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Paper short abstract

How will we work if offices, factory floors, and service industry move to the metaverse? This paper maps conceptual rifts between different types of futuristic imagination – such as imaginaries, narratives, and visions – onto political, corporate, and literary depictions of the metaverse cyberworkplace.

Paper long abstract

Following the pandemic-induced rise of teleworking, workplace settings have become central to metaverse imaginaries, frequently associated with both “magical zoom meetings” (Banis, 2021) in cartoon conference rooms and 'digital twins' replicating physical factory floors. In Japan, this is driven by a corporate-bureaucratic nexus: NTT markets its “Mirza” augmented reality glasses as a catalyst for “worker transformation” (hataraku hito ni henkaku o), Sōmushō (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) recently published 'Guidelines for Metaverse Implementation' focusing on corporate utility, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) is funding a large-scale project on worker wellbeing in the “metaverse office.”

This situates metaverse labor within a sprawling landscape of futuristic imaginations, analyzed through theoretical frameworks like sociotechnical imaginaries, narratives, and expectations. First, my paper maps this conceptual landscape using the case of metaverse labor between real and virtual environments.

In the second part of my paper, I contrast these imaginations from Japan’s public and private sectors with adjacent speculative fiction. While metaverse work scenarios depicted in Japanese Sci-Fi focus on thrilling applications in high-stakes military dystopias, depictions of mundane waged labor in the metaverse are much rarer. I discuss Hirano Keiichirō’s novel Honshin (2021) as one example of the latter. The novel, more than its 2024 cinematic adaptation, presents a starkly dystopian critique of Japan’s future service sector. It envisions the embodiment provided by metaverse platforms, avatars, and wearable technology as facilitators of exploitative, highly intrusive labor configurations.

In sum, the paper maps the conceptual spectrum of futuristic imaginations onto official imaginaries shaping Japanese public policy and corporate strategy, contrasting this with an alternative literary exploration of 'Working the Metaverse'. It critically interrogates the mutual constitution of fiction and futuristic imagination, which may coalesce into Cool Japan 2.0 technopolitics, but may also – as the novel Honshin illustrates – read dominant imaginations against the grain.