Platforms Do Not Reflect the Social: They Produce the Social Structures in Which We Live. José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society, Oxford University Press, 2018
“Communication technology” is the key to the economic and political process, as it determines the space-time coordinates of society: the forms of organization, the distribution of power among groups, and the types of knowledge accumulated by the people. Harold Innis, Empire and Communications, University of Toronto Press, 1950
Today, we are experiencing a rapid succession of waves of innovation. One after another arrives and, like waves crashing against cliffs, break noisily before quickly receding, leaving behind faint traces of their passage or the ruins of a tsunami.
This speed often prevents us from understanding the scope of phenomena that are not only technological but also increasingly social and cultural. Consequently, technologies and the users who utilize them “sink” into a karst, subterranean territory. Far from media attention, secluded in a niche, users have the time to develop and deepen their use of these technologies, exploring their potential thoroughly and creatively.
This has been happening for about two decades with the technologies we now define as the metaverse, which represent the pinnacle of a trajectory that began with the advent of the social web. In three-dimensionality, they find their most sophisticated and complex form, where identity takes shape in a virtual graphic environment. The avatar is at the center of this revolution.
This paradigm shift occurred in 2006/2007, generating a mass phenomenon: Virtual Worlds. Over time, after the eclipse of their trajectory lasting a substantial five-year period beyond the media “event horizon,” they continued underground until the highly publicized announcement by Mark Zuckerberg in 2021, which relaunched them into the spotlight, making them re-emerge on the surface, giving them new evolutionary impetus and awakening the interest of businesses.
But is the metaverse the opening of a new marketplace prairie? Is it a new medium being added to the array of existing social channels? Certainly, it is both and neither.
The considerations I present on this matter derive from years of project work in the field of culture and digital art within Virtual Worlds and in real life. I have always been interested in the relational aspects of digital society, and this has led me to articulate and deepen the relationship between Person and Avatar, both through personal experiences and by intertwining human and professional relationships, until developing a method of relationship and listening that is very useful in all management and moderation activities in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC).
Experiences in social virtual worlds, called metaverses, vary in type and technology. To be considered as such, they must have a social foundation: they must be primarily populated with relationships and interests, with people and their desires — desires to know, intercept, and satisfy.
Concrete Markets of Immaterial Products
The metaverse deals with markets that originate new products, driven by new needs directed at the avatar that complement those of the person. These markets are composed of platforms with up to 300 million users, such as Roblox, or Second Life, with 56 million users, 10% of whom are part of an elite group of content creators (I believe it is the largest concentration of creatives within a single platform) that generates a GDP of over seven hundred million dollars.
The immaterial market and the material market are inevitably hybridized, intertwined, and configured into various forms depending on the technologies and available resources of the many platforms that today populate what we can globally call “Spatial Computing.”
The Material Market Always Follows the Immaterial Market
It is now necessary to recall a foundational axiom for me: the hybridization of material markets is the consequence of the quality of immaterial markets, and not vice versa.
Historically, when real brands entered the metaverse at the dawn of 2008, they failed in their objective for several reasons, but essentially because they failed in their commercial and communicative policies towards a platform economy of native brands that were much more competitive, much faster, much more integrated into internal social dynamics, and much more aware of the code of authority and the ethics that govern them (understood as role play and role game).
They entered as colonizers and emerged defeated.
Fortunately, there are some (rare) but very powerful examples of hybridization of markets born in the virtual and transferred to the real, and, no coincidence, they come from the field of simulation — the area of the most advanced hybridization between real and virtual.
One small but significant example is Fishing Planet, a fishing simulator developed in Ukraine, which opened an e-commerce store for sporting equipment.
Another truly striking example comes from the world of motorsport, where Fanatec, a German company producing hardware devices for driving simulation, and Assetto Corsa Competizione, an Italian company that produces simulation software, are the official sponsors of the GT World Challenge, the main competition for Gran Turismo cars — a role previously held by the Swiss luxury giant Blancpain.
Another example of an e-sport that has become “real” is Virtual Regatta, a sailing simulation game that became the sponsor of the Transat Jacques Vabre, a transoceanic race between Europe and America.
It should also be noted that these examples are peripheral to the issue; they are not exactly the result of a “species-specific” economy of immaterial goods of the metaverse but are part of the well-established videogame market, and thus of a platform economy: they are companies that sell digital experiences.
But the path of hybridization, or rather, the transfer from virtual to real, is this: a powerful virtual social platform generates imaginary needs that reflect reality.
Four Why’s (Plus One) About Platform Markets
If the immaterial market exists and platforms produce wealth for their participants, why is it not visible?
Because platform markets are endogenous to the platforms in which they thrive.
Because immaterial goods do not take up shelf space; they are not found in shopping centers. They are consumption goods of pure desire, made of the same stuff as dreams, even if they are paid for like real goods.
Because they are vertical markets, characterized by consumers and users of specific cultures. Immaterial markets are primarily long-tail markets, with many products on sale supporting small unit sales, although there are contrary cases of true mass phenomena (always niche).
Because they are User-Generated Content (UGC) markets. I will never tire of repeating it: successful metaverses are those that attract creatives, offer stable and usable technological resources, allow a free and competitive market economy, a reliable transaction system, and clear governance.
Plus One: UGC markets are bottom-up, requiring skills, visions, and creativity. The brands that are born and prosper are those that create quality products and know who they are addressing.
The Metaverse Is Not a Substitute for the Web
For a long time, I thought that the metaverse should be, in the evolutionary paradigm, the direct descendant of the web.
But the web, as we understand it today — a complex and articulated network of computers communicating with each other through global and universally shared (protected and controlled by an international consortium) communication protocols — the metaverse seems to distance itself.
This is true both technologically, as it is still proceeding in evolutionary leaps and generations of technologies that are still (and perhaps forever or for a long time) incompatible and driven by diverse design needs and philosophies with various purposes, and ontologically, which is where the novelty lies.
I have come to the conclusion that the project and objectives of the metaverse are fundamentally different from those of the web. And this is for non-technological reasons, but cultural ones.
While the web has an ecumenical and inclusive nature, generating its success on its neutrality (Net Neutrality is one of the network’s foundations) regarding the content it conveys, the metaverse seems to take the exact opposite direction, intimately linking technologies to the cultural forms of the content it conveys.
Probably for this reason, the integration and universalism models of the web that inspired Zuckerberg’s design philosophies for Meta/Horizon, as well as the techno-utopias of many technophile visionaries, have never taken hold.
If we want to make a comparison with economic models that place content at the center of their business, what, in my opinion, is closest to the modern metaverse is a narrative/cultural model pre-existing technologies, such as that developed in the realm of serial comics — the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
Following this model, the metaverse from a marketing perspective could be configured as a colossal media franchise platform (the metaverse is a brand that seems to be made especially to be exploited for various products and content), formed by universes of narrative content, each of which has autonomous forms of meaning, with its own aesthetics and narrative.
I will not elaborate here on the technological side; each universe will use the devices and technologies that the cultures populating it require to create their own content.
Always keeping content at the center of our reflection, it is evident that the metaverse is configured as a set of numerous and autonomous subcultures that, by expressing their own original values and practices, directly influence both technologies and forms of representation, as well as internal markets composed of content creators and consumers of immaterial content/products.
Generative XR. The New Paradigm of the New Paradigm
But it does not end here. In the technological fairy tale, the phrase “and they all lived happily ever after” never closes the narrative. It is a Perpetual Beta story, which envisages continuous regeneration. Integral to this regeneration is artificial intelligence, which brings the metaverse’s interaction with the real world to an even higher level of integration.
However, I would say that the real novelty lies in the evolution not so much of the created, but of the creator. What is revolutionizing is precisely the figure of the creative: it is they who are evolving through interaction with AI.
This precedes the evolution that AI has not only on the modes of production but also on consumers and their desires, and thus on the development of material and immaterial products that are powerfully intertwined.
I do not know what it will entail, and I do not pass judgment, but certainly, if it is already necessary to trim the discussion on the metaverse market from fairy-tale representations dictated by the very low participation of insiders in the unreal reality, it is even more necessary with the new generative AI paradigm to follow a principle of reality.
Already today, fetish words like “immersiveness” and “experience” are overused, in my opinion.
Caution is necessary, but not prudence. In this sea, to learn to swim one must dive in.
What we can observe, however, is how the emergence of innovative cultural and aesthetic aspects is influencing the production of creativity (and thus of immaterial goods and products), leading us to reflect on the transition to the creation of immaterial products redefined by AI.
Reflections published on the Giannino Bassetti Foundation website on 8–10–2024 (Italian).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
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