Niggling Inequality: A Second Introduction to the Immersive Internet

Abstract

Over the next few hundred pages, you will read a series of postcards from the metaverse. Some are pictures of sites the authors are fond of, or that made them ponder the wonderful. Some are pictures of the authors themselves, standing in front of monuments they made. In this essay I hope to set some context for the images and at the same time point out some common details in them. It often happens that authors will share a context but miss interesting patterns across their contributions. A photograph of nature thrills us with color and tenderness, as the photographer intends, but among any 1000 or 1 million photographs of nature there is a fearful trend: each was taken by a person; nature was not alone there, in that moment. As nature imagery documents our domination of the earth, so the little details common across these metaverse postcards reveal something of our own treatment of that place.