Tech industry emphasizes the epitome of efficiency and seeks to commercialize everything in a neat box. Thus, they hate and seek to take over “free” positive externalities that are part of a public space or community while diffusing responsibility for the negative effects they create. The ultimate goal is to monetize everything.
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In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote that clothing “can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially.” In practice, those two functions are intertwined. Even at its most utilitarian — when functioning as a pure “heat-control mechanism” — clothing is still a statement about the conditions we expect to encounter, natural and cultural. The way the tech industry dresses hints at the kinds of cultural conditions it expects to face or, more significantly, the conditions it hopes to create.
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Fashion implies a desire to see and be seen while affirming the need for public spaces and occasions where that seeing can occur. The manner in which fashion circulates and evolves speaks to the kind of shared reality that we are constituting for one another.
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At the same time that tech companies are generating negative externalities, they seek to reinternalize positive ones, such as fashion. They would love to devise a way to own the means by which we can appear to one another; that is, they want all of Arendt’s tables to be proprietary intellectual property. One way of doing that is to eliminate the concept of public space.
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Social media platforms thus structure a reality in which all “shared appearances” are also implicit transactions that can and should be priced. As long as fashion is happening in public, from this perspective, it is essentially a waste.
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Instead of a departure from atomized, feed-based social media, this version of the metaverse aspires to be its apotheosis, an environment where “presence” itself is proprietary.
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Fashion can be understood as a collective experience of the zeitgeist in which everyone can participate, which is open to innovations from outsiders. The tech industry would like to reimagine it as a series of fully instrumentalized status signifiers that attest to our social rank and are always already integrated into branded “universes” of intellectual property.
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