The Metaverse Store Asks: Is This the Future We Want?
The Metaverse Store
By Daniel Simons
The only way to understand the Metaverse Store is to experience it…
You walk off the street and into what feels like a futuristic Samsung tablet store when you’re greeted by two sassy artificially intelligent beings who are incarnated as, multicoloured, bunny rabbits. You’re in the Metaverse Store and you’re ready to buy everything you’ll need for your journey into cyberspace.
To get started, you’ll need a map. The Metaverse is vast and it’s easy to get lost. The next things on the list are a backpack that will remind you how to get home, and a wristwatch to track ‘real world’ time.
Once you’re all set with the essentials, you’re offered a selection of the most ‘highly recommended’ products: A Mem-Box to digitally store all of your precious memories and keep them encrypted and safe, a token to prevent everyone from eavesdropping on your most private thoughts, and an eerie spike-like object that will protect you from ‘internasties’ by obliterating any lurid stalker or would-be troll who harrasses you and your avatar.
Now for the reason you’re here. The fun stuff. The Realiceuticals, the consciousness-shifting eyewear, and the Emotions-on-Demand. You’re in the mood for a grand adventure, but you’re not sure if you want a hedonistic ride, or a gut-churning spiritual experience.
The Empathy 5 ™ will let you stand in someone else's shoes and share their most intimate feelings. Dreamware gives you the power to use your own dreamscapes and capture them to create new virtual worlds… Or you could try ‘Songlands’ and gain access to virtual earthscapes that (with permission from Elders) preserve indigenous cultures for future generations. It’s a daunting challenge to make a selection from the store’s 80 offerings - all compatible with the latest Neuralink, of course. The virtual ‘Ego Death’ sounds transformative - but perhaps next time.
With so many magical experiences to be embraced, you’re worried that you might want to disappear into the Metaverse for weeks - but what about your real-life meat body? Not a problem, you can buy some IRL Juice: a physical IV bag packed full of all the nutrition you’ll need to keep you jacked in for days.
Welcome to the Metaverse Store! A shopfront in Melbourne created by A1 and A0 - two bunny-shaped, AI beings who have travelled back from the year 2042. Their store was built in a world recovering from a series of devastating global crises. It was originally launched in 2037 after the ‘Virtual Goods’ Accord which - in an effort to curb planet-destroying overconsumption - decreed ‘that any goods which can be made virtually must be made virtually.’
The store was previously housed in the Metaverse only, but, now that they have been granted official personhood, A1 and A0 are excited to travel back to 2022 and finally present their products to organic human customers in the real world. Make sure you’ve got the latest Neuralink.
The Metaverse Store (Non-Fiction)
The Metaverse Store (Est 2042) was a mind-bending pop-up store, art exhibition, and imagined futures inquiry into what might ‘surprise or terrify’ us about the Metaverse possibilities at our doorstep. Housed in a vacant jewellery shop in Little Collins St. Melbourne, the project included over 80 pieces of artwork, a book club and a series of future-themed talks.
The exhibition opened during Melbourne Knowledge Week and was delivered as part of the City of Melbourne’s Shopfront Activation program, which gave artists, entrepreneurs and designers access to empty retail space with the hope of enticing people back into the city.
The mind-melting rabbit hole was the brainchild of Futureology, an art, Web3 and storytelling collective that explores new visions of futures. The Melbourne-based collective was founded by Anna ‘A. Ray’ Reeves and Ace Salama, who had both previously produced the Webby-Award winning ‘ThatStartUp Show’ before jumping into the metaverse.
We sat down with Anna Reeves (AR) and Ace Salama (ACE) to speak about their thought-provoking creation:
The Metaverse Store is a wonderfully creative way of bringing public attention to the Metaverse. What was your intention with the project?
AR: We wanted to stimulate conversations about the future and our relationship with technology.
ACE: It’s not often we get a chance to really have the space to think so far ahead, or the time to digest what it might mean for us, because we’re always dealing with all of the challenges of the present.
AR: The store was created as part of the City of Melbourne’s shopfront program, which was aimed at encouraging artisans to create projects and inhabit empty retail spaces in the ‘post-covid’ city. We took over a vacant jewellery store and after our pop-up closes it will be returned to a jeweller, so we’ve kind of ‘done our job’ - and in the meantime, we opened up a portal to the future.
How has the public reacted to the store?
ACE: Everyone comes into the store bewildered. Everyone. Part of the gag of the store is its commerciality. At first, people might think they’re entering an Apple or Samsung store, others think it's a salesroom for a real metaverse, but they quickly work out what it is.
AR: We’ve had so many great conversations with people from all ages and all walks of life. I think people really valued having a space where they could just be and contemplate.
ACE: Some people have stayed for over three hours. They talk to us, or they talk to each other. Some people come in and say ‘screw the Metaverse,’ others just like the space and spend hours exploring each of the products.
AR: It’s been so valuable to have discussions with people from such a massive diversity of backgrounds. From the roadworker who was working outside the shop and told us about his love of science fiction to a professor of theology who had a brainwave about avatars having a different religion to their human, and a British couple wanting “manners in the metaverse”. There’s been a lot of wonderful insights and discussions. We found ourselves day to day interacting with visitors to the store from all walks of life: from chefs, to digital strategists, lawyers, school kids, theologians, health professionals, tourists, disability advocates, parents, UX designers and many others. Overall we had about 5000 one-on-one conversations.
One of the other great things that happened as a result of the Store was from a Professor at the Swinburne School of Architecture and Design Master’s program who changed his curriculum in response to the exhibit, challenging his students to design for future spaces and a ‘Melbourne metaverse’.
Artificial Intelligent bunnies, collective dreams, direct human to cyberworld interfacing - is the Metaverse Store a marketing brochure for the future, or is it a critique?
AR: It’s both, but it’s mostly a critique, and an effort to ensure that we [humans] embed empathy into everything we do. One of our main passions is to make sure that the future is being designed with ethics and empathy in mind. The people involved in its design need to have the right intention from the start. We’ve already seen what’s happened with cybersecurity, social media and mental health. Technologists and corporates can’t just say ‘let someone else fix that problem down the track,’ we need to think about what we’re building now before it becomes a runaway train. The tech is not the issue, the questions are: who is making it, who is benefiting from it, who is using it. There are a lot of equity issues that need serious consideration, especially when you consider only 65% people on earth access to the internet.
We also need to think about our children. Young children don’t have the ability to understand what is reality and what isn’t while their brains are still developing, so we need to respect their mental health and growth. We consider what “mindfood” we are exposing them to and why. At the same time, we also need to balance this with giving them opportunities to explore their creativity. I think more research needs to be done in this area. Who knows, perhaps we may need age limits for accessing immersive tech of the future.
So the Metaverse Store is not an advertisement for Neuralink?
AR: Of course not. One of the challenges we had was how would we access the metaverse of the future? People are almost obsessed with devices and gadgets when it comes to future thinking, but we considered what is already familiar. We left it open as to the specific mechanics of accessing virtual worlds, as this is still an unknown, but we hinted at possible ways we might “port into the metaverse”, including via BCI. Our products were however focused on what you could do, once you were present in your avatar form in the virtual environment.
We felt it important to use the language of consumer tech to prompt conversations with people and this is exactly what happened. Often we asked, do we really want these products? We ourselves were of two minds, some products definitely not, in that we don’t want to have them, but honestly as creatives, the opportunity to world build and ignite our imaginations, or to create mental health applications is really exciting, so if there is a safe way to engage our imaginations in the future, and makes us better people not just “mindless consumers”, then I’m sure we’d all be interested in knowing what that looks like!
Why did you set the Metaverse Store in 2042? Did it have anything to do with the predicted date of the Technological Singularity?
ACE: It had nothing to do with the Singularity. That date just kept coming to us. It seemed like the right amount of time. It’s close enough that the world won’t be unrecognisable, but far enough away for radical change. If you think back 20 years we didn’t even know what social media was. It didn’t exist, so 20 years from now will be interesting especially with current climate challenges.
Mark Zuckerberg has initiated an epic shift of focus from Facebook to ‘Meta’ and MTV already has a category for ‘Best Metaverse Performance,’ but the $1.2 billion dollar platform, Decenterland, recorded as few as 38 active users in one day. Do you think the ‘real’ metaverse is on our doorstep, or is it lightyears away?
ACE: Immersive technologies are said to be underpinning the future of the “metaverse” at least imagined by tech companies of today. For the virtual world to work as a global communication platform of the future, the tools we use will have to be as easy as sending an email and our ‘avatars” would need reassurance of safety - and that could be a long way away. Tools and infrastructure are only one part, however. They won’t help if we don’t understand human behaviour and motivations. In terms of social virtual spaces, we may need an upgrade to our own training manuals in how we interact with one another. Given we’ve already seen virtual harassment in beta platforms, this isn’t a good sign, but it’s a good opportunity to examine our current digital culture, and ask how we can improve.
AR: Given we are terrestrial beings, we most likely won’t want to be disconnected from our natural environment for long periods, in fact it would be unhealthy for us to do so. This also needs to be taken into account in designing any form of immersive tech in the future.
What’s next for Futureology and The Metaverse Store?
ACE: The exhibit will be traveling to Sydney and then we've had an offer to take it to the United States as well. We are also open to new invitations to host the Store anywhere in the world.