Strategy Director, Ellen Cavell-Clarke, continues her reflections on current technological innovations: this time considering how more expansive thinking around new technologies will open their potential for a more diverse audience.

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We live in an age of technological innovation. Everywhere you look something new is
launching. The Metaverse is coming into view, NFTs have been bought for millions,
cryptocurrencies are launching and lurching every day and billionaires are building
spaceships to circle Mars: the Necker Island of our solar system.

Like other periods in history which house similar epochs of advancement, the whole
thing feels slightly unsettling. It’s not the technology that concerns me; that feels
exciting. It’s understanding the destination and finding meaningful purpose within
those new technologies; a future that is exciting, a future that provides answers for
challenges we have now rather than compounding them, a future we are all included
in.

So, my question is: what are we really trying to create, and how can we make sure
it’s interesting?

Though still in its infancy, the promise of the Metaverse needs to work harder to turn heads rather than roll eyes. This is a world of limbless people in meeting rooms, cafes, shops, and underwhelming game-like worlds. Not only are they hard to access, they are not wholly compelling: why would I need to sit in a meeting room in the Metaverse when I can use Teams or Zoom to see someone’s actual face, or visit them in person? Why would I want to remain away from people when, if COVID showed us anything, it was our need for real human contact.  And why is an NFT of interest to someone who is working out how to keep their electricity on and feed their kids with £20 less in their social security?

Actually, let’s pause here: NFTs are a particularly weird one and we must address them at some point. They are a technology waiting for a problem but with no superior ability than anything we have now. Without true and meaningful purpose, they have instead become objects of gross and cynical investment: playthings for the super-rich who have money to waste. I can’t help but wonder whether the people tinkering with them can’t identify a way to make them more interesting because their frame of reference is limited to their experience …and that’s simply being rich. When Sina Estavi bought Jack Dorsey’s first message on Twitter he called it ‘the Mona Lisa’ of the digital world. The Mona Lisa is famous for many reasons; a layered history of theft, patronage and mystery folded into 77cm X 53cm. Like the Dorsey tweet, though, the reality is underwhelming. (The Louvre around it however, now that’s worth a visit…).

The potential of NFTs and the Metaverse, like any new technologies, rest in our imagination and creativity. Their use and place in society is a reflection of those who engage with them. We see this happening in other areas too: big data for example. We all know that data is only as interesting as the questions you ask it. And so, only as courageous as our own appetite for moving forward. The challenge we have seen in our industry is that as well as the chance to move forward, data has provided us with the opportunity to de-risk. For Creatives this is a huge challenge: brands have become risk averse, shying away from big leaps in favour of organised jumps. This approach doesn’t favour ideas that stand out, rather it reflects things we are already sure of. There is comfort there, in personalisation: it makes us feel known and caters to our expectation for fluidity and relevance of experience. But it doesn’t broaden our horizons or opportunities. It provides small dopamine hits, not big ones. It means a little bit, not a lot.

So too in current hands, NFTs are designed to make money out of money and the metaverse creates meeting rooms for people who like meetings and shops for big brands to sell expensive things to rich kids.

Technology is only as interesting as we are creative and courageous, it is only expansive as the teams that play with it are diverse.

If we want to shift and make better and more interesting use of the technological advancements before us, we need to allow them to break out of the trappings we already battle with in the world we have. We need to stop trying to recreate the Mona Lisa for a business mans’ meeting room and start thinking more expansively.