Abandoned in the Camp of the Metaverse

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Culture, Labor, and Meaning Making at Work

Abstract

The metaverse presents technologies that may fundamentally and permanently alter the social and financial landscape of modern society. Despite the liberatory promises of agency, opportunity, and wealth transfer made by advocates of these nascent technologies, they may, in fact, serve to reproduce and perpetuate structures of oppression. Using a Marxist framework to extend racial capitalism to underpaid, disenfranchised workers, particularly those whose labor lies beneath the metaverse, this article combines Farokhi’s (2021) formulation of “cyber homo sacer” with Hammer and Park’s application of the “digital veil” to suggest that without oversight, compliance, and a clearly defined regulatory environment, the metaverse may entrench and even automate structures of oppression for a variety of excluded social classes.

Author

• David Scott Warner, University of Pittsburgh