In the seventy-three years since the United Nations ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], the world has been unable to agree what rights, exactly, should be accorded human beings.
The very idea itself is controversial. The best that can be said of such idealistic documents is that they limit the most extreme abuses to which people may subject one another, including enslavement and economic exploitation.
That's an important achievement because the impending arrival of virtual worlds threatens to compromise human autonomy in the most basic sense.
In a Metaverse as conceived by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you cannot even scratch your virtual nose without the permission of a program controlled completely by the company. There is no standard for virtual worlds. Every single one of them is crafted as a set of technologies known only to the proprietor.
To the extent that moving virtual limbs and seeing with virtual eyes is the equivalent of freedom of movement in a virtual world, no one who enters into a Metaverse of any kind has any autonomy. Their every move is at the discretion of the digital controls of corporations such as Meta that reserve the right to refuse freedom of movement to anyone.
It seems silly to fret over such a situation given that the Metaverse doesn't yet exist. At the moment, it is a figment of Zuckerberg's imagination. And there is reason to believe it is all vaporware that will fail to materialize[2].
Nevertheless, the thirst to participate in a future Metaverse — every press release these days envisions amazing economic opportunities — suggests that many societal activities could become sucked into virtual