Can We <i>Really</i> Have Nice Things? Preparing for the Metaverse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Drawing from our previous experience of the virtual world Second Life, we engage in a critical reading of the hype and promotion of the Metaverse in Mark Zuckerberg’s 2021 Keynote Presentation (Meta 2021). We zoom in on the visions of the reality and of the future that big tech leaders promise to legitimize themselves as not only economically but socially and morally valuable. Presented with the help of three broad themes – connection, experiences, and creativity – the promises of a better future articulated in the descriptions and visions of the Metaverse are anchored in a deterministic narrative of technology as an enabler of individual choice and freedom. In this way, the commercial intent behind the world-building actions of a mighty economic actor becomes reframed as merely an expression of users own needs and dreams of a better future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".