The day I discovered the metaverse and how it brought me here

My name is Obirin Odara, but this is not my registered name. It is part of the process of re-signifying my place in a racist country with a strong African presence that exists in the phenotype, in the culture, in the past, and, given our resistance to the colonial process, of dispute in the present and construction of the future. As Lélia Gonzales teaches us, "blacks have to have a name and a surname, otherwise the whites will come up with a nickname... to their liking". That is why I am Obirin Odara, a Yoruba name that evokes my femininity and my strength beyond the subjection they forge over black people and, above all, over black women.

A quick search on Google is enough to have some dimensions of the data that is held upon black women in this country. As an effect of this structure, I was also held to this simplistic view by believing for so long that certain places were mine and others would not be. Lélia Gonzales also teaches us about this, that there are places socially demarcated for black women in colonised societies like Brazil, namely: the "mulata" - object of objectification; the Black Mother - the place of permanent care for the Other through self-effacement; and/or the Doméstica - the one who would be "almost of the family", but who only serves to serve and never sits at the table. Certainly, as these are the places that destine and condition us, the areas of technology also appear and become fixed in our imagination as distant and inaccessible places.

Despite all the racism, I went on to higher education and achieved my master's degree. At the age of 25, I already had my bachelor's degree in Social Work and a master's degree in Social Policies from the University of Brasilia. This place is the exception, when considering the situation of the black Brazilian population, which was only possible through the conquests of the black movement. Also because of the black movement, my education was not de-racialised. In the fourth semester of my undergraduate studies, I had my first module on racial issues with a black professor, entitled "Introduction to contemporary black thought" which was the crucial turning point for where I am today. It was during those classes that I  first read texts by black people that amplified and changed everything that Brazil told me about Brazil, or what Europe tells us about the world. And, mainly, they taught me that we are not alone, that our pains have a name, and that our history does not begin and end with slavery in the Americas.

All critical race consciousness led me to study the effects of colonialism and racism in various spaces, from the state to interpersonal relationships. Today, I know that this awareness makes me capable of contesting any space and issue in modernity, including technology, but it was not always so!

I have very limited digital literacy. Everything I know, I learned in the practice of daily life in face of the numerous demands that arise at work, such as: knowing and using some Excel formulas, google tools, office packages, etc.

With the pandemic, the virtualisation of relationships, especially at work, became even more present. It became common to spend hours at home, from meet to meet, zoom in and zoom out, interspersed with programmes like Trello, Google Drive, Notion, WhatsApp web, Canva, Instagram, email, Google Agenda and so on. Inevitably, many of these tools became better known because of the demand for organisation in a life that has become more and more focused on screens.

It was from this first approach to these technological tools that are more and more common in our daily lives (at least in mine, where I lived the home office), added to my work experience as coordinator of economic autonomy and women's leadership in a Municipal Department of Policies and Women's Promotion, that some topics became more present. Among them, came the blessed concept of ‘programming’.

In this work experience, I needed to think about a technology project for women in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro and the saga began by trying to understand, initially, which areas are currently growing the most in this environment. In the elaboration and development stage of the project, I came across words that, until that moment, were only words. Programming, app development, front end, back end, ‘Machine Learning’, and so on... here grew a whole new world!

I remember one day I spent watching videos on programming languages and I was ecstatic when I understood even one percent of it. It felt like discovering a new world, unravelling some of what I had never questioned about how it worked behind the many tools that occupy my day. Have you considered how many things are there behind this screen on which you are able to read this now?

Previously, I had never asked myself how apps are created, or what interface is, how we program software, what is Python language, binary communication, nor had I asked who is behind the building of all of this? For many of us, the place of participation is, at most, to consume what we are offered.

Consuming in a non-conscious, passive and growing way. That is when we consume, because, for the most part, technological access is also late and shallow for many of us. The effects of an absurd distance with these areas is exactly not feeling invited to interfere in this environment as someone who thinks and creates. So we are left with the simple role of those who work to access and consume what they produce.

Because of my work, I received an invitation to go to Rio2C: the biggest creativity event in Latin America. I went unpretentiously, as if it were just any Sunday outing. But it wasn't, because this was another turning point in my personal and professional trajectory.

When we arrived, we went to a talk about the metaverse. I had heard of this word, but it seems to me that something in me blocked any interest in the subject, as if something told me that it was not for me, because it seemed like just another technological delirium of the white world, and, in a way, it is! This happens a lot with us black people. We live in a schism, as Frantz Fanon teaches, in which our relationship with modernity is mediated by the colonial experience. Of the various impacts of this violent process, I highlight the impact on our subjectivity and our unconscious; after all, it is as if this voice had become a voice in our own head, which keeps telling us that certain places are not for us, that we are incompetent, that our place is elsewhere. And the disinterest in various things is sometimes not even disinterest at all, it is because we were not allowed to see ourselves in those spaces.

So, in that attentive listening to the topic I became more and more appalled at the way whiteness presented the metaverse as something that does not dialogue, in any way, with the world that I live in and that I want to live in. The speaker's lines revolved around the unqualified defence of the metaverse as an accessible, decentralised, and promising digital place. One of his concerns, which I think is shared by others like him, was about how to broaden the experience in augmented reality, such as how to make it possible for us, facing a fire in the virtual world, to also feel the heat that the fire provides. This led to the possibility of a suit that would amplify the sensation that was restricted to the glasses, and bring the body into the digital world as well. And the thing only grew bigger and less digestible for my black and critical body.

The more he spoke, the more the gap in my chest and stomach grew wider. In my head a thousand questions I swallowed: Who is this place for? Why do they call it ‘decentralised’? What impact does this have on reality? How can they disassociate it from what is around us? Many questions, to which I already had answers, because despite little knowledge about technology, I already understood important things that structure modernity, colonialism, and racism.

To describe this talk, I again refer to Lélia Gonzales, who in 1980 wrote the following epigraph:

"It was then that we were invited to one of theirs, saying that it was for us. With a book about us, we were very well received and treated with consideration (...) And we went to sit at their table. But it was so crowded that we couldn't sit with them. But we arranged ourselves very well, looking for some chairs and sitting right behind them. They were so busy teaching a lot of things to the young people in the audience, that they didn't notice that if we squeezed a little bit more, we could open a little space and everybody could sit together at the table. But they were the ones who threw the party, and we couldn't mess around with this ‘arrive here, arrive there’ stuff. We had to be polite. And there were more and more speeches, all with a lot of applause.”

In contrast to the scenario Lélia describes, there weren't a lot of black people in the audience. And, as I squirmed in my chair with my restlessness, I knew that I had to be polite while they were applauding that presentation, because for those who were there, there were really no problems in that speech. Everything was in place and made perfect sense, because Brazilians are already used to living in a reality that denies the racist structure that sustains it, after all it is the country that became independent still under the slavery regime. If there is something that Brazil has forged in the Brazilian identity, it is that black people don't need to be included in the national development and progress for something to be applauded.

I left that day doing what I have also learned from the black movement: hacking information and taking it to my people. We are the ones who break the bubble of silence, because arriving in those spaces, sitting at the table, being silent and thinking we are part of the party, will get us nowhere. Emancipation only comes when we return to our community teaching what we have learned, to finally sit around and share.

In that talk it was evident that whiteness (holders of this knowledge and of the tools to build and live this experience) is and continues to be concerned with creating a world in which they can control everything. Even though we live under countless acts of racially-motivated violence, this project is flawed. As James Baldwin says: ‘they didn't win, we are still here!’ In other words, in spite of the attempt to control, we continue to dodge whitewashing, silence, and extermination.

I ask you: who is interested in a world (even a digital one) that can be controlled?

I have noticed that the metaverse (digital world) is presented as detached from material reality. They want to convince us that there is a place where we can live next to Jay-Z's house, even if our street has no sanitation. But why the desire to live next to Jay-Z? Does anyone without sanitation have the means to access the metaverse? What is their understanding of decentralisation? Why should we be attracted to a world that is built virtually while the real one collapses on the heads of black people, indigenous people, and other violated and marginalised identities?

As I left the event, I made numerous posts on my Instagram. I used the reach of this social network to inform others about the things I had heard, and this manifesto-denouncement confirmed the absurd gap that the discussion about metaverse and other technologies and innovations, such as NFT, have with society in general. People didn't know what it was about, and I tried to explain with the little I had found out.

After this movement, I created the study group Djeuti, to discuss all this with black and indigenous people. The main purpose of this group is to understand what all these things that are emerging and gaining space are, but, above all, to try to differentiate what technology is, its powers and limitations, beyond the misrepresented use of what was presented to me.

If my concerns, and those of my people, are different, surely the way we will relate to access is different. Can, therefore, the metaverse be a strategy for the emancipation of black people?

This question is yet to be answered, and it demands, above all, a break with the colonial lie we have been taught. Finally, what I want to share in this text is the certainty that we can be in any space in a critical and strategic and constructive way. Using our body, memory, and purposes to go beyond the reproduction of what modernity points to; a development that is exclusionary and harmful to humans and nature. We have an ancestral memory of a people who built pyramids, we can do anything when we question what is set and put our black and indigenous community as a priority.

Today, four months after this event, I am here writing for a portal of international reach that thinks and builds other possibilities of the metaverse, this time, aligning the mythology of the African, black diaspora, and indigenous peoples. Something tells me that I am interfering in the past, by not believing the lies I have been told, and putting myself in the present against all the insecurity that racism causes. We can and will be there, making every reality a possible place for us to exist. The future is being built now, and we will not be left out of it.