Abstract:

“Technological empowerment” in the digital transformation of social governance aims to promote public participation and collaboration in decision-making through emerging technologies. But can it really increase the public’s power? For example, the Metaverse provides the channel and media for communication between the public and government. But the new technology can also be exploited by techno-capitalists to pursue a corporate and technocratic society. This paper examines these questions through a five-level scaffold conceptualization to enrich the discourse of the “technological empowerment” of the Metaverse. The conceptualization is used to distinguish the types and extent of technology empowerment for different stakeholders in social governance within the Metaverse. The five different levels in the scaffold, from low to high, include “corporate technocrat”,“tokenism interaction”, “public participation”, “co-creation and collaboration”, and “delegated power”. In every level of the five-level scaffold, keyword search is used to identify and explain the corresponding roles and cases of the public in social governance. The results show that “co-creation and collaboration” is a promising approach that can be scaled up under current social governance conditions and is a feasible direction for digital transformation. Application of the Metaverse in technological empowerment can be well-guided by “co-creation and collaboration”. At the same time, the five-level scaffold conceptualization also warns of the risks of technolo-capitalists’ pushing a neoliberal agenda by applying Metaverse technology to evade regulation.

Key words: metaverse, digital transformation of social governance, technology empowerment, five-level scaffold conceptualization, public participation