New relational models and innovative forms of participation, transaction and consumption have been modulated by technologies related to the development of the fourth industrial revolution. The new and most advanced frontier is represented by the Metaverse, a virtual space still not unambiguously defined and largely unexplored in its multiple and potentially infinite functions, which prefigures a heterotopic, symmetrical and overlapping relationship between physical and virtual space (Focault, 1967).
The control of this place where trade, communication and social interactions take place is increasingly seen as an opportunity to exert power and to assert economic and political influence whose benefits can also reverberate in the physical world.
Major state actors, therefore, are looking with growing interest at the prospects and risks associated with the development of this platform, which, according to some analysts, may represent an important opportunity to completely redefine geopolitical agendas. In this perspective, the recent strategic choices of some states aimed at supporting the development of the Metaverse must be considered, such as the allocations to support research in some critical sectors, the definition of support policies for cyberspace-related businesses (and work), the establishment of new and strategic alliances, or the reflection on the numerous critical issues that are increasingly clear and that have not yet found a shared response, such as those related to security, state sovereignty, the regulation of the ownership of digital spaces, and privacy. To name but a few.
The ferment taking place outside the platform is accompanied by an increasingly lively activity within cyberspace: cities, states, diplomatic representations and government agencies, anticipating a near future, are in fact transferring functions, services and content to the platform. This is, for instance, the case of Seoul which, as of 2023, will allow avatars of its citizens to animate the digital reproduction of the city, or of the small island state of Tuvalu which, in response to rising sea levels and global warming, plans to create a digital counterpart that could be the first State present exclusively in cyberspace (WEF, 2022).
To date, however, the Metaverse is predominantly populated by the platforms of the large multinational technology corporations that, in their search for new opportunities, are creating digital worlds with profoundly different characteristics, purposes and technologies. The result is a dynamic, articulated and unregulated structure that, in most cases, is characterised by the self-determination of users and a more distributed geography of power.
Starting from the analysis of the still scarce literature on the subject and integrating methodological tools proper to critical geopolitics and field research, the study aims to explore the geopolitical dynamics connected to the development of digital spaces. In particular, we intend to analyse the characteristics that make the Metaverse attractive for a "power project" and the consequent strategies defined by the most significant global actors; we also intend to describe the ways in which power is exercised within the new virtual world and to depict, also through the informative opportunities of network analysis, the relations existing between the different actors and digital communities.
Key words: power, new technologies, cyberspace