The metaverse is a reality that, in turn, creates realities, such as the reality of the metaconsumer versus brands. In a beautiful essay, narrativist Bent Hunt says that the metaverse is as real as viruses, you and me. It’s not that the metaverse is outside of reality, like some kind of empty, trackless escape hole. It is a practice that has value and also generates value. However, like all reality, that of the metaverse is social and, therefore, it is a complex reality. Society is complex. Above all, when different expectations converge. Even different interests. It becomes a conflictive reality, in which different models of it can enter into competition or articulation. Different narratives of it, following the discipline of Hunt. A reality with different realities.
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Brands, metaconsumer and metaverse
There is the model of the metaverse as a game space, for competition. Surely it is the one that is most linked to the origin of the concept. It can be considered the original or classic model, to the extent that it evokes that agonistic feeling of the classic, where survival intersects, to continue as a hero in the game, and ostentation after victories.
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It is the metaverse of competition and, like the other metaverse models, it also incorporates a model of capitalism. It is the capitalism of the bourgeois adventurer of the classic German sociologist Werner Sombart. It’s the gamers metaverse. Now, players/heroes who need to be recognized by the gaming community. Deep down, it’s still communal. It is even a community capitalism, even though its participants are distributed throughout the planet. They create and participate in a community economy, in which they play it. They play money; but, at least to the same degree as economic capital, they play symbolic capital in front of their community of gamers. It is a community metaverse.
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Metaverses and transactions
Second, we find the metaverse more directly focused on the market, on transactions. In the metaverse to sell. Spaces in the metaverse are bought to sell. The main merchandise takes the form of “pieces” of that metaverse that are acquired with the expectation of serving as a lever and reference to, in turn, sell other digital products and services. There are well-placed “pieces”, which are found in the flows where more passers-by, powerful consumers, are supposed to pass, as if they were the great avenues of shop windows at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. When the shop window was established as a form of urban life. There are also other “pieces”, located in what is considered the periphery, which are cheaper. In this metaverse model, economic capital is invested to make economic capital.
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This second model of the metaverse is the one that is calling brands, consumer durables and traditional services. It is the model closest to the Weberian proposal: make the effort to save and invest in the present with the expectation of obtaining returns in the future. It is a corporate metaverse, evoking a society built on negotiation and transactions between individuals. It evokes an individualistic society in which the figure of consumers is expected to emerge in the metaverse.
The construction of the metaconsumer
At least, it is what the brands that are investing -buying spaces- in the metaverse expect. A consumer who is no longer like the one we have been getting to know. It is not presented for the first time to the culture of consumption. He knows its rules and, above all, its signs and codes. Know the signifiers that matter, those that are worth, and those that lose value. More than a traditional consumer, major brands are establishing their strategy in the metaverse on the image of a metaconsumer. They are aware that the construction of the meta-consumer is in their hands. As, at a given moment in history, there was the construction of the consumer of massive durable goods; later, closer in time, that of the global consumer of signifiers. Background, it can also be seen that way, of this meta-consumer.
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The third model is the one that can be attributed to the proposal of the previous Facebook. The company led by Zuckerberg is assumed to change instruments; but not of logic, nor of objectives, nor of politics. Not a model. Furthermore, it is projected that the new Meta will try to model the metaverse towards the model that was already present on Facebook. It is a model of surveillance, control and audience accumulation. Accumulation of monitored audience, to be sold. However, the step incorporates novelties, since With the metaverse and those glasses that claim to be directly connected to our neurons, not only the attention of the monitored audience is recorded, but also their emotional reactions.
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Population management
This third model satiates the Benthamian-Foucaultian theoretical perspective, of those who have described our society as a watched society, woven around surveillance devices to manage populations. Through the metaverse, a new step in the management of populations would be taken. It will be a new concretion of biopolitics. Before it was the census, the prison or the clinic, to name just a few of the devices favored by Michel Foucault and his followers. Now It would be the moment of the metaverse and glasses that, more than seeing, are destined to see us, to register our emotional reactions. From the economic point of view, it goes from achieving audience accumulation, which is the real capital in this model, to selling their attention, to get buildup of active audience to sell their emotional reactions.
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Three ideal types of the complex reality of the metaverse. A reality that, in its concretion, will experience intermingling, competing with each other, articulating. Three ideal types that embody three models of capitalism. The adventurer, in which the search for symbolic capital leads to the ostentation of luxury. A model that seems to be little different from previous models, except that this luxury becomes an industry: trades, professionals and, above all, commercial companies that try to satisfy these demands for symbolic capital. Something that, in the metaverse, materializes in the offer of new games, increasingly dying.
Neuromarquetinólogos
On the other hand, Protestant capitalism: the effort of work, savings and investment lead to success. They are success. And finally, monopoly corporate capitalism, linked to a greater or lesser extent to the state. It is the capitalism that Marx criticizes and that relates to the state for colonization, as happened with the East India Company, at the time the German author was writing. With the metaverse, the projected colonization is that of our minds with an army of neuromarketinologists.
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The metaverse of gaming communities. The metaverse of investors and brands that want to get out of the growing dominance of Google and Co. The metaverse of Meta and its advertiser minions. But where are the users? As consumers, they appear to be at the bottom of the food chain.. Change the agent that is at the top: companies that design games, brands of durable goods and consumption or companies that sell the emotions of the audience. They are not all the same; but users don’t seem to be precisely at the top or in the middle. The first metaverse model relates players; the second groups consumers; while the third accumulates audience.
The metaverses are a reality
They are the community metaverse, the individualist-corporate metaverse, and the corporate-monopoly metaverse. As we have been warning, they can feed each other. Just keep in mind that the second model enters the metaverse because it foresees the explosion of the first model, a wild growth that will lead people to be there. And the agents of the second model want to be where the people are. In turn, the corporate-monopoly model enters the metaverse because it anticipates that brands want to be there.
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As Hunt says, the metaverse is as real as you or me. Although it also looks like it is a reality that will engulf you and me, as part of it.
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