World Economic Forum announces ‘leadership role’ in governing the Metaverse

[Stone]

World Economic Forum announces ‘leadership role’ in governing the Metaverse
The World Economic Forum’s Cathy Li, who is responsible for the Metaverse initiative,

has already suggested that speech censorship will be a necessary part of governing the Metaverse.

Tue May 31, 2022
(LifeSiteNews) – The globalist, pro-“transhumanist” World Economic Forum (WEF) announced last week that it will create governance guidelines for the Metaverse, a virtual reality platform linked to the internet and operated by Meta (formerly Facebook).

During its annual meeting in Davos 2022, the WEF, which collectively predicts and endorses the merging of man with machine, launched its new initiative “Defining and Building the Metaverse,” which it says is “the world’s foremost multi-stakeholder initiative to develop and share actionable strategies for creating and governing the metaverse.”

The metaverse, which was introduced last year by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has been described by the WEF’s Cathy Li as a kind of virtual world that is believed will become “so commonplace” that it will “become an extension of reality itself.”

Zuckerberg anticipates that the Metaverse will be integrated into everyday work, social, and leisure activities. It will enable, for example, the presence of three-dimensional holograms of work colleagues during meetings, or the experience of total sensory immersion in a party across the world via virtual reality headset.

Activities performed “in” the Metaverse could be monitored by the platform’s administrators, which would have the potential of drastically diminishing privacy for all platform users. Integration of all aspects of one’s life with the Metaverse would dovetail with the WEF’s vision of a future without privacy.

The assimilation of such everyday activities into the World Wide Web via the Metaverse also raises the question of whether any speech performed while “plugged in” to the Metaverse can be regulated by its administrators. Such unprecedented regulatory power would resemble that of a global government, which is an explicit goal of the World Economic Forum.

Meta president of global affairs and former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg confirmed the WEF’s leadership role on Wednesday, sharing on Twitter that the WEF “will play a leadership role” in “inform[ing] best practices and governance principles.”

The WEF has explained that its initiative will also “focus” on “economic and societal value creation” in the metaverse, which involves its own parallel economy of virtual goods and services. Such an economy could take on greater importance if the WEF’s vision of the abolishment of private property is realized.

The WEF’s role in establishing such governance and economic frameworks is so weighty that it considers all of its Metaverse initiative members to play “a vital role” in no less than “defining and building the metaverse.”

More than several commentators have noted that the WEF has a tyrannical bent, considering, for example, the group’s endorsement of tight COVID-19 societal controls, such as through track-and-trace apps that help “isolate infected persons from the uninfected.” Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic described the WEF as “steeped in authoritarianism and Marxist ideology.”

WEF’s own stated vision for the rule of the Metaverse is somewhat vague and ill-defined. The group says its governance role aims at “safe and inclusive metaverse ecosystems” that strike a balance between “regulation and innovation.

In addressing the question of just who exactly will govern the Metaverse, the WEF has touched on what it calls the “dilemma of distributed governance,” that is, the proposal to give “users, rather than executives,” economic and governance rights within virtual worlds.

The WEF’s Cathy Li appeared to spurn the possibility of such decentralized power, writing, “While the theory is appealing, distributed governance does not provide an obvious recourse apparatus for when governance challenges get out of hand.”

To elaborate on what she meant by such “governance challenges,” Li linked to a Twitter thread by former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, in which he endorsed online censorship, claiming it has nothing to do with politics or topics, and everything to do with “behavior” and civility.

He cited the censorship of the Wuhan COVID-19 lab leak theory as an example, claiming that it was censored because its discussion involved “massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world,” and because it was not discussed in a “rational, evidence-based manner” by scientists on Twitter.

He further asserted that “ideas” “can be dangerous,” that to allow “debate” of “bad ideas” is “naive.” If WEF governance policies for the Metaverse resemble such a belief, which justifies the censorship of tech giants like Twitter over the past few years, then speech rights during everyday activities could be heavily bridled.