“Manteros” (blanketmen) is the term used to refer to people who sell counterfeit goods on the street, such as music CDs, DVDs, video games, clothes, watches, etc. Manteros are migrants from countries such as Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, usually forced by mafias to work. They sell their products on the street on a blanket and pick up their goods as fast as they can and flee when they notice the police presence. The project, Metamateros, consists in the creation of 3D avatars to act as digital migrants capable of traveling anonymously from metaverse to metaverse (Mozilla Hub, Decentraland, Sandbox, Cryptovortex, or Zuckerberg’s future metaverse), trading data and digital assets.
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The Metamanteros avatars are provided with a blanket that is spread out on the floor, where they display digital products like clothes, bags, music or images, all of them digital fakes and copies, but also their manuals, because each Metamantero will includes manuals describing: a) Techniques for downloading/hacking digital assets, from Screenshots, NFTbay and web scraping; b) Strategies that help virtual migrations in different metaverses; c) a manual to report on DAOs, tokenisation and Web3, decentralisation and decarbonisation; d) tactics to sell products through parallel platforms such as e-bay, Willhaben, or barter IRL; e) a manual refusing to work for free and trade in virtual environments through unsustainable NFTs.
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The metamanteros have a function to collect their products and flee if the police appear. The avatars, manuals, and digital products will be free downloads on the web.