’:

A quick Google search for ladder quotes turns up ‘the ladder of success is never crowded at the top’, ‘climb your own ladder or you dig your own hole’, ‘you cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure’ and ‘you can never climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pocket’.

Pickett, as you will remember, was the co-author with Richard Wilkinson of The Spirit Level, on why more equal societies are better for everyone, not just those below average income levels.

It turns out that people are very good at grading social rank (we are obsessed by status, as Michael Marmot observed) and the idea of the social ladder is embedded in social research:

Two decades ago, the health psychologist Nancy Adler and colleagues came up with the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status, to measure how individuals perceive their social rank in comparison with others in a group. Participants in such an exercise are shown an image of a ladder and asked to imagine that it represents the social hierarchy of the country they live in, or their community or—for young people—their school. They are then invited to place themselves on one of ten rungs.

Objective measures of social status are known to be good predictors of health outcomes. But so do the sort of subjective judgments that the idea of the ladder elicits.

(Public domain)

Anyway, because it’s a well-established research tool, is quick and easy, and has been used all over the world, Pickett decided to use the ‘social ladder’ as part of some social research into the health of pregnant women in Bradford. It turns out that the respondents didn’t like it very much.

14% of respondents declined to place themselves on the ladder (compared to 5% who declined to answer the previous question about how you were managing financially).

And at around the same time, they also used the social ladder question in Bradford in some research into young people. The young people hated it:

The young people, consistently and vehemently, did not like the ladder. They told us they would feel uncomfortable ranking themselves, that the question implied that money and status were more important than they felt they should be and that they already felt judged all the time by society—they didn’t want to have to think about that any further. The reactions were so strong that we decided, until we can come up with a more acceptable method, not to use the ladder question and hence not to measure subjective social status.

As Pickett says, this presents a problem for researchers. They will need to find a new measure for subjective social status, given that there are important implications for health outcomes.

But this also seems to me to suggest a further weakening of the 20th century idea that job and income were the main drivers of personal status. From memory, we see something similar in Inglehart’s research on changing social values.

j2t#213

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