Introduction

At the cusp of the last millennium, during the meteoric rise of Silicon Valley, Barbrook and Cameron (1996) published a critique of the sacralization and fetishization of the Californian ideology. Founded in the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco, they described the ‘ideologue’ as a global heterogenous orthodoxy championing cybernetics and free market economic liberalism, and a paradoxical blend of the counter-culture-libertarian individualism of hippie artisanship and technological determinism. Tracing the socio-political roots of the Californian ideology-led dotcom revolution, the authors painted a cynical futuristic portrait of the then-unprecedented ascent of technology, steeped in social and racial polarization, even evoking echoes of historical oppression like slavery. They critiqued this blend of the New-Left and New-Right, envisioning hi-tech digital utopianism, and the fallacy of an egalitarian Jeffersonian democracy by being myopic toward discrimination, poverty, and sustainability. Three decades later, the Californian ideology remains prevalent and the prophecies of Barbrook and Cameron (1996) ring true, as the once-vaunted technological determinism now seems less liberating and more oppressive, raising grave concerns regarding privacy, consumer trust, ethics, and the sway of surveillance capitalism.

As we transition from an interactive landscape of web 2.0 to the decentralized realm of web 3.0 (Murray et al., 2022), humanity is on a precipice, standing on the brink of technological advancements that are both exciting and concerning. Many new technological developments are either becoming or have already become pervasive in the marketplace, for example, smart devices, social media, e-commerce, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR)—including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR)—algorithms and big data, blockchain-enabled applications—such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are unique digital collectibles purchased on the blockchain, cryptocurrencies and metaverses—robotics, genetic engineering, wearables, and the Internet of things (IoT). Interpretive research in digital marketing predominantly focuses on the social organization of consumers and digital consumer culture (Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010), platformization and algorithmic culture (Ulver, 2022), surveillance capitalism and ethical concerns (Darmody & Zwick, 2020), social media labor, and ideologies and the politics of consumption in a digital world (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996).

With the emergence of, and increased global attention on, technological advancement of web 3.0 and the metaverse (Barrera & Shah, 2023), marketing scholars and practitioners are increasingly becoming interested in understanding how these developments will shape the future of consumption. While few researchers within digital marketing have begun exploring web 3.0 and the metaverse (Belk et al., 2022; Hollensen et al., 2023; Murray et al., 2022), their focus has largely been on instigating academic discourses on the metaverse, due to its novelty, by fleshing out conceptual understanding and developing a research agenda (Barrera & Shah, 2023; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2022). However, in digital marketing, little attention has been paid to investigating marketing and the societal implications of these new technological advances (Tikkanen et al., 2009). The metaverse, as a technological advancement, is poised to shape marketing and retail strategies in the years to come. However, such developments and the potential implications—both marketing and societal—are even less explored in the realm of retail (Bourlakis et al., 2009). To address this asymmetry, the chapter—using a McLuhanian theoretical lens and the metaverse as an illustrative example—will explore how technological advances can shape our future consumption, marketing, and society.

The rest of this chapter is structured as follows: First, I briefly introduce the work of McLuhan, which serves as a theoretical lens for understanding how emerging media technologies shape society and consumer culture. Subsequently, to illustrate the implications of technological advances, I zoom into the concept of the metaverse as an emerging technological development. This is followed by an empirical exploration of how brands have harnessed the current rendition of the metaverse to shape consumption, thereby expanding our understanding of marketing in the metaverse. Taking stock of these examples, which illuminate a future interwoven with mixed realities, the chapter then concisely highlights how marketers can navigate this hybrid path. Zooming out from the illustrative example of the metaverse, the final section of the chapter encourages readers to contemplate the socio-cultural and politico-legal implications of the technological advances shaping our future. A techno-political matrix is presented that envisions alternative future scenarios that can help us both understand the implications of technological advances and anticipate potential future changes. The chapter provides an enrichment of the research frontiers of digital and retail marketing.

A McLuhanian Lens

The Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan studied how media technologies have shaped society over the years. According to McLuhan (1994, 1962), society has evolved from a preliterate age of oral discourses—dominated by mouths and ears—to the age of the manuscript, where words could be written down and communicated without distortion. Thereafter, the era of Gutenberg’s printing began, characterized by the dominance of the written text and visual information, enabling the widespread reproduction and dissemination of knowledge. This was finally succeeded by today’s electronic age, driven by the technological medium of electric light, or pure information. He argued that, while mechanical technology has detribalized humans, the electronic medium is retribalizing them, whereby multisensory involvements are key. His description of the electronic media involved the emergence of radio and television, and subsequently the early-iterations of computers. However, the Internet today—as well as new technological advances such as the metaverse—is perhaps a more vivid rendition of McLuhan’s conceptions.

McLuhan and McLuhan (1992) highlighted the notion of ‘acoustic space’—the natural mode of spatial awareness—to explicate how the world, during the time of printing press, was viewed as a fragmented and sequential vision that supplanted an earlier ‘acoustic’ world. During the electronic media age, television has brought us back into this preliterate mode of acoustic space, akin to a village crowd, via screens that simultaneously displayed identical content to everyone, everywhere. In studying the consequences of media technologies, McLuhan (1962, p. 31) argued that electronic media technologies are reproducing the world “in the image of a global village”. Also, while this metaphor of the global village was employed to explain the advent of the medium of television, today the Internet serves as an even more apt representation of a global village connected beyond transnational borders, with potentially more interactions—as one would expect in a village—than the one-way medium of television. McLuhan’s notion of the global village highlighted interdependency, diversity and a lack of conformity. This can be evidenced in today’s proliferation of digital media, giving rise to a fragmented and algorithmically polarized media landscape (Ulver, 2022). McLuhan indicated that the global village would alter the power structures of societies. With information on television still being controlled by certain powerful groups—for example, governments and media conglomerates—the Internet has ushered in a promise of a more neutral medium with the democratization of information, as mediated by many. However, it could be argued that, during the era of platformization, power has merely shifted toward big tech companies, which can regulate and control information (Ulver, 2022). Surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation have been framed as the empowerment of consumer choice contexts and decision-making (Darmody & Zwick, 2020). Nevertheless, the promise of a decentralized web 3.0 (Murray et al., 2022) could perhaps take us closer to McLuhan’s true global village.

To McLuhan (1994, p. 8), a medium is any extension of our bodies, minds, or beings, while the message is “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs”. He argued that the characteristics of a particular medium structure its content, and the content becomes inconsequential. McLuhan (1994, p. 9) famously exclaimed, “the medium is the message”, since:

it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

Barbrook and Cameron (1996) highlighted that the advent of the Californian ideology can be traced back to ‘technophiliacs’ being inspired and driven by McLuhan’s ideas and predictions, including his ideal of technological determinism. The French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard viewed McLuhan not as a technological determinist, but as a techno-optimist. McLuhan’s (1994) technological determinism depicts the lack of the emancipatory potentials of the media, because he framed humans as embedded within, and powerless to escape from, the perennial panopticon of the media. In his later work (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1992, p. 7), he posited a set of four questions—which he referred to as ‘tetrad’—to encourage adjudication of the impact of a medium and to understand its future implications: (1) “what does it enhance or intensify?”, (2) “what does it render obsolete or displace?”, (3) “what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?”, and (4) “what does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?”

Using McLuhan as a theoretical lens, the next section explores the emerging concept of the metaverse. A McLuhanian perspective offers a conceptual toolbox for understanding how new media technologies have shaped individuals, culture and society, seamlessly fitting with the objective of this chapter, which also aims to expand our understanding of how technological advances shape our consumption, marketing and society. Viewing the metaverse as a new technological medium poised to alter how we communicate provides us with an alternative lens for looking at technological advances. McLuhan’s way of looking at technology, as an appendage to humans, also aligns with how the metaverse can serve as human extensions.

Data was collected using the keyword “metaverse” across academic databases including Google Scholar and Scopus. Furthermore, I examined discussions on the online platform Reddit, consulted industry reports, white papers, and research centers, and analysed articles from online magazines and newspapers. Through a systematic cross-referencing and analysis, the study identified the top 50 most frequently mentioned applications of the metaverse.

The Metaverse

The metaverse has garnered significant attention, with the social media giant Facebook rebranding to Meta Platforms and unveiling its vision of creating a place where we can work, play, and connect with others in immersive, online experiences. There is no universally accepted definition of the metaverse (Golf-Papez et al., 2022), making the concept highly fragmented. However, most scholars agree that it is an imagined future XR space (Belk et al., 2022), a seamlessly hyper-connected VR-based digital universe (Barrera & Shah, 2023) where users can create avatars and interact with others in 3D in the same way as they physically do now (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2022; Hollensen et al., 2023; Murray et al., 2022), an immersive reality where physical and digital converge (Golf-Papez et al., 2022). Ball (2022, p. 42) defined the metaverse as:

a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.

The concept of the metaverse is, thus, a seamless, hyper-real, shared, immersive, interconnected and embodied virtual realm where people can roam widely and engage in various activities using their interactive avatars. According to Mark Zuckerberg, it is an embodied form of the Internet that makes use of other technological advances—such as VR, AR and AI—where, instead of viewing the content, we become immersed within it. It is prophesied to become the successor to the mobile Internet and to shape the future as regards how we interact and experience our lives, conferring opportunities for brands to create new offerings and experiences (Murray et al., 2022). However, the metaverse is still in its infancy and remains a work-in-progress. Thus, it may possibly take years to flesh out and realize its promised potential.

Although the ‘metaverse’ went mainstream with the Facebook rebrand of 2021, the concept of the metaverse has been in place for a long time. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992). However, the notion of such a virtual world has been a popular sci-fi trope for even longer, in books such as Pygmalion’s Spectacles (1935) and movies such as Tron (1982). The application of the metaverse to retail and digital marketing can be traced back to the early 2010s (Bourlakis et al., 2009). These early iterations of the metaverse have been online virtual worlds, in most cases massive multiplayer online role-play games, for example, Second Life (SL), one of the most widely employed examples in the literature (Bourlakis et al., 2009; Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010; Tikkanen et al., 2009). SL is an online multimedia platform, where users can create an avatar and live a second life in a virtual realm created almost entirely by those adopting the SL platform as a space for creativity, virtual construction, socialization, and economic exchange. According to Bourlakis et al. (2009, p. 140), “metaverse retailing, i.e. retailing that takes places in metaverses, is a rapidly evolving phenomenon that may spark the next evolution of retailing”. In the retail literature, this notion of creating more interactive and engaging consumer experiences, in order to render a different and special service offering, is known as retail theater (Bourlakis et al., 2009). For retailers, the metaverse offers a new spatial dimension which can be used—along with physical bricks-and-mortar (B&M) and electronic stores, including websites and social media, to offer consumers a type of store in a (possibly shared) 3D virtual space, where they can experience shopping by means of wearing a VR headset and virtually entering and walking around this metaverse store, picking up items from the shelves and filling their shopping carts, thus affording them a more real shopping experience than web stores, from the comfort of their private domains.

In the digital marketing literature, Denegri-Knott and Molesworth (2010) have introduced the notion of ‘digital virtual consumption’ (DVC) to conceptualize simulated consumption practices in online virtual spaces, enabling consumers to act out fantasies that cannot be provided by material consumption. Differentiating between virtual consumption (located in the consumer’s imagination) and digital consumption (mediated via a digital environment), as well as material consumption, they theorized DVC as a liminal space between the virtual and the material, enabling consumers to move beyond their imaginary minds and to reify their fantasies in a digital virtual space lacking material manifestation as it cannot be used in real life. For instance, consumers can act out their fantasy of being a wizard, daydream about living in a fictional world, or desire to purchase a magical sword that has no use in the metaphysical reality. The digital consumer culture has led to the proliferation and fragmentation of identities, enabling consumers to assume hybrid—and even stigmatized—identities in terms of gender and sexuality. McLuhan’s notion of the media as a prosthetic extension of humans and their nervous systems can be deployed in order to view the metaverse as a hybrid extension of ourselves and our senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Metaverses could potentially offer individuals ways to embody various identities and fulfill fantasies, manifesting themselves as avatars and enabling the extension of the self to an unprecedented level. Web 3.0 is prophesied to alter how information would be disseminated, enabling more peer-to-peer interactions between individuals and with information being stored in various decentralized locations (Murray et al., 2022). This could lead us toward a more refined rendition of McLuhan’s global village and potentially ‘retrieve’ the era of oral discourse when information proliferation was decentralized through peer-to-peer networks.

Using a McLuhanian lens, it can be argued that the metaverse should not be viewed in terms of its affordances—the technical architecture and the vast array of functions that it offers—but in terms of its capacity to shape society and culture, paving the way for new modes of socio-cultural expression and experience. According to McLuhan (1994), throughout history, technological advances have been the driving force transforming and reconfiguring society in various ways. It was the medium, rather than the content that brought such pervasive change to how society was organized, for example, Johann Gutenberg’s printing press led to Henry Ford’s culture of mass standardization. McLuhan stressed the power of the media to alter the course of human life and our social relations. In a similar vein, the participatory nature of web 2.0 has already patterned our lives, with web 3.0 similarly being poised to manifest a significant restructuring of society. As a new medium, the metaverse is different from those preceding it, because it enables a fully immersive experience in virtual realms, potentially engendering a fundamental shift in how we view the world and experience embeddedness in multiple realities. Echoing McLuhan, it is not the content, but the powerful potential of the metaverse as a medium that will shape our future. According to McLuhan (1994), electronic media catch our attention because of their hypnotic ability to engage with our senses using a ‘light-through’ invitation. The metaverse enables even deeper engagement with our senses (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2022). It can be framed as ‘cool media’, in McLuhan’s (1994) words, since it offers high participation, with users having to engage in most of the work themselves.

Marketing in the Metaverse

As with Meta Platforms, many other tech-based companies have jumped onto the metaverse bandwagon. Today, simulation games and social networks are the most common forms of virtual environments or proto-metaverses (Ball, 2022) which facilitate socializing, shopping, gaming, and working. Popular proto-metaverses today include Horizon Worlds (current rendition of the metaverse by Meta Platforms, where users can socialize, create user-generated content, collaborate and work, and be entertained in a VR universe), IMVU (a 3D avatar social networking platform that enables users to explore thousands of virtual worlds to socialize, create and play), Green Park Sports (creating digital experiences and games for the new generation of sports and e-sports fans), Decentraland (a decentralized 3D VR destination for digital assets, owned by the users, who can use the marketplace and cryptocurrency to buy/sell virtual real estate, NFTs and avatar wearables), and many more. Although the metaverse, as envisioned, will not be a standalone virtual space, these early iterations offer a glimpse into what could potentially evolve into intricate, interconnected, immersive environments, where brands have the opportunity to offer various facets of business, communication, community, entertainment, work, and education (Belk et al., 2022).

Examining contemporary marketing practices within the current iterations of virtual environments reveals a spectrum of marketing activities adaptable to metaverses. These encompass the curation and utilization of NFTs and their marketplaces, organizing virtual events and experiences within metaverses—spanning from gaming tournaments and sporting events to political campaigns, museum exhibitions, music festivals, tours and fashion shows—the establishment of virtual workspaces for collaborative employee activities, creating virtual advertisements, the cultivation of virtual talents and avatar replicas, the integration of AR-powered try-ons, crafting crypto-driven campaigns, or constructing virtual stores or platforms tailored for shopping experiences. Gaming platforms like Fortnite and Roblox have demonstrated how marketers can use 3D immersive spaces to offer virtual experiences (Hollensen et al., 2023). Examples in Fortnite include; in-game concerts by Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, collaboration with the National Basketball Association (NBA) in releasing team jerseys and other digital items, allowing fans to explore London’s O2 Arena and the Verizon Super Bowl stadium in order to socialize and play mini-games, cross-over events with Marvel Universe, and, during the 2020 US elections, the Biden-Harris campaign promoted and educated potential voters using a ‘Build Back Better with Biden’ map inside the game. Examples in Roblox include; musical performances by Lil Nas X and a Zara Larsson album launch party, an interactive virtual exhibit and multimedia experience by Gucci to promote Garden Archetypes, Netflix’s Stranger Things launching ‘The Starcourt Mall Experience’, which was a key location in the third season of the series, Warner Bros. promoting their movie ‘In the Heights’ by featuring an in-film neighborhood location and interactions with the movie, Hyundai Motors creating five theme parks in Mobility Adventure, and PacSun offering its branded products in the Avatar Marketplace, enabling users to customize their appearance. Bloxbiz offers brands opportunities for in-game 3D billboard advertisements within Roblox, for seamless integration without disrupting the consumer experience.

The metaverse combines various interconnected technological advances, thus potentially enabling marketers to leverage emerging technological developments—such as NFTs and XR—in order to offer consumers more personalization in retail and a holistic customer experience. At the core of the Metaverse, AR plays a pivotal role as it converges digital and physical realms. Brands have already embarked on seamlessly integrating AR, curating interactive consumer experiences that amplify real-world environments. Within retail, AR has already flourished, ushering in profoundly interactive shopping experiences. During the pandemic, many fashion retailers, such as Gucci, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, Mac cosmetics, Smashbox and others, integrated AR to enable consumers to try out their products virtually. Digital fashion has already taken off, as we are increasingly using the digital realm to find new ways to express our identities and creativity (Ball, 2022). During Decentraland’s Metaverse Fashion Week (#MVFW) 2022, over 60 brands, artists and designers showcased wearable collections. NFTs are facilitating direct-to-avatar commerce: In fact, “the most successful NFT collections are not for virtual goods nor trading cards but identity- and community-oriented ‘profile pictures’ such as Cryptopunks and Bored Apes” (Ball, 2022, p. 270). The rise of block chain, cryptocurrencies, and a burgeoning NFT marketplace are arguably key ingredients of future commerce in metaverses. Axe engaged in a social media giveaway of “dogecans,” a playful reference to Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency. These dogecans contained Axe’s latest fragrance, named ‘48H Crypto,’ enveloped in the recognizable meme that originally popularized the cryptocurrency.

Many retailers have already started developing their own proto-metaverses to offer immersive retail experiences. For instance, SK-II City is a virtual destination designed in the likeness of Tokyo, where consumers can engage with the skincare brand SK-II. Avatars are key to the metaverse, as digital personas are being created online, modeled on (non)real humans. Genies enables creators to construct digital doubles and sell virtual goods, encouraging consumers to become their “fantasy selves” (Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010), by collecting and trading wearable NFTs. Epic Games has launched Unreal Engine, an open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool for developing photoreal visuals and immersive experiences—including the ability to create MetaHumans—and this is used by other makers of games, movies and graphics. K-pop band Eternity is made up of 11 members created using Deep Real AI and a deep-fake virtual imaging technology, while virtual influencer Lil Miquela shares music on Spotify and both living and dead celebrities have performed as holograms. Just as in the physical world, brands, branded offerings and branded environments—such as ‘Nikeland’, a virtual world within Roblox—will significantly influence how consumers behave in the metaverse (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2022). So, what do these existing marketing practices in virtual worlds tell us about navigating a future embodied by the metaverse?

Navigating a Mixed Reality Future

The American political philosopher Robert Nozick (1974, p. 42) postulated a thought experiment whereby he offered a choice between our experiences in the real world and a carefully curated and desirable simulated reality:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?

He argued that humans would always prefer to do things and live their experiences rather than merely have the experience and constrain themselves to a man-made reality, bounded by the constraints of previous human experiences. The simulated reality of the sci-fi film series ‘The Matrix’ was a more evocative demonstration of the same thought experiment—the red pill (reality/truth) or the blue pill (simulation/illusion)? In his book, Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard (1994) has posited that our society/consumer culture has become a hyper-real simulation of symbols and significations that imitate but have become more real than the real world. Virtual realms like the metaverse offer a type of escapism and an extension of our consciousness, with the hyper-real set to encroach into the real, in our quest for a utopian future. As the lines between our physical and virtual realms become blurred, how does the future look?

Taking stock of the emerging innovations and current marketing practices highlighted in the previous section, let us dive into the potential avenues for navigating a mixed reality future.

Immersive Embodied Experiences to inhabit hybrid space is, perhaps, the most prophesied way to navigate the future of retail. The metaverse introduces collaborative shopping as a pivotal retail sector (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2022). Personalized AR touchpoints (such as virtual fitting rooms) have become mainstream due to retailers delivering customized shopping experiences. For example, Mashable Home is a virtually rendered 3D house experience by Walmart, whereby users can navigate—in 360 degrees—a home filled with art, editorial content, videos, interactive games and opportunities for shopping. Thus, retailers can offer immersive experiences that are impossible in real life because they can transcend physical limitations. During the pandemic, museums, galleries, fairs, and conferences initiated digital virtual viewing rooms for exhibitions. Various institutions have made forays into offering immersive virtual exhibition experiences, such as the Smithsonian, the New York Metropolitical Museum of Art, the British Museum, Rijksmuseum, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, and many more. This offers collaboration opportunities for product showcasing with emerging platforms or designers.

Tokenization and the ‘Phygital’ Fusion have gained momentum as NFTs are being used as digital artworks, virtual fashion items, in-game skins, digital collectibles, video highlights, virtual places, domain names, and so on (Hirsch, 2022). Digital images are increasingly being owned and sold to be displayed as artworks in homes and galleries. Infinite Objects has created pre-programmed digital frames, containing artworks or consumers’ own customizable videos. NFT platforms (e.g., Exclusible) and virtual real estate markets (e.g., Sandbox), respectively enable the purchase of digital collectibles and virtual land. As digital and physical realities become increasingly intermeshed, particularly given the fusion of NFTs with physical objects, the future is appearing more ‘phygital’ than ever before. Retail spaces, both within and outside of metaverses, are likely to feature digital-real hybrid solutions featuring omni-service store experiences across multiple digital touchpoints (e.g., AR clothing).

AR-Powered Amplification and Gamification of digital events can provide more dynamic interactions during meetings and collaborative work. Retail gamification has been dubbed the future of shopping experiences, as experiences are increasingly being gamified and customized in order for socialization to seamlessly fit consumers into phygital spaces. Pepsi curated an AR-powered campaign, allowing consumers to scan QR codes in order to bring to life AR renditions of top football players like Lionel Messi on their mobile devices. Starbucks uses gamification to provide consumers with personalized loyalty rewards through in-app engagement.

Co-creative, Collaborative Communities are likely to become indispensable as we journey towards a decentralized future. Brands will need to engage in building co-creative communities within metaverses, grounded in trust, shared values, and authenticity. Numerous brands—for example, Gucci and Bored Ape Yacht Club—have already forged alliances with NFT communities. Although the creator economy, bolstered by social media, is already vast, it will also be important for brands to align with communities and engage in social listening in order to connect with brand followers in an increasingly fragmented retail landscape. As digital creators upend traditional loyalty programs through crypto-rewards harnessed by web 3.0 technologies, brands can emulate the triumphs of these fandom models to craft innovative retail experiences.

Imagining the Future

According to McLuhan, the emergence of new media also leads to implications for society’s political systems. While the global village has been viewed in a techno-optimist way, McLuhan (1962, p. 32) has also illustrated his concerns about the socio-cultural implications of a society bounded within an electronic medium:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence.

Consumers today are constantly generating data by interacting with online media and surveillance capitalism, thus enabling marketers to gather massive repositories of behavioral data for personalized marketing (Darmody & Zwick, 2020). Thus, much like living in an actual global village, where individuals are well-acquainted with each other, consumers are increasingly becoming exposed to scrutiny and erosion of their privacy. This showcases the importance of reflecting on the socio-cultural and politico-legal implications of technological advances.

According to Ericsson (2021), both technology (AI, blurring the physical and the virtual, connectivity in everything, wearables, sensory and bio-interfaces) and societal geopolitics (climate crisis, post-pandemic, socio-economic shifts, global fragmentation) are important forces shaping our future. Governments worldwide are increasingly enforcing the stricter regulation of technology companies, along with growing consumer expectations concerning trust and privacy. The chapter began with a critique of the Californian ideology, followed by discussions on how technological advances—such as the metaverse—can shape future consumption and marketing. In a full circle back to the inception, I invite readers to think about the future implications of such developments. McLuhan highlighted the importance of studying media technologies in order to be able to anticipate the future social changes that they produce. One way to contemplate the potential implications is imagining alternative future scenarios by exploring how historical patterns and emerging trends can be coalesced to shed light on the future. While scenario planning offers far-reaching and polarizing visions, it could also help anticipate—ahead of time—any potential changes looming on the horizon in order to help prepare for futures that are more plausible. Thus, to help readers visualize and contemplate future scenarios, I have developed a techno-political future scenario cross, presented in Fig. 4.1. It is a 2x2 matrix with spectrums in both the horizontal and vertical planes that cross each other. The respective ends of the vertical axis are techno-optimism—the belief that information communication technologies can continually be improved and can enrich human lives, making the world a better place, as this has an emancipatory potential—and techno-pessimism—the belief that contemporary technology has created as many problems, if not more, for humanity as it has solved, and that it is likely to bring unforeseen consequences and social perils. The continuum on the horizontal axis is state-regulatory intervention vis-à-vis the market-based self-regulation of technology.

Fig. 4.1
A Cartesian axis maps techno-optimism and pessimism on the y-axis, and state regulatory intervention and market-based self-regulation on the x-axis. The quadrants represent Californian ideology, democratized information society, technological governance systems, and algorithmic surveillance culture.

Techno-political Alternative Future Scenarios

Full size image

This techno-political matrix generates four potential alternative future scenarios. First, the continued fetishization of the Californian ideology by technophiles, due to technological determinism, coupled with the free-market consumer culture and anti-statist gospel of cybernetic neoliberal orthodoxies, can encourage continued innovation and progress in the technology in our lives. Proponents argue that such market-mediated cultural resource allocation can potentially save the world, but at what cost? Second, the techno-utopians’ belief in an ecotopia (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996), and an egalitarian information society, can be achieved through a democratized information society, where individuals and social groups will be able to express themselves freely, due to democratic governance, in a more decentralized cyberspace, although any innovation could be less lucrative. Such a celebration of the creative powers of digital artisans has resulted in consumers being empowered by digital and biopolitical marketing (Darmody & Zwick, 2020). Barbrook and Cameron (1996) called on Europeans to build a more inclusive and universal cyberspace, taking entrepreneurial zeal from Silicon Valley but with a mix of state, corporate, and DIY initiatives to avoid the fatalism of the Californian ideology. Moving on from the upper side of the matrix of techno-boosters to the lower side of technophobes, an algorithmic and surveillance culture thrives on consumer concerns about data piracy, privacy, and protection. It can be argued that such a scenario is not too difficult to envision given how brands are accused today of manipulating consumer choices and decision-making through algorithm-powered ecosystems and consumer cynicism about how brands are surveilling and parasitizing on consumer data (Darmody & Zwick, 2020; Ulver, 2022). Finally, consumer distrust of how brands misuse technology can lead to technological governance systems, resulting in the high regulation and control of big tech companies, in terms of safety, privacy, competition, and transparency. Such a ‘techlash’ can mean less skepticism about data privacy due to laws, policies and fines given to tech companies, but also limited accessibility and the control of information, censorship, restricted innovation, decelerated technological adaptation, a lack of spending on technology, and increased policing by the state using technology.

The techno-political matrix can be used by marketers and retailers to contemplate and plan for the future. First, it is important for them to reflect on their company values and consider the potential ramifications of these scenarios for their organizations. In the Californian ideology scenario, companies could strategically prioritize rapid and continuous innovation to ensure their survival and, through personalization, cultivate consumer value that empowers them to shape their own experiences. In a democratized information society, businesses might proactively anticipate and prepare for impending regulations and policies that will come into effect. For instance, consider the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which compelled companies to become more transparent about consumer data usage. This prompts a need for businesses to reconsider their strategies around utilizing consumer data to craft omni/multi-channel consumer experiences. In an algorithmic and surveillance culture, recognizing heightened data accessibility for businesses and the resultant consumer vulnerability and lack of trust is crucial. Thus, organizations should enhance transparency in data collection and use and provide consumers with choices in order to build trust. An illustration is Apple’s recent App Tracking Transparency policy, providing users more control over third-party app tracking. Lastly, in a technological governance systems scenario, consumer expectations stem from their lack of trust in technology. Thus, organizations should reinvigorate and reimagine physical spaces to foster shared experiences and communities. Localization could also play a pivotal role, since the use of technology might become expensive.

However, it is important to understand that the future would not necessarily be defined by one of these scenarios, but one of multiplicity and complexity. Nevertheless, comprehending the potential ramifications of this for consumers, businesses, the state, and society—as regards democracy and wellbeing—remains instrumental. The metaverse poses certain risks (Hirsch, 2022), along with ethical and legal challenges that could lead to detrimental and unintended consequences for society, as predicted in numerous science fiction narratives. The flourishing of fragmented realities and social disconnect might foster an illusion of freedom and privacy, concealing the actual loss of autonomy. Moreover, despite assertions of the democratization of information, stark power inequities could persist, casting doubt on the perceived benefits of the metaverse. Can a truly decentralized future be achieved if certain big tech companies control the metaverse(s), employing extensive data collection and surveillance? Scholars have already noted the multisensory social interactions within the metaverse and called for understanding its societal impact (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2022). Thus, it becomes crucial to explore the societal implications of this new medium, defined by the senses required for participatation. In a McLuhanian perspective, this chapter has demonstrated how technological advances such as the metaverse hold the potential to transform and shape society. Given the increasing polarization and culturo-political conflicts (Ulver, 2022), the changing geo-political landscape and the consolidation of power by big tech, it becomes pivotal to question the rhetoric of unbridled innovation and growth and to reflect on the far-reaching implications of such progress.

Conclusion

This chapter has delved into the intricate interplay of marketing and socio-political implications stemming from technological advancements. Drawing on a theoretical perspective informed by McLuhan’s insights, the chapter has used the emergent metaverse technology as a lens to expand our understanding of how the new medium could potentially shape consumption and marketing practices, and its implications for society. Employing a McLuhanian theoretical underpinning allowed for the unfolding of an alternative understanding of how the metaverse can shape our future consumption and marketing. The chapter contributes to scholarship on the metaverse in digital marketing (Barrera & Shah, 2023; Belk et al., 2022; Golf-Papez et al., 2022; Hollensen et al., 2023; Murray et al., 2022) and retail (Bourlakis et al., 2009). It expands our understanding of how marketers can navigate the virtual world of web 3.0 (Murray et al., 2022) in an increasingly polarized and algorithmically driven media landscape (Ulver, 2022). Furthermore, the envisioning of alternative future scenarios has enriched our knowledge of the socio-political implications bound to technological development (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996), particularly poignant consideration in a digital marketing domain marked by algorithmic manipulations, eroding privacy, and the rise of surveillance capitalism (Darmody & Zwick, 2020).

The celebrated sci-fi author Isaac Asimov once opined that, “any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech—and both are still dangerous to this day—but human beings would not be human without them”. With changing consumer expectations around trust and privacy, coupled with the lingering impact of pandemic-induced stress, anxiety and uncertainty, a new narrative for brands emerges—one defined by compassion and empathy. In the light of tightening government regulations, companies ought to ingrain user rights and privacy as transparent and standard components, ensuring individuals maintain control over their digital consumption practices. I would like to end this chapter by asking marketers to center their efforts around people-centric digital propositions. This involves nurturing consumer trust in technology by prioritizing the human element at the core of their processes. That is my clarion call.