THREE MORAL CHALLENGES OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM IN THE METAVERSE

Abstract

2021 has been called the first year of the metaverse, which is an independent virtual digital world that is both imitative and transcendent to the real physical world. Many tech giants claim that this technological innovation will bring huge opportunities and dividends to society, but some critics believe that it will also pose challenges to the current social ethics. The important moral challenges may stem from the data issue posed by the metaverse, which is believed to build an unequal relationship between users and service providers due to data-intensive technologies such as VR. This paper argues that the unequal relationships in data have caused the typical consequences of what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism and posed three major moral challenges to our society, including alienation, exploitation, and domination. According to the Marxist account, alienation and exploitation arise from the existence of digital labor and the monopoly of means of production in the metaverse, while by referring to the Republican account of liberty, the emergence of domination can be attributed to the inequality of data possession.