Gender Fluidity In The Metaverse

offline self. Experimenting with who you are online, especially if those identities are really different from how you present to the analog world, that's not a totally new concept. Neil Stevenson famously coined the phrase metaverse all the way back in so it's no surprise that folks are using newish technologies like crypto on the blockchain to play with their

self expression. But some folks are using blockchain enabled structures to monetize these experiments with identity, including their gender presentation. For more on crypto and identity, I'm joined by Bloomberg reporter Emily Nicole and by Florence Smith Nichols, a PhD student who researches, games, ethics, and artificial intelligence. Emily as always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks

for having me. We are going to talk about crypto and money and gender identity and gender fluidity and people pretending to be other folks for the sake of monetizing that identity. But before we get into some of that, let's start with the crypto mechanics here. What are the vehicles and what are the you know, what's the why

of why people are are doing this online? So I think, as it always is in crypto, there are always people seeking to find new ways to break boundary, is, to establish new forms of hierarchies in crypto and ultimately make money. And in this scenario or this universe, UM, we are

looking specifically at doubts, which are decentralized autonomous organizations. You could think of them a little bit like companies, but they operate almost exclusively on a code first basis, so everything they do is voted on by the community, using blockchain contracts to execute those functions once they pass or get rejected. And they usually have a group of people at the top rather than a single person. And there's that that group is it's like a governance committee, it's

a board, it's a what what how does that work? Really? So the people at the top might be the founders of the project that we're talking about. They might be people who have run their way up through the group by contributing a lot to the to the community and therefore have been decided that they have warranted themselves a leadership position. But you won't have somebody who's the CEO

or you know, the CFO or whatever. You might have somebody who's in charge of treasury, for example, to you to use the crypto terminology, but you're not going to have somebody who you know, like does the analysts call

at nine am after the earnings? So this is it's a club and there are members and then there are people who, you know, listening to their members most of the time decide how what the club's priorities are, what they're going to spend as you say, their treasury onto the money or the crypto that they have in the bank, as it were. But what do dows have to do

with gender identity? So in this world, as people seek to kind of break the boundaries of what crypto can mean or what it can be represented for they're also trying to find ways that crypto could be something more appealing to the mainstream. And if we think about, you know, the ways in which we engage with social media and the role of influences in that um, we've been seeing the rise of something called simp dows over the last few months and maybe even a year. Can I just

gonna stopulate? Did you say simple? Yes? So, to simple means basically to be a fan of somebody, but in typical Internet language, it's always pretty aloaded, and so simping generally happens from a male fan to a female influencer who is considered to be quite beautiful. And so in this world of simpows, some female influencers are using the mechanics of crypto and these miniature organizations to basically allow a bit more of a developed relationship between them and

their fan base. The fans can contribute to the tao, contribute to the US's reputation, deciding on what projects she should take on or not, but then in return they might gain something in the form of a reward like a crypto token or an n f T, which they can then used to kind of give back to the community again, it becomes like a little circle of financial value. I guess you could call it. So is this like only fans on the blockchain? I mean you could consider

it that slightly. There are some dows that have been set up that are slightly sexual in sure, if that's what we think of as only found his main business model. So and there are even dolls that have been set up to honor female influences without that person's permission or knowledge.

One of the most prominent ones that was reported on by Vice not long ago is one in tribute to Belle Delphine, who is known as a gamer girl, and she very famously tried to set off her bathwater adoring fans, and as far as we know, she was not involved in that because at the time anyway, she had been offline from the Internet for about a year. But there are also, you know, versions of these dolls that don't

involve anything of a sexual nature. So one of the prominent ones that I spoke to for um this story was a dow belonging to an influencer called Irene Zoo, and in her dow, she mainly just uses it as a way to interact with her fans, on a more unique and direct level than she'd been able to previously in Instagram, where she found that d ms are pretty

inefficient in your reporting. In the story that you wrote about this, one of the mean characters, or otherwise I supposed they were playing two characters at once, is someone named Eric Wall who has a SIMP dow as we've discussed under the name of Erica Wall. Can you see more about this? Yes, So, Eric Wall is the chief investment officer at a crypto asset fund. But he's also a pretty big personality on crypto Twitter as we call it.

He's got more than eighty thousand followers, and he's known for being kind of a bit of an expert on all things crypto and therefore tends to get into full online disputes with people over the mechanics of krypto and

blockchain mechanics. But one thing that he found over the last few years is that occasionally, when somebody wanted to make fun of him, they would photoshop him in a picture of a woman, so they'd give him, you know, long hair and mascara and breasts and all the rest, And eventually he said he that one of those pictures was good enough that he decided to take that picture

for himself and reclaim it. And he had been advising dows like Irene's for quite a while, and so he started Arikadao as, as he said, a way to kind of model out how easy it could be to set up one of these symptows for Instagram influences, and in his mind, I think a use it as a way to kind of encourage more influences to take up this this mechanics and make blockchain more mainstream, but be raise his own influence um and find more ways to engage

with the people who interact with him online. Now that there's something that you said about the fans that I that I want to point out because I feel like there's a central tension here, which is the people who were following him online. We're trying to make fun of him by portraying him as a woman, which, let's be clear, is a super sexist thing to do, right, like the the idea that the worst thing you could do to

a man is make him look like a woman. M hm, And so okay, fine, like you, Crypto represents all of the dysfunction of society because it is a part of society as always. But he then is like, I'm just gonna I'm going to lean into this, ha ha, I'm going to reclaim this. I'm going to mon as high is this. Has he gotten any kind of support or

criticism in either direction from this, almost like costly? Yeah, So I think you'd expect there to be some negative backlash, right, You'd expect there to be some backlash to the fact that a man is portraying himself as a woman online and creating some sort of monetary flow around that, whether or not he decides to use it for personal gain, personal profit or not. But actually, he said though there was on some level of a bit of confusion from some people as to why he would set up a

dow in the name of Erica. Most people thought it was funny. Most people weren't on the joke, and most people thought, you know, if I want to contribute to this,

I can. But he started then using the persona as a way to bring attention to causes like the plight to Ukraine and how you could donate to that with crypto, and also again bringing more attention to some of the work that he'd been doing with other simp dows, like irenes so in essence, while there was some expectation of a negative reaction, it wasn't necessarily what he told me

is what he got back. But there are folks and you you didn't include these examples in your story who are not necessarily as transparent about what they're doing, not necessarily encryptal, but in other sort of formats like live streaming or streaming games, who are also engaging in this

kind of gender performance. Yeah. So there is a trend that is very, very popular and still ongoing in places like YouTube and Twitch, where sis men will dress up as women and while the people who are watching their streams or their videos are in on the joke. They'll often go on platforms like amigle, which is a site that randomly assigns you another person over video chat to

talk to and pretend to be a woman. Everybody who's watching knows what's going on, like you know, in the background when they're watching these videos, but the person they're

talking to is being duped, and and therein lies. I guess the humor or the attraction and the world of simptows is in some ways that you know, there are always going to be people who are coming to something like eric Odow, what the dow that Erica has set up and not know who he is, and not know who that person is behind the photoshop damage in front

of it. He even went to like a recent Bitcoin conference with Eric Odoa as his name um and has used things like voice modulators on podcast to appear as Erica previously. But in essence, I guess that the message that he was pushing is that that isn't his intention. Well, you know, we all know that intentions always leads to fantastic outcomes. So thank you very much, Emily. That was a very interesting story and I appreciate you taking the time to share it with our audience today. Thanks for

having me. You can find more of Emily's reporting on the Bloomberg Terminal on Bloomberg dot com and follower on twit her. She's at Emily J. Nicole. That's n I CEO l L. We'll be right back with more from Florence Smith Nichols about the ethical implications of gender fluidity in a DOW universe. In the metaverse, you can be

anyone or anything you want to be. Now that we have more an idea about how the dows work, I'm going to turn to Florence Smith Nichols to give us a little bit more insights on the moral and ethical implications of gender fluidity and the blockchain. Florence, such a pleasure to have you in the studio today, virtually or otherwise.

Thanks so much for having me. You are a specialist in some very very interesting areas of research, and you know, our audience just heard from Emily who interviewed you for a story about gender presentation and crypto and the blockchain, and I'd love for you to say a little bit more about what you've encountered in the realm of online

gender performance. I know now we're talking about kind of crypto, the metaverse, the blockchain, but people ex perimenting with gender expression online and in kind of a virtual context has been happening really sort of, I think as long as those places have existed, And certainly my kind of expertise is particularly in video games and my favorite that's yeah, that's something that I think you here, for example, in the trans community sort of like countless stories of people

saying that the first time I really started to experiment with kind of a different gender expression was through like say, choosing a different avatar in a video game or something like that, because it represents sort of like a safe space to do. So when you were talking to Emily, one of the things that I found interesting that she reported in the context of the conversation was about how the pandemic was a moment for people to be able to do more of this kind of exploration in a

crypto context or otherwise Can you say some more about that? Yeah, So, I think it's really interesting that it seems to have been this kind of you see this trend of people discovering kind of new aspects about themselves that maybe they just didn't feel that they had the time to do

so before. And I wonder if, especially because a lot of our interactions just had to be online by necessity, and because online interactions allow you to potentially kind of play around with your identity, whether that can be a something right as simple as even oh you change your Twitter profile picture, right, And a lot of this conversation around crypto and things like meme stocks really really hit the mainstream during the pandemic, right, so at least the

time lines were overlapping. And as part of that, as you as you've discussed with Emily, previously was this kind of distinction between I suppose, a sincere exploration in the way that you're describing of people, you know, finding out who they really were, and a more cynical, potentially performance for some other motivation or game or gain. Where in the what we call the simple Dowel context, do you

see that spectrum? I feel like that this kind of trying to draw a line between people, yeah, kind of genuinely exploring the identity versus perhaps yet what you would see as a more cynical kind of way of trying to exploit a kind of performative identity is really tricky because especially from an outside perspective if you don't know the people involved. But it's the more kind of cynical examples that hurt or kinds of people, especially trans people.

You know, A big part of transphobia is people being accused of being fake, right, right, not just pretending, so you can see how Yeah, it's a really difficult topic.

But I think with the simp dows specifically, I mean even just in the name, I guess that it was kind of revealing, right, It kind of kind of it tells you what kind of level that's at, and it's something that's fill I guess it's kind of generalization, but I guess for the male gays in a very particular way, and it's not about sort of an individual exploring their identity. It's a group kind of around this kind of avatar in order to potentially leverage getting more money out of people.

I guess essentially in the context of you know, video games, the metavers and communities, are you seeing any spaces where it's more how should I say, supportive or constructive of gender exploration compared to maybe what we're seeing in crypto I think vrchide. Yeah, I would probably from what I've seen where there seems to be um kind of just a general sense of people being very welcoming about people

um kind of exploring their gender. Although at the same time, I will say, from what I've seen, like, for example, you get a lot of people who have the kind of stereotypical like anime girl kind of after which you know,

you get very very large Yeah. Um. And that's kind of interesting because apparently the reason why that is is when m R chat was just kind of getting started up, a load of people sort of import a load of character models from a particular anime game, and they were a much higher quality than any of the others, so that's why people use them. So it's just kind of ended up kind of being a trend because of that.

But that's that's interesting because then you get a lot of people who say, well, actually, I just feel really comfortable wearing this avatar or through having you know, kind of tried this out for a while, I realized things about my gender that I didn't know before. Um, so it seems like, yeah, from what I can see, there's

definitely a lot of space exploration there. But again, like I suppose, it's like any online space right where you maybe have to be careful where you are because I think if you're kind of like a public sort of lobby space, you can meet anyone right who could just be obnoxious or potentially very rude. Well, if it's if it stops at rudeness, that would be a better better degree than some of the online harassment that we see in other places. So thank you so much, Florence. I

really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you. You can find Florence on Twitter there at Florence s n. On the next episode of Bloomberg Crypto. So Rare is one of several companies attempting to take the idea of collectibles like baseball cards and bring them into a more digital context. In me so Rare announced a partnership with Major League Baseball here in the US, and they announced Serena Williams was going to be a member of their advisory board.

Why is this company betting so big on sports? Do collectibles even need to be on a blockchain? And will baseball players benefit from that needure leaked deal. To explore these questions and more, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporter Hannah Miller and to Sarrere's own CEO, Nicola Julia. I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, and this is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Email your questions, comments, or suggestions for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net and you'll find us on Twitter at Crypto. The supervising producer of this episode is Vicky ver Galina. Our producer is Mohammed Baruk. Associate producer is Zanab Sudiki Desta wonder At is our Engineer. Original music by Leo Sidron. Bloomberg's head of podcasts is Francesca Levi.