In these days when Web3 technologies have become widespread, a word that has penetrated our daily lives has become Metaverse. This concept, which attracted attention with Facebook's change of corporate name to Meta and a Metaverse-themed launch accompanied by Mark Zuckerberg's avatar, is worth examining the background, although it is heard with the agenda of "buying land from the Metaverse" in daily life.
What is the Metaverse?
When we look at Wikipedia, the concept is defined as "the potential to move beyond the physical universe by moving away from the dimension of time and space thanks to computers, android devices, VR lenses and various 3D user interfaces". The Metaverse, which is seen as the future of the internet, is said to promise to create a virtual public space, and the virtual currencies of this public space are already traded on the cryptocurrency market today.
The concept dates back to Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, and to this day, one of the most important metaverse investors in the world is Facebook, which bought Oculus, a company working on virtual reality devices, for $ 2 billion.
One Step Back: Oculus' Crowdfunding Story
The crowdfunding campaign for the production process of the virtual reality device Oculus Rift is one of the good examples of the crowdfunding option used by initiatives that want to create social, ecological and cultural impact. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus Rift, chose to address a community of VR enthusiasts rather than knock on investors' doors and be rejected with negative responses. The device first made its name known with the campaign on the Kickstarter site. The campaign, which started on August 1, 2012, attracted the attention of many people in a short time and raised a targeted $ 250,000 in as little as 4 hours. In 36 hours, it exceeded the million dollar threshold and managed to collect 2 million 437 thousand 429 dollars by the end of the campaign. In March 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR, the maker of the device, for $2 billion.
Adopting a Focus on Social Good In the Metaverse
In a newspaper interview evaluating the Metaverse, academic İsmail Hakkı Polat describes the vision that Turkiye will implement "to become a country of social and economic prosperity of the 21st century" in the context of the Metaverse: "It must create a social consciousness of those who bring together the east and west, north and south of the country on the Metaverse, building an ecosystem that provides equal opportunities for all and is full of productive practices that will create education, solidarity and employment for the community to unite."
However, he says that the most important task in the transition to 3D environments in education falls on instructional-technology leaders.
Oğuzhan Aydın, who examines Metaverse in the context of equal opportunity, inclusivity and sustainability in his article published in Aposto, points out the potential of Metaverse to "participate in the workforce in a more dynamic way". It will provide equal opportunities for people with disabilities and those living in different geographical areas and will provide opportunities against physical, social and economic barriers, he adds. "It is also foreseen that with the creation of a parallel space by the Metaverse, most emissions related to consumption and transportation can be prevented. Because the metaverse is expected to reduce our need for transportation in the near future, to make the fashion sector,
one of the most polluting sectors, greener by moving to digital, and to carry the blessings of the arts, entertainment and tourism sector to our hall."
The Ekşi Şeyler page, which compiles the qualified definitions in the Ekşi Sözlük, also describes the Metaverse through a prediction on the site: "The savings made thanks to this technology can be spent on solutions such as universal basic income and social policies in a world that is heading towards an inevitable problem of massive and mass unemployment."
Different Assessments of the Metaverse
The Metaverse, with all its positive potentials, is also being discussed in ways that can deepen inequalities.
In their article examining the metaverse, Çağrı Mert Bakırcı and Mücahid Köse from the Evrim Agaci, criticize the fact that "the effort to build humanity's first great simulation, the metaverse, is based on a top-down model, not a bottom-up model." They also question Facebook's role in terms of the risk of turning the Metaverse into a structure to be concentrated in one hand or in a minority: "Those who said the Metaverse would belong to no one changed their name to 'Meta.'" The two also provide a striking example in the context of gender equality: "They continued to run the same algorithms even though they knew it worsened the psychology of 32% of the girls and reinforced the suicidal thinking of some." While examining Facebook's negative reputation with these and similar examples, they also draw attention to harassment and bullying on the internet and ask, "How do we ensure privacy and security in the metaverse, where we will make our physical selves a part of it, when there are terrific security problems even in social media?
The "Metaverse" episode of the Fayn Studio and +90 Co-Produced Magnifier video series explores the concept with the following questions: "What will this next version of the internet look like, with everyone already racing to take their place? Will the metaverse be a utopia or a dystopia? And more importantly, what choices await users in this new world that has been laid?" Dr. Güven Çatak, whose views are included in the department, emphasizes that "people will carry themselves there": "I don't really foresee much change because their own trauma will carry their own troubles there, and because of the income models inside, the poor will still be poor." Cüneyt Durukan, another interviewee, warns that "we can go to a universe where there is actually a national or closed metaverse, where there is a transition from a more corporate-dominated structure to a more nationalist structure, where the internet is more censored and controlled, like an effort to move to a closed-loop internet."
ReFi Türkiye Podcast 🎧️
🌱 Within the scope of ReFi Turkiye program, in all the episodes of our podcast series, which we made with the pioneers who think and build on Web3, we pose common questions to our guests! From their perspective, each guest describes the areas they find exciting about Web3 and the risks they see. As we mentioned above, if you've liked to have encountered Metaverse arguments from different angles, you may also be interested in the reviews in podcast episodes. You can access Spotify here.
Belgesel Önerisi
HBO's documentary We Met In Virtual Reality, shot entirely in virtual reality, follows Jenny, an American Sign Language teacher, as she experiences the metaverse. Before watching the documentary, which conveys the virtual world through the difficulties experienced by deaf communities.