Metaverse Ethics (To Be Or Not To Meta-Be)

Last Monday, Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT updated the 'Expanded Virtual World Ethics Principles' it released last Summer. Now 3 core values and 8 principles are listed under a more buzzword-friendly title 'Metaverse Ethical Principles'.

As far as core values go, 'safe experience' and 'sustainable prosperity' were much more predictable than a 'sincere identity' you usually don't associate with virtual, avatar-filled meta-worlds. But remember that this is Korea, a netizen nation were you're never totally anonymous, and where most of your online experiences require a digital ID or a digital signature (often through public-private partnerships involving such platforms as Kakao or Naver) that keeps getting smarter and smarter, and wrapping around you with tighter and tighter technologies (biometrics and blockchain on the government's menu).

Likewise, if 7 of the 8 principles follow a classic playbook...

- 4 usual suspects: 'respect for privacy', 'protection of personal data', 'autonomy' (as in lack of coercion), 'reciprocity' / mutual respect

- 3 feel-good mantras: 'fairness' / equal access, 'inclusiveness', 'responsibility for the future' / sustainability

... one oddball looks disconnected from the metaverse's inherent... disconnection: 'authenticity' means that your virtual self should behave like your actual self, since the former will impact the latter.

Forget about role playing: that's you up there. The real you, even with those fangs and wings, this embarrassing cosplay, or this spectacular virtual gender correction. After all, this is Korea, where you can't escape plastic surgery, and where you can change your name on a whim. 

The metaverse is not an out of body experience: the economics of attention go 3D, and it's not only your clicks of browsing patterns that will be captured, but also the very way you move and breathe. The more you submerge yourself into it, the better you'll be decyphered, the faster your intentions and your decisions will be detected and shaped for you. 

The guidelines for users are one thing, and service providers have their own duties in that list, but it's mostly about not overdoing it, a very vague self moderation. And of course nothing about interoperability or portability, each one can lay its traps without many consequences. 

In short, the government tells users 'be responsible', but falls short of telling service providers a decent 'don't be evil'.

This is 2022, and the 2020 metaverse bubble has already kind of deflated, a bit like in the crypto / blockchain world, where the collapse of Do Kwon's Terraform predated that of FTX. Yet both remain strategic axes of competitiveness for Korea, so this wasn't the moment to clip the wings of players who were actually involved in these guidelines.

Ready, Player Won...

mot-bile 2022

(video: Naver Z / Zepeto Studio's world building teaser)

Smells like tin can spirit

Bell Labs' prez, Jeong Kim, announced in Seoul that thanks to nanotechnologies, mobile devices will sense changes in facial expressions and even smell people or things. You'd better not eat garlic before videophoning your girlfriend. And watch out next time your company offers you a Blackberry : it might beep your boss each time you lie or recover from booze or pot smoking or all of the above. What a Xmas gift !
"Merry Christmas" is the name of the software developped by Sookmyung Women's University for a PR firm : it crawls across the cyberspace and displays a rather graphical way both the positive and negative opinions on people or issues. US firms are already using such tools to roam the blogosphere, when their employees don't do it directly. And when I say "do it", I mean either roaming (funny how people keep visiting from Redmond, WA or Cupertino, CA) or building the blogosphere (e-pinion minions). Not always in the open.
Speaking of which... Korea's MIC seems to confirm the implementation of its "real-name system" plan by the end of this year. Before posting any comment on the web, Koreans will have to enter their personal ID. Not that of their service provider but the official one they use in their everyday life. The public seems to want that reform, and not only for the big internet players (who often have already implemented it) but for the whole web. Yet, major portals like Daum or Naver fear users will switch to foreign based providers.
So now both your mobile and your cyberalter egos will expose your true self. Not much will change for me : I decided to use my real name on my personal spaces as well as on public fora as a challenge. Every lapse, every mistake, every stupid joke will remain somewhere : I'm sick of the forgiveness of word processors and other polishing softwares, allzusoftwares.

Open Spheres, Personal Spheres, Shared Spheres and Safe Heavens

The fierce debate between Qualcomm's Dr Irwin Mark Jacobs and Forrester's George F. Colony at Seoul Digital Forum 2005 somehow seems reminiscent of the early 2000s war between Bill "Pervasive Computing" Gates and Jorna "Mobility Rules" Ollila.
Why oppose the PC vision to the mobile age mantra ? Broadband Korea proves the handset remains relevant in a VDSL home advertised on TV with the intel inside jingle. Instead of talking about "X-Internet" (for extended internet), Colony should consider dropping the obsolete "PC" term : the PC as we know it is as dead as the mobile phone, long life to the Hubs.
Let's forget hardware and consider the spheres we live in : the Open Spheres, the Shared Spheres, the Personal Spheres often blur and sometimes use the same device (ie the various users environments of a shared home hub), the mobility factor being yet another dimension. In this wild wall-less world, one of the key issue remains security. That's where your most personal device can actually become a key, the kind you never leave far away from you. But not a universal one either (the so-called universal remote control) : not that many people put their car keys on the same ring as their home keys and even fewer would hook both to their mobile phones.
Another spot (or maze of spots) you want to consider is what I would call your Safe Heaven, where you keep your valuables. It can be a portable vault and/or a few remote servers but it's somewhere on the map and you can't afford excluding it from your closest environment.
Even if you balk in front of the one-stop-logging perspective (and you do have a point there), this cloud of references is as consistent as your self, as unique as your fingerprints, your ultimate ID.
Please don't let anyone - and certainly no corporation - steal your DNA (Digital Networking Agility) nor even do any kind of research on it.