[New Wave] Conditions for the Metaverse to Become a New Realm of Life

The momentum of the metaverse (extended virtual world), which once seemed poised to engulf the entire world, appears to have somewhat waned with the 'gradual recovery of daily life (With Corona).' Alongside this, skepticism is rising, questioning whether the metaverse is merely an illusion.

However, I think differently. The new experiences that blend online and offline are hard to revert to pre-experience states. Beyond holding meetings online and normalizing remote work, there are now quite a few organizations eliminating offline offices or having employees 'commute' online. Moreover, children around ten years old today experience online classrooms and lessons as the standard for school life.

The traditional mainstream worldview is closely linked to modernization technology. In particular, the concept of identity based on the rationalization of time and space has served as a standard across modern politics, economy, society, and culture. The concept of time allowed the unstable, continuously flowing future to be uniformly segmented and perceived as a stable cycle. This concept of time then gave rise to the idea of efficiency. Many modern salary systems are not unrelated to the concept of time, and the judgment of a competent person has become common sense that is difficult to establish outside the notion of efficiency relative to time.

The same applies to space. Modern Westerners were inspired with confidence to dominate the world by world maps that reduced infinite space into a comprehensible form. This confidence later led to bold actions such as colonial conquests and casually drawing borders on other countries' territories. The rationalization of space also influenced art. Especially, the perspective in painting was a product of spatial rationalization that precisely divided and perceived space. Not only that, from large-scale models of the universe to small-scale gene maps, and even the structure of online spaces called sitemaps, these provide standards of perception.

Subsequently, identity as a rational subject perceiving time and space was emphasized. As the standard of the world, people were regarded as entities whose inherent human rights were unquestionable standard rights. Ultimately, standards were the foundation of values of nobility and the ability to control.

The modern subject of perception and the standards constituting these subjects do not smoothly interoperate in the metaverse. In other words, it is a phenomenon outside modern civilization. Generally, one of the habits of modern thought is to regard those whose standards do not interoperate as barbaric or foolish and therefore subjects to be controlled. Modern Europeans depreciated non-European civilizations with terms like laziness, pleasure-seeking, foolishness, and inferiority, or gave reserved evaluations such as mysteriousness or wonder. The current skepticism toward the metaverse phenomenon is very similar to the past European evaluations of non-European civilizations.

To incorporate the metaverse as a new living domain, it seems urgent to create new standards. Should time in the metaverse apply real-world time, or should a new standard be created? What will be the alternative to the abstract spatial understanding tools of north, south, east, and west? And what kind of relationship will avatars existing within it establish with offline subjects?

These discussions are by no means empty humanities play. Closely, they concern the value of labor for the younger generation familiar with the metaverse, and more broadly, factors related to sustainable social order. Those who aspire to be leaders in the metaverse era cannot avoid nor should they avoid these issues.

Lee Jang-ju, author of ‘How to Communicate with Children of the Game Generation’ and director of Irak Digital Culture Research Institute