My 93-year-old father is also a philosopher of life. One of his frequently quoted sentences deals with the “fragmentary nature of human existence”. What he means by that: People are not always consistent in what they do. The holistic picture of an individual as a unified, moral and responsible being breaks down again and again – due to external circumstances or simply to ourselves.
My father unconsciously foresaw a development that will occupy us intensively on the next ignition level of the Internet, in the metaverse: the fragmentation of individual identity or – the disruption of the ego.
For the virtual worlds of the metaverse, we need virtual representations of ourselves. These avatars, even as hyper-realistic creations, are easy to create using new technologies, such as the Metahuman Creator app from Unreal Engine, the leading tool for creating sophisticated computer game worlds by Epic Games. The app promises to create “high definition people”. That’s more than a promise, it’s the program.
High-resolution describes not only technically the image quality with which the avatars are traveling in the metaverse. The effect that this technology will have on individual identities is also high-resolution. There will not be just one avatar with which everyone will travel throughout the metaverse, even if the problem of “avatar portability” has long been discussed intensively among experts. It should make it possible for future avatars to move smoothly between the different domains of the metaverse.
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According to futurologist Amy Webb, we will be traveling the metaverse with many different avatars. Depending on my needs and my mood, I can then go to the coolest Metaversum club as a tattooed punk lady or sit in the video conference in a blue double-breasted suit. I don’t have to do any of that physically in real life anymore. And no image of myself has to match the many others.
What does this mean for human identity? Or to put it more boldly: Who am I then and if so, how many? “Identity” in psychology is the inner unity of a person experienced as self. It also determines how others perceive us. It’s exciting that even the early pioneers of the social internet interpreted the concept in this way. There’s the well-known quote from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is said to have said in 2010: “You only have one identity. […] Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity.”
Conflicts of identity at the heart of disputes, civil wars or acts of violence
With this statement, Zuckerberg wanted to prevent individuals with different accounts from being active on Facebook, because that is bad for consistent individualized advertising marketing. Things are different in the metaverse: different avatars of a person can each be filled with personalized advertising for individualized virtual products.
It is a social and civilizational achievement that every person has to learn in the course of their own life to deal with themselves as a whole, to endure inner contradictions and to negotiate them again and again in contact with the world. If in the future I can design myself in every social situation in the metaverse in such a way that my avatar is perfectly adapted to the respective environment, then where are these contradictions? Am I going to be boring, or am I going to be schizophrenic? For centuries, human history has shown that conflicts of identity are at the heart of disputes, civil wars or acts of violence. We are seeing this again in Ukraine. Will we transform the metaverse environment into a kingdom of peace with our avatars, because everyone can represent themselves so virtually that everything always fits perfectly?
I don’t believe in that. First, there is the issue of accountability. Will we be able to ensure that a mundane individual is accountable for all the missteps of his many avatars? Secondly, if I am technically capable of designing my avatars in a hyper-realistic way, then others can too. This trend has long been discussed in the tech scene: Individual avatars can also be crowd-designed. Then a whole group designs and somehow has to come to an agreement in the process.
In the metaverse, the identity of the individual will continue to fragment
While that’s an interesting notion, the other possibility is terrifying: there will be a virtual black market for fake avatars. Just as the fake video of a supposedly capitulating Ukrainian President Zelenskiy showed us: The struggle for one’s own position, the own identity of a person, a group or an entire people will continue. Just as we are faced with deepfake videos of celebrities today, the Metaverse will also have deepfake avatars pretending to represent a person.
In the metaverse, the identity of the individual will continue to fragment, only the individual fragments will become smaller and smaller. The American poet Walt Whitman described this as early as 1892 in his long poem “Song of myself”: “I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself. I am spacious, I contain multiples.” This is a poetic description of how human identity is not a fixed construct, that it can evolve and change. With Whitman these multiples will always return to a whole, the ego. In the metaverse they can be on their own, as a cloud of atomic ego particles that have lost cohesion and over which the ego has lost control.
In this column, Miriam Meckel writes fortnightly about ideas, innovations and interpretations that make progress and a better life possible. Because what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly. ada-magazin.com
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