Some of the world’s most powerful companies , not to mention countries , have taken the plunge into the metaverse. So activists fighting to curb the power of these institutions in the real world are moving the battlefront to the digital realm. Just as the metaverse can be a powerful marketing tool for luxury clothing , or sneakers , or fast-casual dining , digital demonstrators have logged on repeatedly this year to boost social causes from income inequality to the war in Ukraine. A few examples, to start: Entourage, a French social networking company , helps connect people experiencing homelessness with each other — and caused a buzz earlier this year with an ad criticizing the hundreds of thousands of dollars investors are spending to buy virtual land . In January, Netherlands-based non-profit Superflus organized the first protest in the metaverse outside of Samsung’s headquarters in Decentraland. Weeks later, as Russia launched its invasion into Ukraine, the metaverse offered fleeing Ukrainians and those sympathetic to their plight a virtual venue to make a stand. And as protests rage in China against the Communist Party’s strict zero Covid policies, Chinese dissidents are joining the digital fray, creating NFT collections that symbolize and document the demonstrations taking place on the nation's streets. (Their protests, however, have yet to reach the metaverse, likely because its Chinese equivalent is expected to be built with the intense level of censorship and surveillance typically found behind the country’s “great firewall.”) Guy Goldenberg, CEO of the Ukraine-based tech company MultiNFT who helped launch the protest against Russia’s war as he himself was fleeing Kyiv, said taking to the metaverse at that point “just made sense” — no small feat for a technology still looking for home run “use cases.” Goldenberg described the metaverse as a forum for the kind of “irreversible, immutable freedom of speech” that could endanger your life in some real-world countries. That gets to one of the key differences between the metaverse and the web as we know it now: On a text-based platform like Facebook or Twitter, censorious governments can delete or alter posts after the fact. In a virtual space where verbal speech is the default mode of communication, people experience that speech in real-time, absent the presence of a hyper-vigilant censor. It’s not just non-profits or tech companies that are using the space to make a statement. At the COP27 climate conference earlier this month, Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific, made headlines by announcing plans to upload itself into the metaverse as a “digital twin,” in an attempt to save the country’s culture and preserve its maritime borders as rising sea levels threaten to submerge it. Of course, displaced Tuvaluans will not be able to make a real home for themselves there. And virtual protests don’t exactly have the same real-world impact as, say, a potentially economy-crippling rail strike . But they do draw attention to the cause, in the same way a metaverse Chick-fil-A can draw attention to the company’s brand: You can’t put on a headset and taste a virtual chicken sandwich, but its existence gets people talking nonetheless. And there are even some advantages of virtual protest over its real-life equivalent. For example, in the metaverse anyone can join a protest, from anywhere, for any amount of time. “Somebody gets a link and they can just attend immediately, and they don't have to actively stay there,” Goldenberg said. “You can press a button that your character is raising a sign up, and your character will stay there until you go back and shut it off.” It doesn’t get much more accessible than that – though, it also means the possible rise of fake protests attended by bots that don’t represent support for a cause IRL. Another advantage is safety. While Goldenberg was protesting in the metaverse, his mother was arrested and held for hours for protesting in real life in her home city of Moscow. In places where protestors are often met with violent crackdowns from police, the virtual world offers a way for people to speak out without risking their safety. Some digital activists have taken things a step further. In 2020 Journalists Without Borders created the Uncensored Library , a striking architectural feat in the game Minecraft where users can access articles that are banned or censored in their country. Uploading articles as Minecraft books takes only a few seconds thanks to a script the Journalists Without Borders team programmed, Tobias Natterer, one of the team’s members, said. According to him 25 million people have already accessed the library. Much like the aforementioned sandwiches or sneakers, none of this means marches, protests, strikes and sit-ins are in danger of passing into history. “Nothing can completely simulate the feeling of holding someone's hand for the first time or watching a concert or whatever,” Goldenberg said, “But it's a new addition. It’s another medium.”
| 
