If nothing else, the metaverse is already creating job for futurologists to pontificate on how consumers will behave when we spend every waking hour strapped into VR headsets.
For those in search of an insight into how we will dress in cyberspace, look no further than Screenwear, a paper from Vice Media’s creative agency Virtue Worldwide. It has previously written reports on other epoch-defining topics like Animal Crossing, the “digital renaissance” and the “collective awakening” of Gen Z.
Screenwear itself is a whopping 96 page analysis of the sector which promises to “go beyond statistics and inside culture”, and get inside “culture 3.0”.
What it ends up doing is exposing the continued ambiguity about what the metaverse actually means — despite the vast sums of money being poured into projects — and the historical amnesia required to make it sound new.
Before we get to the report itself, you should take a look at the NFT collection launched alongside it. My personal favourite is the Buckaclava, a bucket hat/balaclava which represents “complete creative freedom untethered by physical limitations”, while being an easy — if unflattering combination — to create in the real world.
The analysis itself is based on a survey of 3,000 respondents, plus interviews with experts, including NFT artists and creators (who some might speculate have a vested interest in bigging up the industry).
We first hit a bit of a bump with its “short history of the future” (which really just a list of digital “things” and some sci-fi).
Famously, nothing else relevant to the intersection of online culture and fashion intersect launched between 1992 and 2009. Nothing at all. Not a single sausage.
The decision to include Bitcoin and Ethereum in the category in a history of the “future” is also looking hairier as the great crypto crash of 2022 continues apace (at least Terra didn’t make the list).
But perhaps you say that history is old hat. Virtue’s research on responses to the word “metaverse” seems more promising (Ignore the 200 per cent figure: respondents could choose multiple entries).
But while the report says 83 per cent of people had a “positive perception”, the biggest category was “curious” (according to 50 per cent of all respondents). Polysemy is a tricksy business — I can be curious as to whether my dog has emptied the bin; I am not positive about it.
That less than half said they were unequivocally excited or inspired by the word “metaverse”, and at the very least a fifth of respondents voiced unhappiness, is perhaps more telling.
My own enduring experience of the metaverse was a press conference before the Australian Open’s launch in Decentraland, a digital world which Virtue’s history helpfully points out began before the Trump presidency.
Seven years of work could sadly not counter connection issues, which meant the Q&A of the future had to take place on Google Hangouts with videos off. I’d say that’s quenched my curiosity for now.
At this point, you might be asking how Virtue defines the metaverse, a notoriously vague term. The answer appears (sort of) a couple of slides later:
The real metaverse seems to be whatever we wanted it to be all along. Sent a selfie with rabbit ears? You had a metaverse experience. Wasted hours of your time on Runescape as a child? You had a metaverse experience. Dumped your life’s savings into dogecoin? That’s right, you had a metaverse experience (and you are probably pissed).
Virtue did give more of a definition when contacted:
In general, we like to think of the Metaverse as a shared fantasy — an altruistic delusion, if you will — that’s larger than the sum of its parts (crypto, XR, gaming) and is fundamentally about bringing back excitement to an internet that has left most people jaded for the last many years.
So that’s cleared up.
Now we know the metaverse is apparently a meaninglessly broad term for “online things we like”, we can move on to how the report treats digital identity, which it found was the biggest selling point for virtual fashion.
On the surface, this feels like more solid ground. People have been using virtual worlds to explore gender, race and sexuality for decades, often subverting the design constraints of platforms. See Julian Dibbell’s 1993 article A Rape in Cyberspace or Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest for both the good and the bad.
But to sell the ‘new’ era of metaverses, that history has to be swept aside in favour of breathless speculation.
“Can you be a body that is not yours? Can you be an ethnicity that is not yours?” asks one expert, tossing out questions to which the answer has been “YES” since the late 20th century.
And then we slide into talk of the “digital self”, which suggests a divide between virtual and physical identities, rather than a single, complex whole. This fallacy of “digital dualism” was described by Nathan Jurgenson, sociologist at Snap all the way back in 2011 (Tim Bradshaw interviewed him back in 2019 here).
Therein lies the great waste of too much “metaverse discourse” which would rather focus on selling a utopian future than asking whether the new ‘verses will be better than what we have currently.
If you want to tell brands that the kids are going to spend half their lives in Bored Punk Kitty Land, old-fashioned cyberpunk thinking doesn’t cut it.