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AbstractThe metaverse is equivocal. It is a science-fictional concept from the past; it is the present's rough implementations; and it is the Promised Cyberland, expected to manifest some time in the future. The metaverse first emerged as a techno-capitalist network in a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Our article thus marks the metaverse's thirtieth anniversary. We revisit Stephenson's original concept plus three sophisticated antecedents from 1972 to 1984: Jean Baudrillard's simulation, Sherry Turkle's networked identities, and Jacques Lacan's schema of suggestible consumers hooked up to a Matrix-like capitalist network. We gauge the relevance of these three antecedents following Meta's recent promise to deliver a metaverse for the mainstream and the emergence of blockchain-oriented metaverse projects. We examine empirical data from 2021 and 2022, sourced from journalistic and social media (BuzzSumo, Google Trends, Reddit, and Twitter) as well as the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This latest chapter of the metaverse's convoluted history reveals a focus not on virtual reality goggles but rather on techno-capitalist notions like digital wallets, crypto-assets, and targeted advertisements. The metaverse's wallet-holders collect status symbols like limited-edition profile pictures, fashion items for avatars, tradable pets and companions, and real estate. Motivated by the metaverse's sophisticated antecedents and our empirical findings, we propose a subtle conceptual re-orientation that respects the metaverse's equivocal nature and rejects sanitised solutionism. Do not let the phantasmagorical goggles distract you too much: Big Meta is watching you, and it expects you to become a wallet-holder. Blockchain proponents want this as well.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are frequently promoted as decentralized, but developers and academics question their actual decentralization. This motivates further experiments with public permissionless blockchains to achieve decentralization along technical, economic, and political lines. The distribution of tokenized voting rights aims for political decentralization. Tokenized voting rights achieved notoriety within the nascent field of decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020. As an alternative to centralized crypto-asset exchanges and lending platforms (owned by companies like Coinbase and Celsius), DeFi developers typically create non-custodial projects that are not majority-owned or managed by legal entities. Holders of tokenized voting rights can instead govern DeFi projects. To scrutinize DeFi's distributed governance strategies, we conducted a multiple-case study of non-custodial, Ethereum-based DeFi projects: Uniswap, Maker, SushiSwap, Yearn Finance, and UMA. Our findings are novel and surprising: quantitative evaluations of DeFi's distributed governance strategies reveal a failure to achieve political decentralization.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are frequently promoted as decentralized, but developers and academics question their actual decentralization. This motivates further experiments with public permissionless blockchains to achieve decentralization along technical, economic, and political lines. The distribution of tokenized voting rights aims for political decentralization. Tokenized voting rights achieved notoriety within the nascent field of decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020. As an alternative to centralized crypto-asset exchanges and lending platforms (owned by companies like Coinbase and Celsius), DeFi developers typically create non-custodial projects that are not majority-owned or managed by legal entities. Holders of tokenized voting rights can instead govern DeFi projects. To scrutinize DeFi's distributed governance strategies, we conducted a multiple-case study of non-custodial, Ethereum-based DeFi projects: Uniswap, Maker, SushiSwap, Yearn Finance, and UMA. Our findings are novel and surprising: quantitative evaluations of DeFi's distributed governance strategies reveal a failure to achieve political decentralization.