Foundations for Grassroots Democratic Metaverse
This addresses the issue of lack of democratic governance in digital spaces for users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts like cryptocurrencies and metaverse ideas.
The paper tackles the problem of digital autocracy in online platforms by proposing a vision and framework for a grassroots democratic metaverse, where digital communities are owned and governed by people, aiming to transition from current centralized or plutocratic systems to digital democracy.
While the physical lives of many of us are in democracies (one person, one vote - e.g., the EU and the US), our digital lives are mostly in autocracies (one person, all votes - e.g., Facebook). Cryptocurrencies promise liberation but stop short, at plutocracy (one coin, one vote). What would it take for us to live our digital lives in a digital democracy? This paper offers a vision, a theoretical framework, and an architecture for a grassroots network of autonomous, people-owned, people-operated, and people-governed digital communities, namely a grassroots democratic metaverse. It also charts a roadmap towards realizing it, and identifies unexplored territory for further research.