The Metaverse Scares Me – How To Make The Next Iteration Of The Internet Inclusive
I’m a Black woman and the metaverse scares me – here’s how to make the next iteration of the internet inclusive.
Marginalized people often suffer the most harm from unintended consequences of new technologies. For example, the algorithms that automatically make decisions about who gets to see what content or how images are interpreted suffer from racial and gender biases. People who have multiple marginalized identities, such as being Black and disabled, are even more at risk than those with a single marginalized identity.
This is why when Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the metaverse – a network of virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects – and said that it will touch every product the company builds, I was scared. As a researche...