In the run-up to the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) restricted all its users from forwarding private messages to more than five people.

The goal, evidently, was to stop “harmful” content, probably political, from exploding across tight in-groups within Facebook’s user population. Such blanket restrictions are indeed effective by their very nature, but imagine what they would mean in the metaverse: private online groupings could be prohibited by their hosting platform (Meta or Microsoft, say) from sharing particular content, encouraged to share more innocuous content, or simply barred from interacting in certain ways.

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Urbanisation and immigration may have caused melting-pot tendencies in the last century, but the metaverse offers previously unthinkable possibilities for undoing the heterogeneity of modern life, separating us out into monocultural strata in which every hobbyist subculture, every sub-Marxist movement, and every sexual fetish can easily find mutual affirmation. Individuality will dissolve into the unified mindset of one’s chosen monocultures. Once having joined a stratum, members will naturally play down their differences in favour of their commonalities, to the point that they forget those differences.

Source: The metaverse will steal your identity – UnHerd

Metaverse enthusiasts see a virtual world of virtual people interacting with one another. Where virtual land can be sold and bought. Where virtual products and services can be exchanged. Where endless communities can be formed and joined.

Or, as suggested in this essay, where self selection into community identify creates even more uniformity – yet the potential for more of “us” versus “them” attitudes. Literally, the real world, but made more intense and worse.