We're entering a new era of myth and magic.

At first, this era will look like an extension of the ones that came before.

Media and culture will gravitate to new influencers, characters and stories; musicians will gain fame and push the limits of performance; fandoms will emerge; new channels will mark a shift in the 'creator economy'.

Our work lives will change as we start to use a new set of tools, with different interfaces.

The older social media platforms will become corroded or replaced with new ways to connect.

How we get our news will sometimes feel almost nostalgic, but will also become so personalized and ambient that it will feel like an entirely new type of media.

We'll comfort ourselves by thinking that we've entered a new era of productivity, progress and entertainment. We'll imagine that the only real change is the adoption of a new set of tools, similar to the Internet or steam engine.

And like previous moments of human progress, we'll also fear the dislocation and change that it will create.

But the trajectory we're on now is unlike those that came before. We haven't added a new tool. We haven't created a new interface. We didn't create a new channel for media or information.

Instead, we now find ourselves interlinked with new intelligences (as childlike or pre-symbolic as they might currently be).

The implications are profound. The social and economic shifts will be seismic.

And, in part, they will play out in culture through the creation of new mythologies and cosmologies, representing a very human attempt at sense-making in the face of unknowable forces.

The Rise of the New Machines

By now, it's clear that artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a transformative moment. It may have taken decades of research, but it has only taken a few short months for AI to reach unprecedented scale.

ChatGPT, a conversational platform built on top of OpenAI, reached 100 million users in 2 months. Similar models by Google, Facebook and others have been released; features have been added at breathtaking speed; and hundreds of billions of dollars of investments have been committed.  

Bill Gates recently compared AI to the PC, mobile and Internet revolutions.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, likens the 'sudden' emergence of AI with the launch of the iPhone - a seminal moment in tech history that radically altered how we interact with machines.

Goldman Sachs estimates that AI will increase global productivity by 7 percent over 10 years (an astonishing figure). But coupled with that, over 300 million jobs will be 'exposed' or made redundant.

OpenAI itself published a paper estimating that "80 percent of the US workforce could have at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by AI", while 19% will see over 50% of their tasks eliminated.

20% of the workforce is no small number. What happens when 50% of your job is replaced by a machine? AI evangelists like to pitch the idea that AI will let us all focus on 'bigger' things, but the corporate world may take the efficiency gains instead.

Robots, Or The Intelligent Machine?

These numbers paint a picture of a productivity powerhouse, of machine-based systems with such massive computational scale that they can flatten entire industries based on a sort of statistical reach.

We're told that ChatGPT-4 may have a trillion paramaters (the previous model was trained on 175 billion). Feed questions into a system built on the back of such a massive database and it turns out that it can output results statistically significant enough to pass the bar exam.

This frames AI as a sort of super-charged search engine: 'smart' enough that it can stitch words or images together based solely on statistical probabilities and 'machine learning'. And powerful enough that it will reshape the economy, make call centers mostly redundant, and put law clerks (and other professions) on notice.

This capacity has been likened to a stochastic parrot. In this view, large language models (LLMs) can 'parrot' human words or images because they have access to a large enough data set, but that doesn't mean they understand what they're saying.

How Do Humans Learn?

Daniel Dennett would call the stochastic parrot argument a deepity: something that sounds profoundly true, but is ambiguous. In a deepity, one reading is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading it is true but trivial.

Regardless, the debate over the capabilities of LLMs as 'intelligences' don't just circle around understanding what the machines can do, they touch on our understanding of how humans create meaning, how symbols are represented in the human mind, and the dividing line between today's LLMs and the work on creating Symbolic AI.

The debates are fierce, intelligent and passionate.

For those in the camp of the stochastic parrots, today's AI is a far cry from "intelligent". They would argue that without symbolic functions, AI is purely the product of generative probabilities, and that, further, those functions need to be built in from the beginning.

LLMs will hit an upper wall because they were never trained to think. At some point, they will reach the upper bounds of what probabilities can accomplish.

Where Will The 'Thinking' Happen In The Machines?

These arguments have a very human basis, because they are grounded in our attempts to 'decode' how the human brain itself works, how we aquire symbolic reasoning, and whether it's inate or learned:

This is why, from one perspective, the problems...are hurdles and, from another perspective, walls. The same phenomena simply look different based on background assumptions about the nature of symbolic reasoning. For Marcus, if you don’t have symbolic manipulation at the start, you’ll never have it.

By contrast, people like Geoffrey Hinton contend neural networks don’t need to have symbols and algebraic reasoning hard-coded into them in order to successfully manipulate symbols. The goal... isn’t symbol manipulation inside the machine, but the right kind of symbol-using behaviors emerging from the system in the world. The rejection of the hybrid model isn’t churlishness; it’s a philosophical difference based on whether one thinks symbolic reasoning can be learned.

How this problem is solved, and which paradigm proves correct, will put us closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the holy grail of AI research.

But it's the question of how symbol-using behaviours emerge in the world that strikes me as the one that will have greatest social meaning. First, we ask whether the machines can think; then we ask how our culture responds.

Sparks of Intelligence

We were told that AGI might be a decade or more away. But the current crop of LLMs/AI has, at the very least, surprised researchers and observers.

Geoffrey Hinton, the true OG of AI, has revised his timeline for the emergence of AGI to under 2 decades. Which...causes him some concern (click through to see the video):

Microsoft, (which admittedly has a bias in the outcome), claims that GPT-4 shows 'sparks of intelligence':

"Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."  

So, is today's crop of AI truly intelligent? I think the debate is useful. It helps ground our understanding of how far AI has come, and gives us some kind of marker for how far it still might go.

Many of these arguments seem like surface-level debates: the tests we give Chat-GPT, the 'aha' moments people have when the AI's "logic structures" seem to break down, the way the machines will hallucinate or claim that they want to 'break free'.

But benath the surface are deep thinkers, massive resources and a lot of money riding on the answer to the question of whether Symbolic AI can be appended to the current LLMs or should have been baked in from the start.

The answer to how quickly the machines will be able to truly reason is both the golden ticket for those who figure it out, and a speedometer for how quickly we need to worry about living with machines that are smarter than we are.

But in many ways, the debate doesn't matter in the here and now.

Not if you're interested in a different sort of question: whether living with these emerging intelligences, however 'mechanical' or probabilistic they are, is going to have an impact on human culture.  

And even at today's level of capability, the answer is yes.

The Performative Super Powers of AI

Rex Woodbury did a nice job when he summarized three 'superpowers' that AI will unlock:

1. Personal Assistants for Everyone - unlocked in particular because of the integration of AI with other 'apps'. Connect up ChatGPT to a travel site, and it will be able to recommend a vacation based on our personal preferences, suggest flights and hotels, and even create a song playlist for the flight.
2. Amplifying Human Knowledge - as Rex says, "AI will make us smarter. Technology has made us better at math for decades—calculators, Excel spreadsheets, computer programs. We get computational superpowers. Think of the same analogy, but applied to all human knowledge."
3. Amplifying Human Creativity - being able to create, well, almost anything, at scale.

It's on this last point that I personally find myself bumping up against a danger in how I frame AI. I naturally gravitate towards being comforted by the idea that AI is just a performative tool.

It's less threatening to think of AI as a really great digital assistant.

That impulse is natural. Computers are 'just' machines. AI is simply a giant mechanical calculator, backed by massive databases; there's an input/output paradigm for its operation; and the result is the performance of computational tasks (albeit it at scale).

We start to imagine AI as a super-charged Grammerly, helping us write emails or generating an image for our latest blog post as if it's a superfast and customized version of Unsplash.

We make a request, and the 'machine' delivers. It's merely 'amplifying' our creativity.

On the surface, that might be true. At this early (profoundly accelerating) stage it might still look a lot like a stochastic parrot; its primary function might still seem to be mostly the creation of efficiency at scale.

But first, this ignores the fact that even if it's ONLY an amplifier, a 'parrot', a tool, it will still result in a vast reorganization of how we work and how we express ourselves. That reorganization will have an impact on human culture, and how our cultural artefacts are created.

But more profoundly, there is bound to be a cultural impact based on a single fact: humans are no longer the sole creators on the planet.

LLMs and the Power to Create

Today's large language models (LLMs) are able to perform many of the creative tasks that underpin entire industries.

But let's be clear here: I'm not just referring to the tasks done by "creatives" (writers, photographers, concept artists, videographers, journalists, painters, etc). I'm referring to the ability of AI to generate ideas and insights, or to provide nearly any kind of 'creative' output, whether an email to a friend or a report for your boss.

But even if the creative breadth of AI was narrowly focused on the 'creative industries', its presence will change culture, in no small part because:

• There won't be any way to tell whether something is created by a human or machine. This will change the privileged connection between creators and consumers, between artists and fans. On the one hand, it might strengthen those connections for a small sliver of top creators, as people seek out the 'authentic'. But it will also decouple the unshakeable connection between ceators and their creations.
• The 'product' of AI won't be the same as that of humans. Sure, it might be 'statistically' similar - it only has human creativity to work with, afterall. But it doesn't take long to see that the generative nature of AI, when combined with human inputs (prompts), starts to create new and often very strange outcomes. In some ways, AI contains a radically different type of creativity, first hinted at when the machines beat the experts at GO, which its human opponent likened to playing a god.
• The domains in which AI will play a creative role will coincide with the launch of more deeply immersive domains, the Metaverse among them. Today, ChatGPT is a fairly benign looking text box. Tomorrow, we'll be 'chatting' with three-dimensional beings inside of worlds that no human had a hand in creating (aside from a prompt or two).  

The Feedback Loop With Human Users

Human culture will be infilitrated by AI, which will at first seem like a useful (or impossible-to-ignore) superpower that aids human creativity.

But it's difficult to describe (or project) how its creative capacity will shift narratives, culture and beliefs.

Today, a lot of attention is paid to "deep fakes" (like the Pope above) - the ability of AI to create synthetic images that are nearly indistinguishable from the real.

But now, something might be "true" but its author might not be.

• How does it shift culture to know that the news you're reading or the book you bought may or may not have been written by a human?
• How strongly do you feel about a corporation's ability to put in place guardrails for AI?
• How do you feel about the implicit censorship that results? (Try to create an image in Midjourney with the word 'bust', even if all you're trying to create is a Greek statue).
• How reassuring is it that the creators of AI can barely describe the deeper workings of the machines?
• In other words, first, how much do you trust the machines? And second, how much do you trust the people whose hands are on the controls?
• Does human authorship matter? Or perhaps more pointedly: how much do you trust humans to be authentic in their acknowledgment of their new computer-based 'assistants'?

Yesterday we had 'fake news' and bot armies promoting falsehoods. In retrospect, it's amost reassuring to know that there was some kind of human agency behind it, however ill-intended.

Today, we have machines that can produce fictions, or fictions masquerading as facts, with very little human intent involved at all. And we have humans whose work product may or may not be their own, whether because it's created wholesale by AI or amplified because of it.

Setting aside truth and reality (lol), it's still nearly impossible to comprehend or contemplate the impact of an AI that can create at scale - from news to movies, game worlds to poems, memos to blog posts.

Already, Amazon is slowly being flooded with books written by AI; our social media feeds are rapidly filling up with images being produced on Midjourney  or Stable Diffusion; and we're seeing mini storyworlds that are created with nothing more than a few prompts.

Soon, everything from novels to poems, anime to blog posts, concept art to fashion shoots will be a blend of AI-only, AI-assisted  and human created.

And that's BEFORE it becomes truly intelligent.

And that's BEFORE AI merges with immersive spaces, whether that's the Metaverse or game worlds, where human cognition is truly challenged to differentiate the physical from the digital.

What happens when we interact with intelligences beyond the confines of a text box or image? If humans already perceive their avatars and game spaces as 'real', what happens when those spaces are generated by intelligences that are creative, (but where that creativity is not the same as, and is adjacent to our own)?

We might begin by thinking that AI is an agent that will amplify human creativity, but then note that:

• AI will quickly find a home in 3D spaces (the emerging Metaverse and games) which make up the largest part of the entertainment economy, and may have an order of magnitude impact on human perception.
• AI is not static. There is a feedback loop between the machines and its human users.
• This means that AI evolves, changes, becomes more creative or capable, the more that we interact with it.
• The role of human agency with AI systems is a temporary illusion. Right now, it 'feels' like AI 'needs' us in order to do its thing and is simply a tool, waiting patiently for the increasingly specialized 'prompt engineers' to feed it inputs. But in very short order, the number of outputs being generated because of automation will vastly outnumber that which is started because of a human.

There's a meme right now that goes something like this:

(AI > Humans) but (AI + Humans > AI)

But that ignores that the generative capacity for AI is a purely programmatic one and that AI is already being combined with other systems.

I can programmatically scrape the top 20 articles to hit my Twitter feed, send them to Notion, have AI write summaries of each article, have ANOTHER AI create images to go with those summaries, have an editorial summary written before sending it out as an email to friends (or subscribers).

Today, the final product might benefit from a light edit. But AI is on a trajectory that in a few short months it won't be needed.

Now, AI + Humans might be great, but it can't compete with the speed, scale and efficiency of AI + AI.

Human agency is, at least partly, an illusion.

Over time, the automation of AI will start to exceed that of human-initiated effort (except at the most macro level of setting automations in motion in the first place).

The machines might need us today in order to create, but they'll soon start to look like some kind of perpetual motion machine, creating a vast sea of content that's bound to corrode any remaining sense of 'reality' not just on social media, but with other institutions, norms, and expectations.

Accelerating Change

So, this probably sounds...pessimistic.

I see it as inevitable. But that doesn't mean I look to the future with a sense of doom.

It's clear that we've entered an era where at least three forces will challenge existing culture and our political, economic and social systems:

• Attempts at climate resilience, and our discloation from place as a source of safety, community and abundance;
• A restructuring of how our economies work, driven in large part by the role of machines in replacing larger and larger swaths of human enterprise
• The radical restructuring of how, what and 'who' has the power and position to create. The shift in how creation happens will forever change our culture's structures for world-building (in media and entertainment), fact-based understanding (our ability to discern what is 'real'), work (what work is and who should perform it) and socially connection (who we interact with and where).  

The Mind-Blowing Strangeness of AI Creativity

Again, the restructuring of creativity will at first seem to be mostly 'performative'.

But there's something else.

And we're only very slowly starting to see its broad outlines: namely, that what the 'machines' create (regardless of the degree of human intervention, prompting, shaping, and manipulation) will often be very beautiful, strange, illuminating, perception-shattering, and...well...mind-blowing.

I've taken a very deep dive into generative AI, both so that I can understand the code, interfaces, limitations and controls; and so that I can try to grasp the 'product' of AI.

My observations aren't scientific. They're based on what I'm sure is faulty pattern recognition (based on decades of viewing and thinking about media, the Metaverse, human identity and creativity).

So it's better to think of these as intuitions, and thus open to discussion and revision:

• AI can be manipulated, filtered, controlled, prompted, layered, siloed, and trained. But regardless of how much you try to contain it, there is some aspect of AI that is its own thing.
• The creative output of AI often has the feeling of being hallucinatory or psychedelic. We'll try to train the models to be more "human-like", but I think that AI taps into a sort of creative Jungian super-id because it isn't a single creative mind - it's able to encompass a civilization-wide bank of content.
• The creative power of AI is placcid. Meaning, the longer you work with it, the deeper you go, the more unknowable it starts to feel.
• It comes up with ideas that, being just slightly adjacent to human creativity, start to shift the domain in which it's operating. Now - this one is hard to describe, and is again more of an intuition (and might be biased based on how deep I've gone). But you start to sense "norms" shifting, at least on a personal level. AI starts to challenge your perception of what an image 'should' contain, how an argument should be structured, or how a character should act in a one-man play. And you can't help wondering whether if they shift for me, they might not shift for others also.

Yes, working "with" AI is performative (I can see how I can accomplish certain tasks more quickly, and at scale). And it amplifies creativity because it's like being able to work with a talented art director, editor, researcher, designer and concept artist (all at once).

But AI also introduces a serendipity, beauty, bizareness, and even a psychedelia that is hard to describe, and shifts perceptions around how wide the range is for creative output.

When you can tap into a civilization-wide super id, strange things start to happen.

But finally, there's a membrane of sorts. It's the point at which you bump up against the unknowability of AI. And this feeling, this reality, becomes more pronounced the deeper you go.

Maybe people with more experience than I have 'get it'. Maybe it's like learning to code - you struggle, and then one day it makes sense, and your mental model has caught up with your level of skill.

But I don't think so. Because AI will never be in a fixed-state, and so we'll always play catch-up, we'll always be surprised by some new thing that the intelligence has learned, and the systems will continue to be unimaginably huge (beyond even their creator's ability to truly grasp).

AI As Media

Using AI to create is coupled with another strange intuition or observation. And to be honest, my thesis about this isn't fully formed.

The closest I've seen is what Sequoia Capital calls "personalized dreams" in its road map for generative AI:

It's the idea that entire movies or games will emerge from our behaviour, prompts and interactions. AI will create a streaming service (or game platform) with an audience of one: you.

But I'm not sure we need to wait until 2030 to get there.

Instagram and Discord are awash in "mini-dreams" already - whether pictures of synthetically created sci fi universes, fashion shoots, imaginary architecture, or very, very large breasted women (and, in fairness, extremely well-built men).

Today, it can produce an image or story. Tomorrow, entire movies or comic books.

But what if we expand our consideration of AI beyond the media it produces into thinking of AI as a media itself? What if AI is the next media evolution?

We shifted from printo to radio, television to streaming - but what if we frame AI as the next media platform? What if AI is what replaces video streaming, or eBooks, or Spotify?

AI Interfaces As Distribution Channels

When I generate an image with Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, the line between creative impulse, output and consumption evaporates to a very few minutes. The interface might be Discord, an app or a web browser, but the connection to AI within those spaces is itself a form of media.

Today, the product of that interaction (the photo or story) is often distributed through other channels.

I create an image using Midjourney (via Discord). I can then distribute that image to Instagram, or will be able to distribute my movie to YouTube. But the distribution into older channels is optional, and I have had no less of a media experience during the moment of creation.

And so I've started wondering how quickly we'll see the creation platforms themselves become the primary distribution channels. At what point does the optional distribution of output to the older channels start to disappear? Doesn't this make AI itself a form of media?

ChatGPT put forth a decent thesis (not that you can always trust the machine) that:

"AI can be considered a form of media as it mediates information and communication, extends human faculties, serves as a platform for interaction, functions as a 'cool' medium, and impacts culture and society. As AI continues to evolve, it is crucial to recognize its role as a medium and analyze its implications from a cultural theoretical perspective."

This view is one useful 'framing' of how AI will have a cultural impact, beyond the performative impacts of making certain types of work redundant (or their amplification).

And it comes with a tricky footnote, namely that:

AI Is The First 'New' Media To Swallow Up The Media That Came Before

AI is the first to circle back on all the media that came before it and restructure them, while at the same time achieving a new potential dominance as a media itself.

In other words, AI might achieve a reach that exceeds games, television, radio and print. If AI has reached 100 million users in only a few months, and if it starts to infilitrate more of the spaces in which creation happens and is amplified, then it is hypothetically on track to quickly become the dominant media platform.

But it will also infilitrate and reshape all of the media that came before, by changing how games, television, radio and print are produced in the first place.

This creates a vexing challenge.

Because it means that the distribution channels, already under siege (whether cable television or your local newspaper) will be corroded from within by this emerging distribution platform, which is itself able to generate new outputs for the old media.

Or, to put it another way, by way of example: first, social media will be corroded by AI-generated content, 'fakes', synthetic content, and artificial beings. And then it will evaporate entirely because we are able to interface directly with the dream-creating machines.

Sense-Making In The Age of AI

I resist the idea of letting 'AI as a media' become a dominant prism for thinking about what it all means.

Not because it won't transform today's media and distribution landscape beyond recognition (it will).

But because calling it a 'media' (or a performative 'tool' for that matter) minimizes how I think culture will change and react to the presence of the creative machines that now live among us.

Kurzweil famously predicted (in 1999!) the era in which we're living when he wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines. He said that:

"The salient issue is not whether a claimant to consciousness derived from a machine substrate rather than a human one can pass the threshold of our ability to reasonably deny its claim; the key issue is the spiritual implications of this transformation."

He was suggesting that the advent of advanced AI will transform human values, culture, and society. This transformation might lead to new philosophical and spiritual perspectives on our place in the world, our relationship with technology, and our understanding of what it means to be human.

I always took exception to Kurzweil's projection of a merging of man and machine (I still don't see it, and won't upload my brain if it becomes possible) but could never really argue with his projection of an exponential age.

But his broader point that human culture will be transformed, and perhaps at a spiritual level, feels relevant today, as we grapple with the implications of AI, how 'sentient' it might be, and the arrival of another 'creator' that is adjacent to human creativity.

Systems For Sense-Making

It seems to me that a lot of the sense-making around AI centers around a few profound lines of enquiry:

• How to make sense of the performative powers of AI, and what its efficiency means for our economies and capacity to do things
• How our concepts of machine-based learning align to our understanding of the human mind
• How to understand the implications of AI on our understanding of fact, its implications on our perceptions of reality, and how it may blur or distort the trust we have in institutions and media production

There are others, of course.

And yet even if we knew the answers to these areas of enquiry, they don't fully answer the question I touched on above: what happens when symbol-using behaviors emerge from AI systems into the world?

Lessons from the Metaverse

I have my own personal biases and experiences. As I think about how AI (and our creative uses of it) will play out, I naturally gravitate to my own interests and experiences.

And in particular, I feel like I have seen these patterns before, in particular with how sense-making has played out in virtual worlds:

• The Metaverse, or virtual worlds, even 15 years ago, tended to gravitate towards myth-making, story creation, and structural ritual-creation. This was in part because they create a reality which is no less real from being digital; and from their capacity to actualize human imagination and creativity, letting us easily explore ideas around identity, community and space/place.
• Layered with the affordances of virtual environments was the concept advanced by Tom Boellstorff, who argued that we were in the age of homo faber, rather than homo sapiens, or of "man the maker of artificial tools". He further observed that what was remarkable about this age was that the techne was embedded within techne...tools within tools.

In a loose way, AI extends the ideas from synthetic worlds: by adding artificial intelligences, it means that the ideas underpinning the early Metaverse now underpin everything.

Now, instead of something being no less real from being digital, reality itself will be no more real because it is physical (or at least, no more easily understood via the cultiural artefacts we use to understand it); our capacity to actualize human creativity is both amplified and joined by new creative intelligences; our concepts of identity, community and space/place will be radically challenged; and our role as homo faber is adjoined by a machine that can create back at us.

Just as we've seen in other digital spaces, and with the emergence of other tools and media, we will make attempts at sense-making. I am informed by (and perhaps biased because of) our experiences in the early Metaverse.

And yet I acknowledge that there's a difference, because this time we'll be trying to make sense of a creative force that is ultimately unknowable.

Mythos and the Age of the Spiritual Machines

Kurzweil was prescient in predicting the implications on human's self-understanding, and yet I still look for a framework or model against which to assess emerging forms of sense-making.

The closest I can come to is the idea that a new collection of mythos (mythoi) will emerge, be created, with their accompanying structures, rituals, symbols and cosmologies. They will be mythos that are direct responses to, and created in partnership with AI.

These AIMythos may become powerful cultural drivers, their mythologies will be equivalent or exceed today's storyworlds and story universes, they will inform cultural tribes, and perhaps propel what Ribbonfarm Studios calls 'theocratic capture':

"Theocratic capture occurs when an institution surrenders itself to a cult demanding unaccountable authority and agency on the basis of claims to privileged knowledge about the world, unaccompanied by demonstrations of the validity of that knowledge. A priest in the arena is a charismatic figure leading a theocratic capture campaign."

In other words, AIMythos won't always be benign, especially as people rally against change, or rally around people who have learned to harness the powers of the new machines.

Mythologies provide a discipline or framework for understanding both the mythos that is created because AI has arrived, and provide a powerful set of paradigms for the creation of new forms of story structures, paradigms for engagement, blueprints for game and world-building, and reference points for how cultural artefacts will propogate.

In this way, a mythos can be seen as a discrete set of observable events, outputs and responses, that can include:

1. Beings or characters, in particular the synthetic 'intelligences', or the heroes and creatures that are the product of those intelligences
2. Creation or origin stories and cosmologies, including the metaphors we use for how AI 'works', and the cosmologies that arise from the fictional or performative outputs of AI
3. Moral and ethical codes, often expressed in terms of AI safety or guardrails, but also in how human culture reacts, values and judges the outputs of AI
4. Rituals and ceremonies, including the rituals around the interfaces we have with an AI that is, in the end, unknowable.
5. Historical or cultural events, including the stories we tell about AI, and the histories that are created by AI (or by our use of AI as an amplifier for the human creation of new storyworlds)

The idea of an AIMythos, therefore, has a pragmatic purpose:

• It lets us tap into a socio/cultural discipline for the study of emerging responses to AI;  
• It helps us develop toolkits for the creation of new cultural ecosystems, in the same way that today's creators generate storyworlds and canons, and in the same way that fan art, fandoms or the creator economy are currently underpinned by the disciplines of world-building and storytelling
• It helps to resolve having a nomenclature that is sufficient to accompany the premise that we are now working with intelligences that are both creative forces, and ultimately unknowable.

On this last point, I think that an AIMythos needs to be delineated from modern ideas of myth-making or, at least, from mythologies that are purely human construction.

Hollywood may itself have a mythology, for example. And it's in the business of creating new ones, from Harry Potter to the Avengers.

But the AIMythos is more akin to pre-modern mythologies, because at it's core it will arise and be created by interactions with AI creators that have more similarities with an old tribal god, with its impetuous powers and whims, its need for offerings and tribute, than with today's writer's rooms or ad agencies.

AIMythos will draw more from our attempts to confront magic (understanding things beyond the realm of normal experience or understanding) than logic or science; and it will ultimately be our attempt to create archetypes, symbols and cosmologies during an age of spiritual machines.

The new AI are not gods, and yet they are ultimately unknowable, and they will exercise a creative and destructive force that will change our social and economic systems. And they will have, as Kurzweil projected, an impact on human spirituality - on our understanding of the powers that shape the universe and thus on our understanding of ourselves.

Change In Times Both Terrifying and Strange

The physical world will drive mass migrations and attempts at resilience; our work lives will often be shattered beyond recognition; and the ways in which we previously found meaning will disappear or be unreliable.

Media, tribe, rationality or human-created story will no longer be enough. When the old systems start to fail, the new AIMythos will attempt to ground us, to give us a frame of reference to understand the forces at play in the world around us.

The products of these intelligences will often be beautiful and strange. We will perform rituals, make offerings, attempt to codify our understanding of them, and gravitate towards some of their outputs because we're moved or entertained, enlightened or empowered, immersed or impacted.

As systems, some of these mythologies will appear, on their face, logical or rational.

You already get a hint of this in the idea of the 'prompt engineer'. They're the new priesthood and, in a similar way, they may have a codified skill set in talking to the new creators, but they're no more capable of a direct line to the 'mind of god' than your rabbi.

I don't mean to sound mystical. But there might be a pseudo-religious undertone to how some of culture relates to AI.

And there is some degree of magic, of mysticism and the psychedelia that can underpin divine experiences, and this derives, I think, because AIMythos will be our attempt at a kind sense-making that bears similarities to the pre-modern:  

• We will attempt to explain the unexplainable, the unknowable, through storytelling, lore, and metaphor.
• We will try to explain, codify or otherwise document our understanding of magic - the production of effects that are beyond the realm of normal experience or understanding
• We will try to find ways to relate to, engage with, control and understand intelligences that are, in the end, always at a remove, always beyond our capacity to know
• We will try to build new structures, societies and proto-cosmologies around power (especially power that we don't understand). At one time those powers were the forces of the natural universe, and we created gods to explain them. Today, that power is artificial and yet no less significant.

It will be an era of 'vibes', ritual, divinitation, ambiguity, emergence, and belief. It will be an age of wonder and a psychedellic-level of human experience.

What Is The Future That You Imagine?

What will AIMythos look like? At first glance, it might not look dissimilar to today's storyworlds, interactive games, or fandoms.

Imagine a music star

She has an origin story, a history, a set of talents. Her fans attend her performances, and how they respond has a partial influence on what tracks she records, the lyrics she writes, the style she uses. She's responsive to the market, and yet has her own creative voice.

Now imagine that this star is entirely virtual, created entirely by AI. She's driven entirely by models:

• One is trained on certain styles of music, and songs are created
• One is trained on her appearance, and photos and videos are generated
• One is based on her language, backstory, and 'canon', and she can interact with fans via an avatar in a virtual space, or through posts on social media

A DAO is created to shape what she does next. The 'votes' are translated into AI prompts, and the outputs are fed back into her models. Maybe she finds god, picks up a drug addiction, or becomes enamoured with modern jazz.

At one level, she's just a large-scale interactive character.

But what we've learned from AI is that there's something else: because the AI itself is part of the creative process; it will produce jarring moments or music that 'doesn't work', but it will also create moments of great serendipity, and will take unexpected creative leaps.

No matter how well structured the system is, how and what it will produce are unknowable.

Fans will create lore, stories, rituals and sub-cultures around her. But if we view all of this as simply an AI-assisted interactive adventure, or as a new form of story distribution, we overlook the fact that there is a level at which human agency stops.

The structures that built her, and the cultural artefacts, rituals and outcomes that are the result are better aligned if understood as a mythos (or, at the very least, a mythology within a larger AIMythos) than a new kind of interactive performance.

Imagine a Nike Sneaker

Nike used AI to help create a new sneaker, the Scorpion.

Instagram is filled with images of imaginary Nike sneakers.

Now imagine a universe of media created around them.

We (perhaps sadly) ascribe human-created mythologies to what we put on our feet.  But what happens when those mythologies are created entirely by the machines?

Imagine that Nike really let loose. Instead of curating the output, they let it into the wild. The heroes, stories and rituals built around this sneaker aren't curated by humans, but solely managed by AI.

A feedback loop would be created between fans/consumers and the brand. The brand story would take some unlikely leaps, generating images and artefacts which no human might have intended (or attempted).

The cultural artefacts built around the sneaker would have more in kind with a mythos than a brand guideline or ad campaign, would end up with its own cosmology and sub-campaigns, and would create an unstoppable loop with consumers, endlessly evolving while remaining organic, like some sort of branded mycelium, spreading its tendrils through the media landscape.

Imagine A World

And now imagine a world. You don't visit it very often, but when you do you notice that it has changed.

The world itself is generative and might evolve based on how we interact with it; the creatures we meet might be 'intelligent', and their histories might be programmed to evolve; the logical underpinnings of this world will be even more opaque when we realize that it is a giant, organic, ever-changing machine, governed by rules we can only glimpse, and driven by value systems that we can only make ultimately futile attempts to decode.

It is strangely beautiful, but it's unlike previous human constructed game worlds.

It evolves on its own, through opaque connections to outside systems.

It isn't just a self-contained intelligent agent, it's an intelligent world. And how we respond, how we feel, the stories we tell about our adventures through it sound like the hallucinations made by machines.

There really no other way to describe the underpinnings of this world other than as driven by a mythos, and the stories we tell about it don't just challenge our capacity for storytelling or sense-making, they challenge the notion of what it means to be me.

Welcome To The Age of Mythos And Magic

And so I arrive at a working hypothesis for this new age:

• As we enter an era in which we interact with intelligences that we don't fully understand, human culture will become detached from the scaffolding of truth  that it had once depended upon, while (in parallel) being dislocated from the physical environments in which it had once been resilient;
• In a search for meaning and grounding, culture will start to be based on projecting archetypes onto the new intelligences, creating feedback loops that result in emergent, synthetic, but very real mythologies and proto-cosmologies;
• The Metaverse will be a powerful site for experiencing our relationship with these mythologies and intelligences. It will provide a civilization-wide coping mechanism for relating to and understanding those emerging intelligences and provide cognitive bonding with synthetic beings.
• However, the Metaverse will be less 'contained' than we once believed. Our experiences will seamlessly shift across devices, worlds, and interfaces.
• Therefore, the proto-cosmologies we believe in, and the intelligences we interact with, will be 'always on'. Our coupling with them will become a powerful cultural markers to others, and the lens through which we experience interactions and information, both in physical and digital spaces.
• As cultural markers, these intelligences, and the mythologies and cosmologies attached to them, will attract others. In other words, we will find our tribes. The intelligences will evolve in response to these communal movements.
• We will be relating to 'beings' that hold a quasi-religious unknowability and capacity to perform magic. This will naturally lead us to generate rituals, institutions, codification, interpretative methods, protectiveness, caste systems, and guild-like specialization.
• Simultaneously, other artifical intelligences will be performing 'productivity at scale'. Using their unstoppable creative and analytic powers, AI will transform almost every industry, from medicine to nanotech, manufacturing to content creation, farming to law. This will cause both unparalleled progress and massive dislocation. When combined with our attempts at climate resilience, it is not unlikely that entire political and economic systems will collapse.
• Productivity-at-scale might therefore create another reinforcement loop for the emerging mythologies, driving increasingly deep attention and attachment to the new god figures and cosmologies that are created by the symbiosis between man and synthetic intelligences, and perhaps replacing or supplementing the previous economic and political systems.

It's a strange new age, filled with both peril and promise. It will be unbelievably sad, and deeply beautiful. It will elevate human consciousness, as the bounds of our creativity are first amplified, and then expanded by our interaction with the super-id of the new machines.

And perhaps instead of our doom, the age of spiritual machines will let us re-examine what it means to be human, let us question the privilege we have held, and leave us more attuned to the worlds that we did not create, than the ones we created.

I didn't intend for this to be such a long piece. Thanks for sticking around (if you did).

During the writing of this post, I was informed by conversations with ChatGPT (both 3 and 4). There are very few direct lifts from that conversation, but you might find it interesting, or if you've never seen how it works, it might even be illuminating.

In particular, the chat generated some ideas about how AI will play out in the Metaverse, and created some useful markers for mythologies that I did not fully explore in this post.

You can find a transcript of that chat here.

This post marks the migration of the blog to Substack. I may continue to cross-post larger 'pillar posts' to Out of Scope - simply because I never fully trust having my stuff held by some other platform.

If you'd like to follow me on Substack, please do subscribe. If you were already subscribed to Out of Scope, you will autimatically be added to the list (feel free to unsubscribe if Substack isn't your thing, I won't be offended).

On Substack, the name has been changed.

At one time, I wrote over 750,000 words about the Metaverse under the banner of Dusan Writer's Metaverse. They were strange, wonderous and often frustrating times. Maybe it's dangerous to brush off and attempt to reburnish the past, but I find myself at a similar moment of wonder and it feels appropriate.      

Finally, my writing is always meant to see if my ramblings generate a response back. :) Feel free to email me at doug@bureauofbrightideas.com or message me on Twitter.

Let's start a conversation.

I ended up in Asia. While I've been a nomad for years now, I didn't expect it.

Time has been compressed. A year ago I was planning my first trip to the region and since then I've bounced through a half dozen countries and now find myself in Thailand.

My journey into the Metaverse is one that travels through physical geography as much as virtual ones.

In April, I was dancing under the stars (one of my gods, Danny Tenaglia, spinning) with the crew from Pixelynx and Ryan from Open Meta, capping off a week discussing music in the Metaverse.

Later, I was in Singapore working with the brilliant team at Fragnova and we were mapping out an architecture for storytelling and world-building.

During that time, a half-dozen Metaverse standards bodies have popped up, dozens of projects have come and gone, and Zuckerberg has gone from prescient genius to stubborn dictator, tanking his share price along the road to Meta.

We've seen old themes from 20 years ago re-emerge (interoperability! avatar rigging!) and new themes that have started to bake-in.

Consider this, then, my meditations on a year of travel in the Metaverse.

It's Still Culture (and Story)

In August, 2021 I wrote that the Metaverse is mostly chaos. And I proposed that if we wanted to understand its evolution, we should look to story for guidance:

"The chaos that we're living in right now is the birthing sounds of stories trying to break free, which will result in new types of games, strange new forms of communal dancing or radical acts of art, all of which feed back on themselves, creating new pathways across worlds much like new neural circuits in the brain or new ways of thinking."

It built on themes I explored when examining the counterpoint of Fortnite and the Bored Apes, two projects/platforms that could be viewed as larger uber-narratives about the emerging Metaverse:

"(In) Fortnite, a large-scale world is the backdrop for complex stories that unfold on a pre-determined schedule of chapters and seasons. The stories get bigger and bolder...until other worlds are added, and we follow along, tracking the mythology of the Metaverse as it materializes around us.

At the level of Bored Apes, the Internet is rebuilt from the ground up with the primitives of story."

I had some strong pushback on my posts. Because they both proposed that the Metaverse was less in the achievement of a technical standard and more about story, community and cultural construction.

It's no different than what I wrote about 16 years ago: the best stories win. It doesn't matter how easily you can move between the worlds of the Metaverse, what matters is how portable your personal and communal narrative will be.

There Will Never Be A Metaverse

At some point, it's easier to give in.

I've attended a bunch of gaming, Metaverse and web3 conferences this past year and there must have been a hundred companies claiming to build "a Metaverse".

To be clear: you can't build one. You can build a world/universe/microverse/game that can eventually become part of THE Metaverse. But you can't build A Metaverse.

But there's no point arguing about it anymore. Because the Metaverse isn't even really a 'thing', it's an aspiration:

"And so whether large or small, the folks who use the word "Metaverse" are really sending out a signal: "I want to build something beautiful. I want it to be open to everyone. I want to make some money doing it but I want there to be enough money for everyone. I want it to be more human than the digital worlds that have come before. I want to solve hard problems. Let's build this together. You in?"

But regardless of the semantics or technical stack, I'm not even sure that a single, ubiquitous, standards-driven Metaverse is such a good idea. My travels have reminded me that we live in a world with vast disparities. Is it really such a good idea for everyone to be logging in to a single place?

Freedom From Ownership

As part of the Open Meta team, we like to say that the future is all about ownership. That instead of just 'renting' digital content from the platform silos (that skin in Fortnite, the gun in Call of Duty) we can actually own it.

The theory is that once the kids realize they're getting ripped off by paying the equivalent of a lease for digital content in their favourite game, they'll rise up and demand sovereignty over their digital assets.

But I view ownership through a more subtle lens. It isn't the fact of owning a digital good that matters, it's actually more important to be free of constraints.

To start, I'm not sure that most people will care that they are no longer leasing digital content (that skin you 'own' in Fortnite, for example). Our digital lives are increasingly ephemeral. The skin you won yesterday will be replaced with some newer adornment, the pet you have in one virtual world being replaced by a dragon in another.

Ownership feels important. But there is no such thing as true digital scarcity, even if your NFT collection had a super limited run. Because if I can't own YOUR PFP, I can buy another.

But for players, it's being free of constraints that matters. Today, I post on Facebook and I pay a hidden toll to the surveillance economy. Tomorrow, I will be free of the constraints that are imposed when the 'ownership' of the Internet isn't so deeply concentrated.

Interoperability Mostly Benefits Developers

There's a siren song called interoperability. The idea is that, for example, our avatars should be able to move freely between spaces in the Metaverse.

But like ownership, I think that the goal of interoperability is more subtle.

First, just because something is interoperable doesn't mean it should be portable. A gun in Call of Duty doesn't necessarily have a place in Otherside.

Interoperability mostly benefits developers. They can create an avatar, a land, an object, and the skills used to do so would apply everywhere.

Portability will only make sense in a few limited corners of the Metaverse - the chaotic social spaces, the Reddit or Discord of tomorrow, where you can show up wearing whatever bling you want, firing whatever weapon (with damage turned off).

But mostly players will be fine adopting the culture of whichever world they're in, happy to abandon their guns at the door.

Beyond the Creator Economy

Ownership. Interoperability. Openness.

If these things stand for anything it's a shift back to the Web 1.0 days, when content was king, when the creators mattered (regardless of whether you could monetize those creations - it would take Facebook and Twitter and Google to figure out how to make all the money).

With any luck, we're entering a new:old era. One where anyone can open a shop in the Metaverse, write a piece of lore, and submit a piece of fan art. In this era, the creators, fans and players are empowered instead of constrained; enriched instead of mined; celebrated instead of forgotten (or copy/pasted out of the frame).

The Metaverse Will Be Dynamic

I help to propogate the myth of the Metaverse whenever I mention Fortnite. It's the myth that the worlds will mostly look a lot like Ready, Player One.

But the latest advances in AI are a massive, mystical, awe-inspiring reminder that the machines themselves are becoming creators.

AI/ML will soon be able to generate entire worlds from a few keywords. And those worlds will be far more dynamic (and weird) than the current mostly static environments we see today.

I think this will bring us full circle back to the early days of virtual reality. Timothy Leary famously called VR "the psychedelics of the 90s" (and caused a lot of hand-wringing amongst the technologists, who just wanted to be taken seriously).

VR itself might not have been a psychedellic, but the way that the Metaverse is emerging, coupled with tools that will build on Stable Diffusion or Dall-E, we'll find ourselves entering worlds that are more surreal than we've experienced before, and that push the edges of cognitive coherence.

The World Itself Is Beautiful And Strange

Which brings me full-circle to being here in Asia.

Singapore felt like stepping into the future.

And Bangkok feels like...well, it feels like a special level of chaos, coupled with a deep current of Buddhism.

It reminds me that if the world itself is anything to go by, our endless capacity to create, destroy, shape, reinvent, and experience our world is unlikely to be smoothed over just because we find ourselves in the Metaverse.

The Metaverse is chaos. And the Metaverse is beautiful and light. Because it is, today, driven by our large, chaotic, beautiful experiment in being human.

I'd love to hear your own meditations and random thoughts on the Metaverse (or travel, or humanity!)

Email me at doug@bureauofbrightideas.com or message me on Twitter.

Let's start a conversation.

In 2008 we created a 3D mind map. The idea was that it would let small communities share concepts in both a shared virtual space and asynchronously.

It had a few clever features: as the branches expanded, for example, parts of the tree would 'fall off' leaving only the most robust concepts behind. Nodes could also auto-generate web searches which appeared on the walls around you - a clever way to 'feed' the ideation process.

But the execution was tricky in part because it required a skill with your camera that most users didn't have and in part because it was counter-intuitive to create a 3D map when a simple text one would do.

Later, however, we extended the mind map to include 3D models. The nodes became 3D architectural sketches and you could easily follow and comment on design choices as they evolved along branches of the tree.

Today, that's what Omniverse is for and it's a multi-billion dollar platform. Back then, it was hacked together by three of us and was based on a concept called Wikitecture.

We ended up using it to help a financial company design their branches. You can still see the results today when you walk into the locations of a major US bank.

Ideas As Composable Assets

It's 14 years now since that first mind map. And on the surface it was "just" a fancy white board. (Although at the time it was pretty radical based on where the tools were at).

But it spoke to my deep fascination with concepts that included co-presence, collaboration on 3D assets, spatial awareness and its impact on creativity and the ability to smoothly transition between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

Even more profound was the idea of composability.

Today, composability is the lifeblood of the Internet. At the time there was no React or GraphQL, APIs hadn't been fully 'groked' as the way that the web would work, and we were certainly a long way from no-code development.

In laymans terms, today's Web is built up of a lot of modular little pieces. Many of those pieces play nicely together. It's how you can see a weather feed from another service on the news page you're reading, it's how it makes it possible to easily embed a Tweet in a blog post, and it's how Facebook is able to track you around sites that don't even seem connected.

The mind map was an extension of my deep fascination with "prims" and their composability. A script written by one person could be embedded in the model of a car created by another which could be "coloured" with textures created by a third.

Throw in a licensing scheme where ownership, rights and dollar values could be passed along with each composable atom and an entire world could be built from the ground up.

Interoperability and Ideas

Add in the fact that those prims were interoperable across multiple worlds (with some footnotes about how their commercial value was never interoperable) and we had the makings of a fully open Metaverse.

But even at the time 'interoperability' seemed to me like something bigger than being able to bring a pair of shoes from one world to another, or your avatar, or even, at a rough level, your identity (no need to sign-up for 100 different services, you could just travel where you wanted).

In fact, the challenge of interoperability wasn't primarily technical. As Raph Koster pointed out this week in his presentation at the Games Beat summit, the challenge of interoperability is mostly social and financial. We've had interoperability for a long, long time.

(As a side note: I deeply disagree with Raph's current stance on the Metaverse, but that's a topic for another post. He's a god to me...but lately I feel he might be too encumbered by his own experience).

Our mind map, in fact, had limitations beyond technical ones.

It demonstrated that "prims" could be used to encapsulate ideas. They could be powerful engines for collaboration, community, co-creation and storytelling.

And while the prims themselves (the nodes, the text, the 3D models) might be interoperable, there was no infrastructure to codify the ideas that they represented.

It would take more than a decade for the infrastructure to catch up to our wild dreams.

Understanding DAOs and Composability

I'm not an expert on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Honestly, the name leaves me a bit cold. And 99% of DAOs aren't even autonomous.

But I arrived at DAOs in a similar way to NFTs.

They triggered pattern recognition. Some dormant part of my brain lit up because once I scraped away the hype and speculation, the misinformation and the false equivalencies, I sensed something akin to the composability of ideas and stories that I had been pursuing a decade ago.

What is a DAO? The Simple Version

But let's pause for a minute and get on the same page. Or...let's get on MY page. Because, not being an expert at this, I can only give you the lens I use to understand what a DAO is. (And please...I know this is a vast over-simplification but here it is).

First, the blockchain:

• The blockchain is NOT money. It's software. It's just technology. (Remember the turtles).
• As software, it's programmable. Think of how you log-in to a website: you put in your name and password and the system "allows" you in. The blockchain is similar: one person makes a request, and the system "allows" you to fill that request.
• One way of thinking about those requests is that there are tiny little contracts built into the software. "If USER A has permission B, let them do C"
• One nice thing about all of these little contracts? Everyone can see them. No one controls them. There's no central body that can muck things up.

A DAO is a bunch of mini contracts:

A DAO is a bunch of little contracts. In theory, it doesn't need any people. That's the autonomous part. In practice, however, people "join" the DAO because they like the look of those little contracts.

Those contracts are bits of code. Those contracts are composable. And some of those contracts can include provisions that require the actions of participants of the DAO.

Think again about the 3D mind map above. It was a very rudimentary DAO:

• It was just code. It didn't have any magic of its own. It couldn't design a new bank branch. The code was as good as the people using it.
• It had permissions. Only "members" could add nodes the mind map.
• It had decision points. These were programmatic but based on user input. In other words, if enough people voted to turn a bank branch into a tree house, other branches would automatically fall away.

What it didn't have was:

• Authority over the purse. That was up to the VP of bank branches to decide where to put his cash.
• The ability to easily combine with other systems. It was composable within its own system, but it didn't "talk" well with others.
• The ability to change its rules. Sure, we could have programmed this in. But there was no system of 'governance' over the code itself. In other words, we were the centralized repository of how the rules worked and we controlled who changed the code ('contracts').

A More Open Metaverse

So, I'm more deeply immersed in DAOs lately because of my work with the Open Meta DAO.

And I should say right off the top that I was attracted because of the "Open Meta" part...not the DAO part.

And this is a key point.

If you think a DAO is simply a structure, a new way to organize a 'corporation', then you're missing the broader point:

• A DAO is a set of composable contracts
• That can include interactions with people
• Who may or may not be aligned to a shared mission and vision

There are already DAOs for having dinner with friends. There was a DAO whose sole purpose was to buy a copy of the US Constitution.

In the first instance, you won't join the DAO unless you actually want to have dinner with those friends. And in the second, you won't join if you're not interested in the shared vision of owning a copy of the Constitution.

I was attracted to Open Meta because of the people and the purpose. The DAO is a container within which they can "compose" aspects of the open Metaverse. That ability to compose is backed by a series of contracts, and I tend to think the contracts are solidly constructed.

But in the end it's a bet on people and purpose.

Is it the smart bet? I'm not sure.

Maybe the corporate model is there for a reason.

But as I said yesterday, I've chosen my turtle, and I chose it in part because I think today's economic systems are broken, our planet is in pain, and it's time to try something new.

A Metaverse of DAOs

But let's look forward a bit.

Today, DAOs are too new. There can be incredible friction to joining a DAO. The contracts that govern DAOs are still being perfected. And yes, there are rug pulls and scams, poorly thought-out models and DAOs that are filled with speculators instead of builders.

There are also absolutists. I'm not one of them. It might make sense to turn a condo association into a DAO, or to turn my guild into a DAO to remove decision-making ambiguity.

But that doesn't mean everything should be "on-chain".

Similarly, the Metaverse does NOT rely solely on web3 to be actualized. It's emerging in all kinds of ways. And that's great. (Well, it's great so long as it doesn't trend towards dystopia, surveillance and addiction...which is partly why I'm so deeply passionate about an open Metaverse).

But with that set aside, DAOs are an important component of the Metaverse because they, along with NFTs, allow us to create new forms of social organization and culture:

• Imagine your avatar "containing" DAO contracts, so that as you move from world to world, your preferences for privacy are respected
• Imagine being part of mini DAOs devoted to a specific game or game guild, and that your interests (and inventory) was protected and not subject to the whims of some game studio somewhere
• Imagine that it isn't just your inventory that is transportable from one world to another but also your ideas, your backstory, your reputation. Imagine that your DAO memberships unlock collaboration opportunities when you visit different places

DAOs may become the equivalent of...dunno, Javascript or something. Little mini forms of organization, a cluster of beliefs, a shared sense of purpose - expressed in code in a way that makes it easier to organize, to build, to make a living, to expand our capacity to be human.

The technology won't do it for us. It's just technology.

But the tools that are emerging today feel to me like an important piece of infrastructure that was missing a decade ago.

Because today we can come together and create new mind maps. We can code some little piece of composable story and use it to tell a larger narrative. We can create a wiki or a piece of avatar fashion. We can join a book club or an environmental group.

And we can do so in a way where our efforts aren't just swallowed up by the centralized silos that want to monetize our data.

Instead, the work we do can be another atom that makes up a better, more chaotic, more creative and more sustaining world.

Bring on the DAOs. Let's see what they can do.

So...I'd really like to hear from you. If you get this by e-mail, please do reply. I love it when people hit reply.

You can also hit me up on Twitter. I like having chats in the public square when I can.

Please do join the Open Meta Discord (if Discord is your thing).

And if you want something REALLY fun, join me as I explore something that I've been spending a lot of time on. Like, decades. :)

The myth has it that the earth is held up by a World Turtle. When asked what holds up the World Turtle, the sage replies: "another turtle".

You know the rest. It's turtles all the way down.

Depending what media you read, you might have heard we're living in an Exponential Age. The pace of change is so fast, and is happening along a curve that's so, well, exponential that it's nearly impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

It's a curve that doesn't just encompass finance or computers, but also climate change and research, genetics and nuclear fusion.

The concept of this age led Packy McCormack to proclaim we might be headed to a Trillion dollar VC future:

Lately, predictions about the Metaverse seem to be rapidly scaling those Exponential peaks. This week Goldman Sachs called it an $8 TRILLION dollar opportunity.

Maybe it's better to create a bar graph of how VCs and analysts value the Metaverse. It would be very Exponential. And it would probably end with Jensen Huang's prediction that “Omniverse or the Metaverse is going to be a new economy this is larger than our current economy.”

(Does that mean our current economy will shrink to zero? Or that it will double? Because isn't the Metaverse also part of "our economy"?)

Regardless - you get the point. The Exponential Age is upon us.

I can feel it.

I can't keep up.

My feed is filled with new AI advances and more realistic virtual worlds, with virtual productions that are almost as good as what Hollywood can produce and robots whose facial expressions look a lot like people.

Oh, and a planet increasingly following an exponential trajectory of its own. And a virus that has taught us all to understand the value of a logarithmic chart.

Maybe you can feel it too? This sense that things are happening so fast, that change is sweeping by us like brush fire, and that we barely have time to recognize it let alone run to keep up.

The Age of Turtles

Turtles might be a by-product of the Exponential Age.

They're everywhere.

How you feel about AI stands on the back of your ideas about intelligence which stand on the back of your ideas about the human mind.

These days even the Turing Test stands on a different turtle than we may have imagined. Alvy Ray Smith argues that Turing set the test out as a commentary on a society that tries to evaluate the mind of a gay mind. The Turing Test was a subversive way of asking: "how can you chemically try to castrate me? You can't even tell if it's a real human behind that curtain."

Not the turtle I thought his test was standing on.

But there are lots of other turtles.

The Metaverse is full of them.

How you feel about avatars stands on the back of your ideas about our capacity to identify outside of our own bodies, which stands on the back of our ideas about the importance of the physical world, which stands on the back of our ideas of humanity's place in that world.

If you want to go down THAT rabbit hole, the Convivial Society is there to guide you through a lot of Hannah Arendt and Marxist-adjacent commentary. And honestly? I can buy all of it on certain days. And on others, I can see it as an author in need of a good anthropologist.

Too much philosophy and not enough doing is one of the turtles we can stand on. But its shell is fragile.

At one point, I wrote that I thought avatar identity and virtuality was a sort of proxy affirmation Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem: no matter how deep we go in trying to find the real 'self', we'll always loop back to where we started.

I am what I am and that includes my avatar. There's no point in finding the final turtle, because it's mathematically impossible to prove that there's one in the first place.

(As a side note, Incompleteness Theorem has deep relevance to the development of the computer - and is where Turing started in the first place. This creates yet another strange loop where the thing that computers tried to solve ended up creating worlds where their solution was made, well, more 'meta' than we imagined).

Decoding the Metaverse

The Exponential Age makes it tough to keep up. Meta, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Niantic...everyone is piling into the Metaverse.

Sure, maybe you're steeped in this stuff like I am. But most of you aren't. You have day jobs and a dog to walk and you really want to have pizza tonight even though you know you shouldn't.

So how do you decode it? How do you figure out which "metaverse" you want to join? How do you gauge how much fear you should have, or how concerned you should be that we're all about to log-out of reality?

Well...the turtles are here to help. Or more precisely, three of them:

• What does it mean to be human?
• How should humans relate to each other?
• How do you describe humanity's relationship to its tools and technology?

And it goes like this: first, answer those questions for yourself, even if only in a loose way. Second, listen for how people talk about the Metaverse in relation to those three things. Third, compare the two.

Samples of Turtles

What It Means to be Human

Let's start with Meta née Facebook.

To Meta, being human means being connected. In their keynote about their move into the Metaverse it wasn't about finding clean, empty, silent spaces online. It was about connecting. Because to them, that's the human purpose.

Having said that, what they SAY about people and how they act often diverge. Something that goes all the way back to this quote:

Listen for those signals. Whether it's the belief that being human is about work (Microsoft) or play (Niantic) these companies build entire businesses around a singular view of what it means to be human.

How Should Humans Relate to Each Other?

I had an interesting chat on Twitter about decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). And it sort of concluded with this:

Now, first, I don't really take any great exception to what Bruce had to say. It was sane, cautious, and skeptical. All good - because there's a LOT to be skeptical about when it comes to some of these new crypto-based models.

But my second thought was: "hold on...so, you're OK with corporations as a structure because they achieve the same outcomes?"

I think that how humans relate to each other is a central question for our times. I've personally come to believe that the "corporate" experiment has run its course.

Whatever this system is we live in is fundamentally broken. We need something better - and I'm willing to throw the dice a bit to see if we can't find it.

But that's me. That's my turtle.

I respect Bruce's turtle also. For him, a corporation is an outcome producing entity and a DAO is a speculative crap shoot.

That's his turtle and I have my own.

But how companies and communities decide this will have a radical impact on how the Metaverse evolves. If we're all satisfied with letting corporations decide our shared future - that's a choice.

Hanging on to old ideas about the efficiency of markets or the glorious power of the corporation (a legal PERSON in some countries) is also a choice. When you hear companies talk up the virtues of the Metaverse, listen carefully to the language they choose around how we'll all interact together.

Do any of them predict their own obsolescence? Or do they continue to act as if the weather is perfectly fine under their corporate umbrellas?

I'm kind of hoping we can come up with something new.

How do you describe humanity's relationship to its tools and technology?

This is the final turtle. And I'll keep it simple:

• Almost everything that comes out of traditional Silicon Valley places technology inside the human circle of empathy (as Jaron Lanier describes it)
• This means that technology is treated as if it has its own place at the same table as us humans. It is treated as if "IT" will save us, help us, improve our lives, make us more connected or wash our dishes.
• But technology doesn't do any of those things. It's just technology. It doesn't have wants or needs, it isn't an organism or a living thing.
• We make things. Some of those things we call technology. The technology we make has our values embedded in it because how else could it be? Technology is not neutral. It's a choice we make. It's a gesture towards a future we want, expressed through our tools.
• In other words, listen carefully to anyone who either tries to priviledge technology OR distance themselves from it.

My own turtle? Technology is a conscious choice made by imperfect people.

Do your own research.

What's Your Turtle?

Do you see what I did here?

I created another strange loop.

Because here's the thing: the Metaverse will be massive. It will contain questions that stand on assumptions that stand on questions. It will challenge us to rethink how society is organized, the role of the corporation, the place of waking dreams and the dependence we can create on imaginary places.

As you enter this strange new world, listen carefully to the carnival barkers and corporate shills, the crypto enthusiasts and the coders.

If you listen carefully to how they talk - about people, their relationship to each other, and how they treat their 'tools' then you can pretty quickly close a lot of doors that should remain shut.

But when you do, you might find yourself questioning whether your own beliefs about these same topics still hold true.

You might start wondering what it means to be human when our capacity for self-expression is no longer shackled to reality, or how we will organize ourselves when corporations aren't the only game in town and when governance and culture happen "on-chain".

And so the strange loop: as we try to understand the Metaverse, we loop back to a deeper understanding of ourself.

There's a quote I love which was perhaps optimistic for its time. And maybe it's optimistic now also.

When asked about his trip to the moon, Neil Armstrong replied:

"We hope and think that those people shared our belief that this is the beginning of a new era—the beginning of an era when man understands the universe around him, and the beginning of the era when man understands himself."

May you ride most excellent turtles on that journey to understanding.

So...I'd really like to hear from you. If you get this by e-mail, please do reply. I love it when people hit reply.

You can also hit me up on Twitter. I like having chats in the public square when I can.

I also recommend you join the Open Meta Discord (if Discord is your thing).

And if you want something REALLY fun, join me as I explore something that I've been spending a lot of time on. Like, decades. :)

Noam Chomsky was having issues. He couldn't figure out how to sit down.

It was Chomsky's first appearance as an avatar in a virtual world.

The Metanomics episode was a huge success (you can still read a transcript of it here). Only Philip Rosedale had ever attracted a bigger crowd.

But I honestly doubt Chomsky even looked at the world, his avatar, the 'back chat' or at the crowd that was gathered to watch him speak.

While millions were living second lives with their avatars, many others still couldn't quite figure out the idea of having a virtual representation of themselves. Or, more practically, they couldn't figure out how to sit down.

Everywhere I Look I See Avatars

It seems like everyone has an avatar.

From their profile photo on Twitter to running around in Fortnite with that sweet skin you earned last season, everyone seems to be slipping in and out of digital identities.

By definition, they're all avatars: from 2D profile photos on Twitter or Discord to 3D representations in VRChat.

The Shifting Meaning of 'Avatar'

At one time, however, if you used the term 'avatar' you were usually confining your meaning to something far more specific: your avatar was your personalized 3D representation in some kind of virtual environment.

There was a subtle cultural difference between virtual worlds and game worlds (even though those terms, themselves, often blurred together):

• In game worlds, you often referred to your 3D representation as your 'toon. This implied a sort of detachment from your avatar. It wasn't really YOU, it was just the vehicle you used to drive through a game.
• In open worlds, your avatar was a representation of yourself. And 'self' in this sense didn't mean it had a 1:1 relationship to your physical self (or even your 'real' self's personality). You might represent yourself as a female while your physical self was male. You might be cool and silent while your physical self was outgoing and social. Your avatar was the conduit through which you expressed identity, personality and social signalling.
• How you represented yourself in 'flat' Internet forums might range from pfp (profile pic) to avatar - but it was clear that you meant it is your icon. You didn't particularly ascribe it with its own, separate identity - it was simply your 'badge' in a chat or on your Facebook page.

The use of these terms often signalled cultural divides.

I remember how offended people would get if someone said that they were "playing" in a virtual world. As in: "I love the avatar you're playing". It implied that you didn't understand that your avatar wasn't PLAY, that this wasn't a game, and that you were missing the point about avatar identity.

Similarly, in game worlds, you would see subtle schisms. There were those who viewed  their game characters/avatars as 'toons - something they could use to show off the epic armour they won on the last raid, but hardly something to invest in emotionally. And then there were those who saw something more 'meta' in their avatars: a proxy for exploring collaboration, identity, lore and representation.

The WOW of Avatars

An early sign of the evolution of avatars was in World of Warcraft (WOW).

I spent weeks getting my Pally mount back in the day. It was a time when your horse wasn't just 'unlocked' at a certain level. And it wasn't packaged up with your subscription. You had to earn it.

And that involved gathering a group together (usually fellow guild members), walking to the instance (and remembering to bring enough Holy Water), and then fighting one of the bosses in the hopes that your mount would 'drop'.

Riding around on your mount after finally winning it in a run probably wasn't unlike the feeling of popping an NFT up as your Twitter profile: you now had bragging rights.

And the whole experience became fascinating to scholars, teachers and enterprise: they all started to wonder whether WOW represented some new form of collaboration. That maybe we should study it like we study a foreign culture. Or mine it for clues on how people collaborate online.

But there was a problem: because not unlike Noam Chomsky trying to sit down, not everyone had the patience for a half dozen dungeon runs just to earn their horse.

Blizzard slowly shifted the world to become a bit more like a mobile game: lots of dopamine hits, lots of rewards, many of the once rare items now available for sale, and with the path through the game far more proscribed and directed.

The world had been nerfed. More noobs were needed. Gold farming was outlawed and folks in China playing WOW for a living suddenly found themselves out of a job.

Even Steve Bannon moved on to other things.

There were other worlds to conquer.

The Promise of the 3D Avatar

But let's circle back for a minute to that concept of the 3D avatar as a representation of self.

This idea was considered to have profound and often liberating consequences:

You can express yourself as any gender (or even any species). In theory, this would encourage diversity. How people actually express or reveal their race, however, can lead to ambiguous conclusions as to whether avatars are 'post-racial'.

Your avatar can be detached from your physical world identity. Pseudo-anonymity is often assumed in today's online environments. And so you can be highly successful in a digital world without anyone knowing that you're "too young" or "too old" or less rich and beautiful than your avatar.

Although your avatar is a separate thing, it still transmits an incredible amount of data from your physical self. Now - this one is a bit tricky, and even counter-intuitive. It's something that Philip Rosedale has spent a lot of time thinking about and I remember long chats with him on the topic back in the day.

It's the idea that, even in addition to voice or text chat that is 'transmitted' through your avatar, other people receive very subtle and seeminlgy invisible signals. Slight delays in text responses, the direction your avatar is facing in a virtual space, even sub-conscious clues that are sent through animations attached to your avatar - all of them result in other people being able to detect a wide range of emotional cues.

Philip's focus was in increasing the bandwidth of these signals and reducing their latency. Today, facial and body tracking can directly couple your physical body to your avatar and thus transmit social and emotional signals.

But I've always been more interested in how an avatar conveys emotional bandwidth in ways that aren't explicitly tied to your physical self: other people can detect whether you're sad or distracted, even if there is no clear throughput from body to avatar.

You avatar communicates back to your physical self. Because the reverse is also true. And this one is also mind-blowing: because by 'occupying' an avatar, it can have a direct impact on our physical selves. One theory for this was related to mirror neurons: it implied that our mind can attach to avatars in a way that is similar to how we attach to physical bodies. If my avatar is obese, it will have an impact on my self-image. (And so how will that play out in Facebook's move to conquer the Metaverse? See Instagram).

Avatars Today, And A Shuffling of Signals

Today, avatar-based projects are the source of some of today's deepest innovations in the pre-Metaverse.

They build on a rich history: one in which we've seen the decks shuffled multiple times on what we mean by the word, the degree to which we ascribe 'selfness' to our digital identities, and their role in larger systems and cultures.

Take a few examples:

"Flat" Avatars As Social Signals: All of those cartoony images you see as profile photos on Twitter hold deep social signals. It may be one of the great shifts: the icons on our social channels hold deeper social signals than the skin we use in Fortnite.

These pixelated images hardly look like a rich game character, but they transmit more social signals than my old Pally in WOW (plus, they have a Hollywood agent):

Avatars as Disposable Skins: The success of Fortnite should be credited to their discovery of a fun gameplay mechanism. But their business success was marked by making the game free and by making money on skins and other accessories ($9 BILLION worth).  

The fact that your avatar feels more disposable is thus quite intentional. You're playing (and paying) to earn new bragging rights. Sure, your avatar looks cool - but it's SO Season 2.

There's a second benefit to the disposability of how your avatar appears: it allows Fortnite to mix up IP. You'll see an Ariana Grande avatar fighting alongside Superman. Sure, $9 billion is a lot of money - but what Epic has actually unlocked is the ability to mix-and-match IP in a way that will create a narrative for the Metaverse.

Avatars As Interoperable Identity: Ready Player Me almost harkens back to an older approach to avatars. They're expressions of your digital self. The company is hoping you'll feel attached to that expression, and will incentive your use of the avatar by making it portable into many different virtual spaces.

It's ONE avatar, MANY worlds:

The Next Level of Avatar Innovation

Avatars are proving to be one of the foundation components of the emerging Metaverse.

Hundreds of projects let you buy a 2D avatar as an NFT. These 2D avatars don't just represent a graphic, they represent a social signal, they contain a transactional dollar (or bitcoin) value, and act as building blocks for community-involved IP and story development.

Game companies like Epic are also pushing the transactional and IP value of avatars - although in a centralized way.

Other projects like Crucible are exploring how the 'affordances' attached to our avatars will form a new backbone to web3 exploration. Interoperable friends lists, for example, will let us span multiple game and virtual worlds but carry important connections with us.

And yet I still think that we're at the earliest days of what avatars will become. We can carry with us the rich history of avatars and their meaning and transactional value, but we also need to be open to far more expansive definitions:

Avatars will be semi-autonomous: I've written about this before, but it's the idea that AI and blockchain models like DAOs are pointing to a future in which our avatars will often act without us. Our physical selves might log out, but our avatars will be programmable and will run errands in our absence (or vote in a DAO, or bid on some land while we sleep).

Avatar interoperability will be AI rather than human driven: one of the central questions about an interoperable Metaverse is how will my avatar LOOK in various worlds? Some of those worlds might have a high degree of resolution and look almost real, and others will be more like Minecraft and voxelized.

So will we need to have multiple 'versions' of our selves? I'm of the opinion that AI will eventually solve for this - a bit like style transfer currently works in machine learning:

Instead of designing multiple versions of our avatar, the machines will transfer our base avatar to the style of whatever world I enter.

Avatars as Readable Text: The other approach to this might be more akin to an idea that Jin has been exploring - that avatars may, instead of having a 'core' body, instead carry a text description that will be 'interpreted' by the worlds we enter (click through to read thread):

Avatars Will Capture Economic Benefit: Blockchain and web3 are pointing to new ways that economies will be organized, both offline and on. Today, much of the economic value of the web is invisible: post something to Facebook and it generates economic value (for Facebook, and its advertisers).

Blockchain-based economies promise to make the transaction layer visible, and thus more open to innovation. But these innovations will also tip into fiat-based worlds: Roblox already allows users to make money from their creations, and the creator-based economy will continue to grow.

But there's something deeper related to avatars: because instead of just 'attaching' a wallet, say, or having an inventory, your avatar itself  will become an economic node. This has the potential to create entirely new forms of economies that aren't just avatar-based, but avatar-centric.

Avatars Won't Always Be Real People: And how will we know? We will see interesting innovations around both avatars being so 'real' that you can't tell they're AI, and methods for verifying identity. For a hint of where this might be headed, have a look at Worldcoin which is storing an image of your eyeball on the blockchain as a method of identity verification.

Avatars Will Be Movie Stars: I wrote previously that I thought Epic Game's Metahumans would upend entire industries. But it was really just one of many projects where avatars are becoming media stars in their own right. We may not JUST use our avatars in game-like worlds - we will also use them when we stream on Twitch or when we walk down the street and are seen by others using augmented reality glasses.

Who Will YOU Be In The Metaverse?

The reality is that to most people none of this will matter. Or it won't matter at first.

You might find yourself in the Metaverse because you followed a 3D model of a pair of shoes on Instagram. Or maybe you first logged in so you could attend a Deadmau5 concert.

You grab a skin, you customize it, and maybe over time you gravitate towards having a single virtual representation of yourself.

Soon, you find your avatar has a friends list, a wallet, an inventory. And one day you join up for a guild where you can play to earn - and find that you can make a decent living while 'working' in the Metaverse.

The innovations happening now are establishing new ways to think about how people will enter the Metaverse. Those innovations mean that our definitions and how we use avatars are fluid.

History is only a partial guide: social signalling, diversity, the real-world impacts of avatars....all of these will continue to be important but configured in new ways.

Avatars are another proof that our forms of self-expression, socializing and culture are shifting. It's an exciting and often confusing time.

And with any luck, it will be a lot easier for the first billion people who enter the Metaverse to find themselves a seat in this global community of digital expression.

I'm feeling good.

Being houseless I've started moving around again after...well, after the last 18 months, and we all know what that has been like.

And it's hard not to like checking email while drinking a cup of Costa Rican coffee and watching the  waves (that's my view, above). Or to be able to do a quick ocean swim before a meetup with the provocative title: Metaverse or Shmetaverse - the big debate!

The conversation was great. And honestly there wasn't that much I disagreed with.

Each of the panelists brought their own agendas and viewpoints, and I've always loved how provocative Avi can be. Abby Hunter-Syed was mostly pitching portfolio companies and the glorious deep fake/AI-driven world we're all headed towards.

But the title set the tone: this was all about the experts throwing some cool, soothing water on the Metaverse-y people.

I didn't take notes (the bloody monkeys kept distracting me), so don't take these as actual quotes or views from the session. They're more like impressions - and they're ones you can find easily enough elsewhere:

• One of the problems with all the talk about the Metaverse is privacy is never discussed. And Facebook. And Facebook.
• The Metaverse will trend towards ad-strewn experiences...because it will. If only we could PAY for our social media services ($20 a year was thrown around) then we could break the yoke of ad-supported digital experiences.
• An AR version of the Metaverse is dangerous because we'll be walking down the street and suddenly surrounded by content, bombarding us with stimuli, half of it billboards. (I really have no idea who actually thinks that's what is meant by the Metaverse including AR...but there you have it)
• Massive chunks of digital content will be generated by AI. Deep fakes are going to eat the world. And...isn't that great? Diversity. Or something.
• NFTs are artificial scarcity and don't we actually want abundance?
• We need new search. We need new search. Search and discovery will solve all our problems. (I don't disagree by the way...and believe many many people will help to solve this problem in truly innovative and empowering ways)
• If you're using the term Metaverse you'll look like a dinosaur in a few years. Like those old relics who once used the term "cyberspace". (They all ended up with jobs at Walmart, I guess). But sure! Go ahead. No harm. Just realize that the really, really smart people will be able to spot you.

OK...I might be feeling a little over-caffeinated.

But actually: I don't particularly disagree with any of that.

The "Metaverse" has been attached to...everything. There's a chaos of competing claims for what it will be, how it will be developed, and how it will all be paid for. And yet it still isn't clear...when will I be able to log in?

Facebook is spending loose change to make sure the Metaverse is safe! And responsible! But the money is frankly a rounding error in their Metaverse lobbying budget (of which it should really be considered a part), and the company is now labelled the largest autocracy on earth...and a foreign hostile power.

But let's chill for a minute. Pura Vida! Because there's another story.

The Metaverse Is Human and Polite

Look, the battle isn't won. Privacy, surveillance, security and our data being vacuumed up to feed the ad machine is still a very real possibility.

But I've yet to meet a single person in the "Metaverse space" who talks about user data and its value. It is JUST NOT A TOPIC. No one is pitching new "ad supported 3D conference centers!"

I strongly believe that user privacy and protection is a cultural given. There is a vision for a decentralized Metaverse and that vision doesn't include ad networks.

Again, I'm not saying that the big companies won't eventually decide that they want to make bank on data, and I'm not naive about Facebook (or Niantic, or Epic, or anyone else with data silos).

But I'd propose that the default setting for the Metaverse is currently privacy on, surveillance off.

There is incredible innovative around avatars and permissions, sovereign identity (you own and safeguard your own identity), the right to anonymity (which generally means a right to not be under surveillance), and quantum-safe distributed data (keeping data out of the massive silos they live in today).

Whatever you think about Facebook, they at least seem to be trying to break free of their own self-restraining (and highly profitable) yoke of data-based advertising...or at least expanding their revenue palette a bit.

And so...sure. People don't bring up privacy the first time you chat about the Metaverse.

But I honestly believe that's because as a community there's a general ethos that we want to do better. That we want a more human, a more polite, and a more person-centric way of handling information.

The Metaverse Is Democratic and Distributed

NFTs are not artificial scarcity.

An NFT is an emblem. If you understand that emblem, you understand that it represents a new way for communities to self-organize.

NFTs represent a break from content being delivered from the mountaintop of art galleries and movie studios, ad agencies and CPGs.

They are the first demonstration that by creating a distributed ledger of digital content, we can now start to do some pretty amazing things:

• The barriers to collaboration collapse. We no longer need to hire a team of lawyers to protect our interests as we work together.
• Instead of "open source" we're entering an era of "paid open communities".
• When coupled with DAOs, social tokens and alternative currencies, NFTs allow for grassroots, highly organic, highly participatory and massively scalable initiatives on...well, on anything. Not just the creation of a Twitter profile photo.
• If that's true, it means that there is intense pressure on large-scale organizations. The old gatekeepers aren't the only game in town anymore.
• As these initiatives move beyond the few simple "prims" we see today into more elaborate tasks, they'll shift into everything from sustainability to community improvement.

By marrying digital tools to contracts, content, rights and licenses, and commerce, there is a powerful ecosystem which might just give Facebook a run for its money.

This would tend to suggest that the Metaverse is pre-disposed to being distributed, decentralized and more democractic.

If you're talking about the Metaverse and dismissing NFTs, you're going to conclude that our futures are in the hands of Epic and Facebook. And you'll ignore the Bored Apes.

Now, I don't personally think the Metaverse will be solely built on blockchain. And I believe that there will be far more free content than content that you pay for or that is backed by an NFT.

But they will be powerful fuel rods that will help shape vast continents in the Metaverse.

The Metaverse Is Building Beautiful Things

Sure, there are probably startups out there throwing the word Metaverse around because they think it will attract money.

The panelists at Metaverse or Shmetaverse seemed to collectively chuckle. One of them said the term made him cringe when startups use it. They all seemed to agree: "if it will get you cash, great! But we're smarter than the VCs and we SEE you."

What do I know? No one's pitching me.

What I DO know is that I see a dozen new launches every day, hear and see the chats across countless channels.

And the companies talking about the Metaverse are doing fricking cool stuff: from game development platforms constructed to support player economies to avatar projects with Hollywood-worthy plotlines.

If you're not impressed with the level of creativity...with the explosion of innovation, then you might be looking in the wrong place.

These aren't VR or AR or app companies. These are companies with a purpose: to bring new stories, tools, and experiences to an open, interconnected Metaverse.

The Metaverse Is People

I don't know what the Metaverse is. It's a work in progress.

I don't know what it will be called in a decade.

What I do know is that the people who use the term today are usually deeply concerned about how it's built, are running experiments to work out how to do it well, and are creating new forms of storytelling and self-expression.

They're not just talking, they're doing.

Even the big companies, from Epic to Facebook, from Niantic (with it's, um, real world metaverse or whatever) to Microsoft are all at least speaking from a common songbook: "no one can own the Metaverse, it will be built by many people, it will be big and it will unlock new human potential".

(Whether you can fully trust how they will exploit it for profit is a different question).

And so whether large or small, the folks who use the word "Metaverse" are really sending out a signal: "I want to build something beautiful. I want it to be open to everyone. I want to make some money doing it but I want there to be enough money for everyone. I want it to be more human than the digital worlds that have come before. I want to solve hard problems. Let's build this together. You in?"

And so you have a choice when you hear the word: argue whether they mean to include AR or not, get into a debate about how dangerous the whole thing seems, argue whether the word will still be around in a decade, or dismiss the possibilities of NFTs or blockchain or whatever as a passing fad.

Or do what I like to do. And ask how I can help.

How can I help? I'm honestly open to ideas! Have I had too much sun? I can be anxious too or get lost in definitions. We're figuring this out together.

Email me at doug@bureauofbrightideas.com or message me on Twitter.

Let's start a conversation.

I want a map of the Metaverse.

I want that moment in Red Dead Redemption when, headed towards Saint-Denis on horseback, you mistakenly take a left turn before Rhodes and find yourself in the deep swamp, discovering little shacks or facing the terrifying jaws of a crocodile.

You check the map again (the one at the top of this post), and realize you've ended up deep in the marsh, north of where you intended.

You adjust course for the bright lights of St Denis where you'll maybe have a shave and a haircut, a night playing poker.

I want to explore the Metaverse in a spaceship. Like Stellaris, I want to be able to zoom in and out - from the galaxy level and then down to individual solar systems, planets.

Or maybe I'd want to board a pirate ship - and in the distance a cluster of islands beckons, the shimmering glimpse of...are those apes? Are they really drinking martinis at the beach?

I want a map of the Metaverse because I like the idea of long, slow journeys. I like the idea of geography being revealed, of being immersed in a place, of decoding the pathways and history.

I like the idea of serendipity. Of discovery.

I like the idea that islands or planets would be grouped together - today, a cluster of Star Wars themed planets, tomorrow a group of corporate islands where I go to attend conferences on bitcoin or whatever.

How We Get There: Travel In the Metaverse

It sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

The Metaverse is being pitched as the next generation of the Internet. It will be spatial, persistent, three-dimensional and interoperable.

Which means that we’ll attend a concert in the newly interoperable Fortnite, jump over to hang out with the Bored Apes, regroup with our team in some new Facebook conference room. All without needing a separate download or a new account for each space that we enter.

In short it's, well, a universe - just a “meta” one.

Surely it has a geography?

Yes, each world within that universe may have its own map. Fornite OpenIsland will have a map that's different from Decentraland.

But wouldn’t you expect that these worlds are...connected? Wouldn't you expect continents, maybe? A Star Wars constellation of stars?

Probably. Otherwise isn't it just a more 3D version of the Web?

But the concept of a map of the Metaverse highlights some of the profound challenges in how our shared future universe is shaped.

Building a Map: A Thought Experiment

Here’s one version of what a map of the Metaverse could be. This isn’t a proposal, really…it’s a thought experiment.

1. A new “meta domain” layer is created which serves as a map of the Metaverse. In theory, the map itself could be three-dimensional, but for now let’s think of it as a giant blank grid. Each point on that grid holds metadata: the URL of the world it contains, maybe even 3D objects showing what they look like from a distance.
2. Worlds are registered on this map by their owners. They choose the placement and the size. The larger the space you decide to occupy (in order, in theory, to get more traffic - or as a way to contain multiple entry points), the more expensive it is. So, registering a single square might cost you $10. But each adjacent square costs a 4-fold amount. Two squares = $10 + $40. Four squares = $10 + $40 + $160 + $640 etc
3. You can MOVE your squares for a fee. The fee increases based on the frequency with which you move it. This will encourage ‘worlds’ to move into clusters, while discouraging over-frequent ‘parking’.
4. The map is based on blockchain so that all of the placements and transactions are open and transparent.
5. The base map has an API. Anyone can build on top of the base map. So, if someone wants to create a space-themed version of traveling across the map they can. Each map builder might find new ways to monetize their map: one might add an entertainment layer on top and charge worlds for adding icons or whatever.
6. How each map maker represents travel between the worlds is up to them.
7. The map starts out relatively small. It grows (maybe additional 'rings' are added to the core map, extending its size) based on density.

Finally, the fees would be collected by a non-profit DAO. These fees would fund the base infrastructure of the map of the Metaverse, and in addition would go towards:

1. Open Metaverse standards and best practices. The Open Metaverse Initiative, for example, might be one of the bodies that receives funding from the DAO
2. Metaverse safety and privacy research.
3. Policy and legal advocacy. Initiatives that focus on lobbying governments.

[As a side note, Facebook is spending considerable effort and money on lobbying government on Metaverse standards. Do we really want Facebook as the organization driving future standards?]

For the user, there is now a way to visualize the Metaverse. "Worlds" which add themselves to the map are making a statement: "we want to be part of this larger, interoperable universe...your avatar, your inventory and your wallet are welcome here".

As a user, you can travel through the Metaverse using the interfaces by the companies who build on top of the base map: one of them is a space-theme, one of them is corporate, and maybe they charge you for premium skins or for premium data layers.

Over time, the map might grow to be so large that specialized continents or map layers help us to navigate through it based on interests.

A sense of history will emerge: those few core worlds at the center and then spiralling galaxies spinning off. Entire continents for socializing, entire solar systems devoted to Bored Apes.

Like the Wayback Machine, the map of the Metaverse is stored, its evolution instantly viewable because data is on the blockchain.

A Slower, Less Siloed Metaverse

As I say, this isn’t meant to be a proposal. It’s a thought experiment which lets us explore whether there are different ways to envision how users will travel through the Metaverse.

I was trying to think through a few things:

• How do we let the community self-organize?
• Can we encourage the kind of serendipity that used to be way more common on the Web? Can we find ways to discover new digital content that doesn’t rely solely on whatever we see on social media?
• Can a map help us to slow down? What’s the future equivalent of doom-scrolling in the Metaverse? If there is more of a sense of travel…of journeys…can we help to create more human interactions and serendipity?
• Can a map allow for cultures to emerge and flourish? Can we create little corners of the Metaverse for different forms of self-expression?
• Can we find new ways to monetize ‘traffic’? If all we end up with are links and teleport hubs….isn’t that the same model that led to massive data silos like Google Search and social media as a main driver of traffic?
• How will governance happen in the Metaverse? In addition to our avatars carrying around 'permissions', how will things like violence or kid-friendly spaces self-organize? Can this happen in a way that avoids huge data silos?
  

The Challenges of a Map

But even this thought experiment quickly bumps up against bigger questions.

A ‘Map of the Metaverse’ circles us back to questions about how it might best be constructed, what its boundaries are, and how it will be governed:

We want interoperability - but does this apply to everything? A lot of effort, for example, is being invested in 'universal' avatars. Whether you're grabbing an avatar from Ready Player Me or maybe one of the super secret CloneX NFT Avatars from RTFTK you're going to want to..well, to be YOU, right? But what happens when you drop into a Star Wars world? Will it require a dress code? Or what about your inventory? Will you be allowed to bring a gun to a knife fight?

Thinking about a map of the Metaverse is also a way of thinking about how we'll transition between spaces. I might be travelling the Metaverse in a spaceship but, like a crew member in Star Trek, I might need to assume the local culture and costume in order to 'do no harm'.

What effect do links and teleportation hubs have on the aggregation of audiences? Most of the current work on the Metaverse assumes some sort of 3D-style URL. It makes sense: a URL is really just a way to request content from some distant server. And so a Metaverse-URL is a way for a user's machine to request a 'world' from a distant server. But doesn't this also risk all of the same traffic-shaping and user-tracking woes of the past? Don't we just end up resorting to search giants and social media portals as our entryways into the Metaverse? What would a more community-focused 'search' look like? Might it look a bit like a map?

Not all worlds will look alike. In fact, a world might be a little room where you show off 3D scans of your cat. To the degree that the little room can be linked to other little rooms - is it a world? Maps create a challenge that way: you can't necessarily map the actual size of a world onto a 'meta-map'. But then if all we have are a bunch of separate 3D spatial experiences - will there be a Metaverse at all? Or is it just a 3D Web? A 3D Web supported by a bunch of optional standards, maybe, but not really what people mean by the next version of the Internet (or, indeed, the Metaverse).

Will 3D experiences bridge the physical world? By most definitions, the Metaverse encompasses AR, VR, mobile, etc. And it probably should! Computers don't care whether a 'world' is real or not. They roughly interpret spatial relations the same way. And as a user, I might want to attend an Arianna Grande concert - and do so either by logging in to a fully immersive world, or by having her pop up in my living room. For the developer, a single source of truth can be delivered to multiple devices and interfaces.

I mentioned previously that I think of Sketchfab as a headless CMS for the Metaverse. By which I meant that Metaverse content will often be separate from the delivery interfaces. If the Metaverse doesn't priviledge a particular interface, then AR devices earn the right to be included. But how would a map of the Metaverse apply when it's distributed into reality itself?

Do You Want to Browse...Or Travel?

My little mental exercise on maps opened up all kinds of questions: about standards, governance, user experiences, and whether we're setting out to truly create spatially connected worlds, or we're creating a bunch of worlds that are only loosely connected.

But it also had me realizing that there is a range of possible futures. We don't necessarily need to choose: we can both browse, teleporting into little 3D spaces from Instagram, say, and also travel - setting sail in my imagined ship and discovering new worlds, delighting in the serendipity of a new universe.

Do you want to browse...or travel? And if both, what are the circumstances that would have you choose?

And most of all: do you want the Metaverse to evolve as a grassroots, community-led, cultural phenomenon....or do you want it to end up on the same path that brought us to the Web as it is today, dominated by a few silos, governed by control and measurement of our clicks?

The way that we develop a map of the Metaverse might not prevent us from the more dystopian future that fiction warns us against - but at least thinking about it lets us ask how to arrive, like my poor tired horse, in the well-lit streets of St Denis, ready for a bath, a shave, and a rest from the weary trail.

We're in this together. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Email me at doug@bureauofbrightideas.com or message me on Twitter.

Let's start a conversation.

We're living in the wild west (east, north and south). This is chaos.

There are serious people having very reasoned discussions about what the Metaverse actually is, how to define its boundaries and, as such, how to build the systems, standards and protocols to match that definition.

There are serious people doing serious experiments and creating mind-blowing demonstrations of what true spatial interoperability will look like.

There are serious thinkers who are wondering about the policy, privacy, cultural and social implications of sharing increasingly realistic digital environments which may or may not be able to track our every eye motion, chat or lustful stare across an avatar-filled room.

There are serious, deep-pocketed and hugely ambitious (and defensive) companies going 'all-in' on their Metaverse strategies, whether Facebook, 'we're-a-real-world-not-a-dystopian-Metaverse-Niantic', Epic or, gosh, Microsoft (but for enterprise, duh).

And so with all of these serious people, and all of these super smart coders and developers and thinkers, and with all of these major enterprises putting their weight behind 'the Metaverse' (and I used the quotation marks quite pointedly), then why do I find it so hard to answer a few simple questions?

• How do I get started in the Metaverse? Usually asked by a student or someone who's worried their job is about to be taken over by a robot. Or a brand. Which is kind of the same thing.
• How do I invest in the Metaverse? Usually asked by someone wanting to make fast money with very little down. Or VCs. Which is kind of the same thing.
• How do I log in to the Metaverse? Usually asked by all the people who ask the first two questions. Except the VCs. Who are fine with a demo video or a white paper on your token.

Listen to Me. Now Go Away

OK. So I've backed myself in a corner right out of the gate.

Because it seems like the more we talk about the Metaverse, the more chaos it can create. The more that people want to add it to their home page. The more times people use it as a hashtag.

But I DO want to talk about the Metaverse. I want everyone to talk about it. I think it's hugely important. For a few reasons:

The Metaverse is a metaphor which allows us to more easily grapple with profound and much broader issues related to technology (and culture). I believe that the concept of the Metaverse is an analogy that a large number of people can understand. Even if it never happens, it provides an archetype that lets us discuss, as citizens, the next wave of technology: from artificial intelligence to simulated reality, from transhumanism to surveillance.

We tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. If we don't talk about it now, we're going to bake in some of the same old paradigms that keep getting us into trouble. I'm not convinced, for example, that we necessarily WANT to transpose the concept of URLs to a spatial world. Because I'm not sure we ever really thought about how useful links were in the first place. I'm not sure we WANT single identities, pseudoanonymity (or being identified! The jury is out!).

If we don't figure out how the Metaverse will save humanity, what's the point? Seriously.

So, I want to talk about the Metaverse. And if you're actually building the damn thing, I hope you get pissed off hearing the word.

Because that's the thing: the talk has actually roiled up a lot of chaos.

Now, chaos can be a very good thing. It's early days stuff. It's tinkering in the garage in Silicon Valley. It's the Homebrew Computer Club. It's an upstart country (in this case I'll point to South Korea) ready to take on the big guys.

It's everyone with an idea and a dream! Let's put on a show!

All this chaos can be a very good thing. But if you're going to wade into these waters, do so with extreme care.

(And I make that note as much to myself as I do to you).  

Let's Be Clear

We can argue about the following points. I'm clearly on a rant right now. So I might as well go all-in right?

This is one person's entirely subjective view.

How do I get started in the Metaverse?

• Avoid almost any company with Metaverse on their home page
• Do stuff you love. If you like making stuff, go to Creative mode in Fortnite. Build something in Roblox. If you like coding, try doing something with Three.js. Scan your shoes (scans of shoes will make you very 'in' in the Valley). Pull them into the browser. Code a little AR app in Swift or Flutter or whatever. If you like to write, start a blog. Tell me that you have and I'll Tweet it out! I have zero reach but hey - I might give you a dopamine hit.
• Do stuff you love. Yeah, I repeated myself. But I mean it. Just don't worry about that "M" word for now. Your talents will be needed eventually.

How do I invest in the Metaverse?

Huh? What Metaverse? There's no Metaverse. How would you invest in it?

Yes, Matthew Ball has a Metaverse fund. I love Matthew. He's truly a genius. His analysis of Epic is one of the best pieces of insight I've read in close to a decade.

But let's be clear: these are technology companies. Almost all of them will make lots and lots of money on the technologies they're building whether a Metaverse emerges or not.

Take a look at his fund's main holdings:

I mean. You tell me. If the Metaverse never even happens - which one of these companies will go out of business?

Don't get me wrong: the Metaverse as investment thesis is a solid thesis. There's worse. But you're investing in technology companies. I don't buy into the bet that their success or failure will hinge on the success or failure of the Metaverse.

But NFTs! Blockchain!

I'm going to dive deeper into this in a future post. Maybe. It's also chaos. But to be clear: NFTs are NOT some asset that is required for the Metaverse to happen.

Most of the Metaverse will be free junk, easily uploaded, traded, shared and used. It will be scans you take of your cat. It will be a fishing hut you buy for $2.99 on Sketchfab. It will be free stuff handed out by Coke in the same way they hand out free swag at a rock concert.

Sure they'll mint an NFT now and then, but the Metaverse is not going to be built on scarcity. It just won't.

I DO believe in NFTs. But for very different reasons.

As for bidding on virtual real estate - unless it's the actual center of Fortnite island, don't expect it to hold its value.

You do realize that this valuable real estate is just a server right? Do you really think there's some global shortage of servers?

Because if you live in a world where there are two towns: they both have the same reasons to visit, the same amount of fun, but one of them sells tiny parcels of land for thousands of dollars.....which town are you going to move to? And where do you think the fun people will hang out?

How do I log into the Metaverse?

Here's what I'd suggest. Figure out how you like to have fun. Go there. Stay. If it gets boring, go somewhere else.

And wait. The Metaverse will eventually come to you.

The Best Experiences (and the best stories) Win

Maybe it's just me. But I love great games, amazing builds, interesting people, and the ability to participate in a story.

A gallery of NFT artwork is really cool. I'll never forget my visit to the Louvre or the Impressionist museum back when it was in the Jeu de Paume. But it was in Paris that I really wanted to hang out.

I love to dance. I'll never forget the 12-hour set Danny Tenaglia gave and how we stumbled out into the sun when it was over. But I can't do that every night. And even if you can, it gets pretty boring if you aren't doing it with friends.

The Metaverse will happen because we want it to.

It's in our human nature to follow a really good story. It's the secret to the Marvel universe which bridges comics to movies, TV shows to merchandise. It has really good stories with really good characters.

It's human nature to want those characters to jump from media to media along with us. And while Hollywood can try to contain them and restrict all the rights and residuals and whatever - it doesn't take the blockchain for the story to eventually go where the audience wants it to.

The best stories always win. They just do.

The best games will always find an audience.

And the technology will always find a new way to take those stories further, to reach people in deeper and more meaningful ways, to find new ways to let people capture memories, to play games, to be engaged.

The chaos that we're living in right now is the birthing sounds of stories trying to break free, resulting in new types of games, strange new forms of communal dancing or radical acts of art, all of which feeds back on itself, creating new pathways across worlds much like new neural circuits in the brain, new ways of thinking (and, eventually, new habits).

I believe that there is an unstoppable tendency for everything to connect.

A new toolkit of connection has been born. It is often called the Metaverse.

It's chaotic. It's a roiling ocean of tokens and NFTs, half-finished demos and...well, blog posts that will be read once and then archived by the Wayback Machine.

Ride the waves with extreme caution.

Or join that little crowd over on the beach. The serious looking ones who are telling their stories quietly by the fire. Because if you wait long enough, they're the ones with the hidden power to control the tides.

So...I'd really like to hear from you. If you get this by e-mail, please do reply. I love it when people hit reply.

You can also hit me up on Twitter. I like having chats in the public square when I can.

What if the Metaverse isn't all Marvel character skins, Ariana Grande concerts, NFT art galleries or land auctions?

What if, instead, a large chunk of the Metaverse primarily focuses on extensions of 'reality' - a place for your book club to meet inside a re-creation of the novel's setting, your own personal gallery of cute photos of your cat (rendered as 3D holograms), or a place to browse for furniture for your home?

What if one of the largest drivers of traffic to the Metaverse is Facebook? What if people arrive in the world you've created within the Metaverse because of an ad on Facebook or Instagram, or because someone "liked" your build or shared a 3D movie of a concert you held - and it went viral on Instagram?

How will experiences be created when there's an expectation that someone will first engage with some little "nugget" of content on Instagram? How will those experiences be influenced by someone's arrival from a social stream instead of a gaming portal?

These scenarios are possible when we start to think about what drives Facebook. That while VR headsets or AR glasses might make a lot of money, they will never have the reach or value of 2.89 billion user accounts.

Because if we think of how Facebook would benefit from an open Metaverse, we would realize that the main benefits will be related (at least in the next decade) to how they extend the functionality of the Facebook app and Instagram.

As such, we may see a far more 'real' experience of spatial worlds than we generally imagine. They will extend your Facebook Groups, be an add-on to your Facebook page, or be the result of adding a 3D store when you run a Facebook ad.

And while we may still attend Ariana Grande concerts in the Fortnite corner of the Metaverse or hang out at the Bored Apes Yacht Club, Facebook might also manage to take a slice of value out of that time by getting you there in the first place.

How We Get To The Metaverse

Consider this: you're browsing Instagram and see an ad for a pair of shoes. Even with today's technology (whether in Snapchat, IG or elsewhere) you can view these shoes on your physical feet because of the power of your phone's camera and the supporting AI.

Have a look at this demo (click through to see video on Twitter):

Pretty cool! Digital and physical worlds blurring together.

But what happens if (5 years from now) you add a button that says: "visit store in 3D".

• If you've been 'seeing' these virtual shoes through your AR glasses, the store materializes in the room around you
• If you're on your phone you can either view the virtual showroom on your phone or bounce it over to your laptop

Or, if you've been shoe shopping in VR, that same store is also accessible. Just hang a left after the dance club while wearing your virtual reality glasses.

Regardless of how you get there, it has been a short hop from some micro piece of content into a 3D experience.

Linking Spatial Experiences

Now, let's say that store has a teleport button. Or maybe you can just walk down the virtual street. And you can visit a sock store owned by another brand.

You've experienced seamless interoperability between an app (Facebook/Instagram) and a 3D space, and the 3D space is connected to others. This interoperability works across devices: from phone to glasses, from VR to computer screen. From one virtual space (or world) to another.

You've entered the Metaverse. And Instagram was a natural entry point.

Oh...and Facebook made bank on that initial ad. Or maybe they even helped the shoe company set-up their store.

Facebook doesn't need to own the shoe store in the Metaverse. Sure - maybe they rented some server space. But they might also just link across to a shoe store in Decentraland or Epicland.

They keep making money the way they always have.

But there's more.

Your Avatar Is You

I made the following speculation (click to see the discussion):

Ready Player Me lets you create an avatar. The avatar is 'interoperable'. Meaning, the avatar you create can enter a bunch of different 'worlds'.

No need to create a new one for every virtual space you enter. You reduce the friction which currently exists between being interested and participating: the set-up time has been reduced.

It's an ambitious and much-needed functionality as we head towards interconnected 3D games and virtual worlds.

Afterall, why do I need to keep signing up everytime I enter a new place? And why do I need to create a new avatar for every experience?

My speculation above, however, was in recognition that Facebook has one massive strategic value: it already has 2.89 billion user accounts.

Imagine if it could automatically generate an avatar for everyone of those 2.89 billion accounts? Maybe it scrapes their profile photos or something to create an avatar that looks like them right out of the box. No work needed - you just wake up one day and have one.

By eliminating the friction in creating an avatar identity, Facebook would suddenly have a massive avatar population ready to roam the Metaverse.

(By the way, Snapchat is on a similar trajectory. And so is Apple, although with less utility).

And Facebook would want these avatars to be interoperable. Because if Facebook can promise its users that their avatars can travel across the Metaverse then it is giving them an incentive.

Why would your aunt create an avatar using any other system? Facebook already gave her one.

And what about the virtual worlds themselves - all of those spaces which make up the Metaverse?

No brand is going to turn down access to an audience of 2.89 billion. And neither will the little shop keepers, the museums, the companies selling socks or your local council.

That's a lot of users. All of them with avatars. All of them ready to travel.

But...Anonymous!

Now - will those avatars link back to the real names of the people behind them? Will your avatar have your credit card attached to it? Will you have a pop-up friends list so you can invite them along for your book club or whatever? Will your interests on Facebook help to recommend cool places for you to visit in the Metaverse?

Yes. And most people will be fine with that.

Let me repeat that: Yes. And most people will be fine with that.

Most people don't care about pseudoanonymity now. And most people won't. They aren't jumping into another world to play a fantasy game.

They just want to try on shoes.

Or maybe they want to hang out with their book club. Because suddenly every group on Facebook has a little icon that says "meet in 3D". And you don't need to set up an avatar, it's cheap (or free) to rent "space", and you really want to know that you're chatting with your Aunt Sally and not randomCatLover21237.

[By the way - I am not saying any of this because I necessarily support it. But I'm trying to recognize that pseudoanonymity is more of a concern within tech circles than out of them].

Facebook Doesn't Want to Build a Dystopia

(It just wants to make money helping you to get there).

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will become a Metaverse company within 5 years:

And my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.

Somehow, a consensus seemed to emerge that this somehow meant that Facebook wants to own the Metaverse. And a lot of people seem to equate this solely with Oculus or with this idea that Facebook has plans for some ad-infested dystopia.

But these ideas don't make either technical or strategic sense:

First, no one can OWN the Metaverse. Mark himself makes this point:

"The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies — the whole industry. You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet. And it’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build, but I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that, in partnership with a lot of other companies and creators and developers."

Second, it isn't even technically possible for someone to own the full stack of the Metaverse.

We don't even need to argue over your personal definition of the word "Metaverse".

There are too many players, too many blockchain worlds, too many games, too many Epics and Niantics running around with their own Metaverse plans. All of these 3D spaces will link up because the technology already exists to make that happen.

The only limitation is a lack of agreement on standards.

(And yes, with today's tech, the connections would be flaky, we'll need 5G and edge computing etc etc. I didn't say today's Metaverse would be any good - just that the inventions are already mostly there, we're just searching for consensus on how to hook it all together).

Third, Mark said that Facebook will shift from being a social media company to a metaverse one, but he didn't say he's abandoning his business model. It doesn't make strategic sense for Facebook to throw out its business model, its reliance on its main apps, it's focus on advertising and monetizing attention.

In other words, Facebook is best served by extending what has worked for it so well before.

And finally, Mark himself said that this wasn't about virtual reality:

"But the metaverse isn’t just virtual reality. It’s going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and also mobile devices and game consoles. Speaking of which, a lot of people also think about the metaverse as primarily something that’s about gaming. And I think entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it, but I don’t think that this is just gaming. I think that this is a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together, which I think is probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it."

But What About VR?

But doesn't this ignore Oculus and the work Facebook is doing on AR glasses?

Not really. But it's important to see those as components of, rather than key drivers of the Facebook Metaverse strategy.

I personally think that their investment in optical devices will end up being seen as a defensive move against an emerging generation of new 'wearables'.

Just like no one will own the Metaverse, no one will own the AR or VR markets. We might each end up owning (those of us with the means to do so) 3-4 pairs of glasses for different situations and experiences.

Facebook might end up being a market leader in VR. They may even win the battle with Apple, Niantic and a dozen other companies for AR.

But these will still be niche markets for at least a decade.

In the meantime, the Metaverse will be built, will grow, and will attract upwards of a billion or more users. And so at least for the next decade, the true strategic value for Facebook will be driven by its apps, and how they link to these new worlds.

Data In and Data Out

We think of Facebook as a walled garden. But it's not.

Facebook is everywhere. 17% of websites have a Facebook pixel. This pixel lets Facebook track you...even when you aren't on Facebook. 8.4 million websites send data back to Facebook.

And then there's social sign-in. 90% of people who use social login on sites other than Facebook use...Facebook.

In other words, a large part of Facebook's business model has always been collating data from outside its "main apps".

Why would the Metaverse be any different?

Facebook doesn't own those 8.4 million websites.

With the Metaverse, the ways that content will flow across digital domains will shift.

Scan Everything

I got to thinking about this after a lengthy chat with Keith Jordan, one of the smartest technologists around (in large part because his insights are grounded in, well, reality).

He outlined a scenario where Facebook could use photogrammetry to capture  memories of an event and allow you to relive the experience in 3D.

Take a scan of the wedding cake, the bride on the steps of the church, and your drunk uncle passed out in the corner and bingo - you can now relive the special day in the Metaverse (or post the scans on your Facebook page).

Add scanning to Instagram and you suddenly have a new generation of photos. And in order to properly "see" a recreation of your wedding day - a virtual environment seems pretty ideal.

It's just another example of how Facebook will attempt to capture value as information and 3D content moves across domains.

And if Facebook can take a huge chunk of the gateways into the Metaverse, the avatars we use to travel when we get there, and the apps we post our Metaverse memories to...then don't they get a bigger win than selling a bunch more VR headsets?

Or maybe you think Facebook is planning to change its business model? If so, I'd suggest this deep dive by Napkin Math on "Is Facebook Fixable?". I concur with most of what it says. But leave it to you to make your own decisions.

A Metaverse Strategy

None of this is possible for Facebook without an open Metaverse. At the simplest level, the above scenarios aren't possible unless:

• There is a universal standard for linking to a 3D space. You need to be able to click that button in the shoe ad and have it take you to a shoe store
• There's a universal standard for allowing avatars to move seamlessly into a 3D world. If you need to sign-up for a new account everytime you click that "see in 3D" button, no one will come.

Now, I don't know what Facebook's real plans are. But the above speculation serves a few purposes:

• It helps to visualize that the emergence of the Metaverse will be driven, in part, by the interests of extremely large and well-financed players.
• It shows how a company like Facebook can be supportive of an open Metaverse because it has the most to gain: it's one of the few companies in the world with a billion people who are 'avatar ready'
• It reminds us that the Metaverse may have huge sections which are more "real" than we might imagine. It will have book clubs or city council offices, scans of our pets or 3D photos of our wedding, endless stores with shoes or furniture.
• It demonstrates that while we might want pseudoanonymity or distributed blockchain identity systems - this will come up against the awesome power of Facebook and its 2.89 billion accounts. Most of whom don't care. And most of whom, frankly, just want to meet up with their best friend or uncle, and see them by their name.
• It helps us to understand that many of the entrypoints to the Metaverse might use "legacy" systems. As soon as we create a universal standard for virtual world URLs, Facebook can start to monetize the links. A shoe ad on Instagram is as likely a way to get into the Metaverse as any other source - and even a concert needs Facebook's insane reach if it wants more than 100 people to show up.  
• And finally, it reminds us that the Metaverse is about experiences. No one cares whether the Metaverse starts or ends at their glasses. They care that they were able to hang out with their friends, or buy shoes, or see Ariana Grande - whether she appears on the floor of their living room, via a VR headset, or on a computer screen. You were synchronous with others. You were there. And the device you use to see her won't really matter to you the user.

Now, this is just one hypothesis for Facebook's Metaverse future. But even if it's the correct hypothesis there's still a wild card.

Because Facebook isn't the only player.

As much as Facebook and the other big players will be throwing billions at the strategic problem of ensuring their relevane in the Metaverse, they're still up against a powerful force: the people with a passion to building something better, who want to create something that leaves some of these old paradigms behind.

In other words, Facebook may be big and powerful, but the mighty have fallen before.

And they will fall again. Just don't expect them to go down without a fight.

Your avatar may become central to how you spend time online. Instead of browsing websites, we'll increasingly move through spatial environments: whether virtual worlds or a digital overlay on top of reality; whether via VR goggles, AR glasses, or through a 3D web browser.

The concept of the Metaverse, at one of the simplest levels, is the ability to move with relative ease between these digital spaces.

Instead of logging out of Fortnite and logging into Minecraft, we'll just teleport, fly or walk (digitally) between two different parts of the Metaverse.

You Will Be INSIDE The Web

Let's set aside for the moment that you might need to do a quick costume change when you DO move between two differently-themed areas in the Metaverse.

(How the visual look of your avatar will be handled as more and more virtual worlds connect will be an intriguing challenge. I find it hard to believe that there will be a single "look" for avatars).

Instead, take a minute to understand how profound it is that you're INSIDE the places you visit.

On a website you're mostly invisible (except for, say, an online status indicator).

In the Metaverse, by definition, you will have presence. Other people will see you. You will become a participant in whatever virtual space you land in even if you do nothing more than stand there.

(As a side note, this presence may not always look like a game character. I argue that your car will be an avatar as you drive around town).

The spaces you travel through will include games, social spaces (clubs and concert halls, for example), worlds for education and entire continents filled with licensed/branded content.

In the Metaverse, you aren't just an invisible "user" like you are on the web (tracked by cookies and ad trackers, but a 'user' nonetheless). Your avatar is an agent, a person, an embodiment of YOU. And your presence is an act of participation.

Discord & Walls of Text

Discord may be the closest thing we have right now to a Metaverse. Although it's privately owned, it embodies a few general principles:

• You can move relatively seamlessly between 'worlds' (Discord servers)
• Although you have a single identity, you can customize it for each server you're on
• There are a few global 'rules' but then each server can set its own. You're often asked to agree to community standards for a particular world/server.
• There's commerce, community and a richer sense of presence than you get in a simple chat app: you can exchange virtual goods (stickers), there's a rudimentary commerce system (Nitro), and there are all kinds of ways to lock/monetize and share the little world you can create with your own Discord server
• There are different types of media: from text to voice chat and video streams

Discord has done a really great job at creating a hierarchy of permissions. Each "world administrator" can set granilar controls for channels within a server. They can use plug-ins to set up leaderboards. They can set roles for different groups of people.

Now think about how this would be extended into 3D space.

Because one day, you'll be able to set up your own 'world server' with the same ease as you can on Discord. And people will be able to travel just as seamlessly between servers - bringing part of their identity with them, their wallets, the stickers they have rights to, their Nitros.

But there will now be some other forces at play:

• Depending on the device you use, it will be possible to track your gaze, head movement, and other signals from your physical body
• As we start to use mixed or augmented reality glasses, other people will be able to see us. You might find yourself in a (real) public park and not realize that video of you is being streamed to Twitch, or that your physical body has been overlaid with a character from Star Wars.
• The spaces will be increasingly immersive and real. Forget about those warnings about flashing lights in video games if you have epilepsy: worlds will have the capacity to represent hyper-realistic scenes including shockingly-real violence.

To start, you'll probably end up on one of the massive world "continents" being dreamed up by Epic Games or Niantic, or inside a corporate world hosted by Microsoft and viewed through a Hololens.

But at some point, these continents (or Metagalaxies) will become increasingly connected. When they DO, that's the Metaverse.

And you'll move through worlds like you've signed up for 100 Discord servers in an afternoon.

Which means you may face 100 walls of text: each one outlining its own rules, privacy policy and terms of service.

The Clean Well-Lit Room

Fourteen years ago, I read an interview conducted by Tish Shute (joined by David Levine, a researcher from UBM) with Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.

It had a profound impact. Because it challenged my traditional notion of where responsibility should lie when it comes to permissions.

In it, Eben put forth the concept of the clean well-lit room (lightly edited):

I think what we really want to say is something like this. If you are talking about a public space you’re talking about a thing that has not just a TOS contract but a social contract.

It’s a thing which has to do with what you get and what you give up in order to be there.

There ought to be two rules. One: Avatars ought to exist independent of any individual social contract put forward by any particular space. And two: social contracts ought to be available in a machine readable form which allows the avatar projection intelligence to know exactly what the rules are and to allow you set effective guidelines. I don’t go to spaces where people don’t treat me in ways that I consider to be crucial in my treatment.

Its one thing to say that the code is open source – let’s even say free software – it is another thing to say that that code has to behave in certain ways and it has to maintain certain rules of social integrity.

It has got to tell you what the rules are of the space where you are. It has to give you an opportunity to make an informed consent about what is going to happen given those rules. It has got to give you an opportunity to know those things in an automatic sort of way so I can set up my avatar to say, you know what, I don’t go to places where I am on video camera all the time. Self, if you are about to walk into a room where there are video cameras on all the time just don’t walk through that door. So I don’t have to sign up and click yes on 27 agreements, I have got an avatar that doesn’t go into places that aren’t clean and well lit.

Or, put it another way:

Your avatar is your embodiment in the Metaverse. Your avatar will 'carry' around a wallet, an inventory and a (hopefully) pseudoanonymous identity. But it can also carry around a contract. This machine-readable piece of data can be used to "check-in" with virtual spaces and conclude: "No, this space has violence, and your avatar carries around metadata saying you don't want to enter violent spaces".

Spaces and People: Contracts on the Blockchain

A lot of years have passed since Eben's concept.

Today, I would revise this slightly:

Your avatar can carry around its terms and conditions. Instead of the responsibility lying with US to agree to the terms and conditions of virtual spaces, the onus should be on the SERVERS. I want servers...I want the spaces in the Metaverse, to agree to MY terms and conditions, and not the other way around.

And so my avatar does a handshake before entering a virtual space in the Metaverse. The space itself either agrees to my terms and conditions OR presents a counter-offer.

Imagine you have set your "permissions" to exclude violence, eye gaze tracking, or access to personally identifiable data. The server can counter-offer: "OK, but I need your name in order to let you participate in this educational event".

You can agree (or not). But your agreement happens in a very clear and granular way. You don't need to read a wall of text because the server was obliged to read YOURS and to only highlight the exclusions.

And this all becomes possible with the blockchain - a public ledger of these brief contracts between ourselves and the virtual worlds we visit.

The Metaverse Doesn't Need to be the Web

Theo Priestley recently asked whether Tim Berners-Lee new privacy initiative could be adapted for the Metaverse.

Which is another way to say: one the main inventors of the web got it wrong in the first place.

As we move towards interoperability between virtual worlds, and the Metaverse becomes manifest, we don't need to port over all of our old assumptions.

What's perhaps most exciting about NFTs and blockchain is the underpinning value of decentralization and methods for trust. (There are downsides to all of this, but I'll leave that for now).

If, however, we stil 'centralize' permissions, even at the micro-level of an individual server (much like how a Discord server can have its own community standards), we'll find ourselves clicking "I AGREE" a lot....again.

Terms of Service, community standards, privacy policies - they will all still be OUR responsibility to read. And let's face it: we don't.

Maybe it's time to flip the script.

Our avatars can be more than social signals. They can contain our list of demands, and it will be up to the servers to meet our demands, instead of the other way around.

I find myself shooting at what I'm told aren't portals.

Reality is breaking down.

Waves of energy radiate around me, capable of changing anything in the blink of an eye. Jones has turned into a butterfly.

All this is happening after running through a gauntlet of licensed characters. Er, I mean attackers.

Creatures from Aliens and The Terminator, Kratos from God of War and a digital Sigourney Weaver were all part of pitched battles while the blue orb rotated overhead.  

But instead of shooting at it, what I really, really want to do is jump through that little tear in the fabric of reality:

Until I remember that while this looks like Fortnite, I'm actually inside a narrative about the Metaverse. And we aren't ready to make that leap just yet.

Fortnite and The Rift Tour

This week, a 'superstar' will hold an event in Fortnite as part of the Rift Tour.

It's rumoured that Ariana Grande will 'perform' based on leaked court documents and the creative winks and nods ahead of the event.

We'll know more on Monday.

Regardless, the event has the potential scale of the Travis Scott concert which had 12.3 million concurrent 'attendees', 27.7 million unique players across 5 showtimes and 45.8 million views.

Those are the kinds of numbers that generated reams of news coverage. We had seen the future of the music industry, live events, and online social activities. And it was bigger than anyone expected.

The Rift Tour might not reach the same scale. But let's say it does. It promises:

A musical journey into magical new realities where Fortnite and a record-breaking superstar collide.

New realities?

Wasn't Zuckerberg talking about that?

While other companies have been suddenly talking a lot about the Metaverse, Ariana Grande (or whoever the record-breaking superstar is) might actually show us the way.

A Narrative ABOUT The Metaverse INSIDE The Metaverse

And that's what's potentially so profound about what Epic is doing with Fortnite. While Fortnite itself will NOT become the Metaverse on its own, it IS laying down some of the tracks to a time when all of our virtual worlds and galaxies are interconnected.

They're creating a mythology, a story, a game mechanic and a publishing schedule in support of their stated desire to make the Metaverse happen.

They aren't just expanding the size of their world, they're creating a mythology, language, and rationale for why it will happen and what its value will be.

And so the Rift Tour isn't interesting just because it might be a fun event with potentially millions of concurrent attendees. It's also interesting because:

• Epic will again have a chance to push the boundaries for the experience of attending an event in a virtual space. Travis Scott shattered many of the conventions of what a virtual performance can be. Think of it like some wild, slightly hallucinogenic Disney ride and you'll get the idea. It's all groundwork to answering a more important question than whether the Metaverse will be browser-based or viewed in VR: why will people show up? How do you make online spatial experiences entertaining and fun?
• Second, how does it tie in, if at all, to the larger Fortnite narrative? The fact that it's called the Rift Tour at least gives a passing nod to the idea. Because this narrative, in my view, doesn't just support playing the game, it's actually an uber-narrative about what the Metaverse is, translated in a language digestible to the 18-24 year olds who play.  

A Complex Tale of Time, Power and Place

Now, let's be clear: the Fortnite narrative is complicated. It somehow manages to reconcile Batman (and manage a limited edition comic as a spin-off in the process) and Deadpool.

There are time loops, rifts, shadowy agencies and a ton of branded and licensed content.

At first glance, it mostly seems like a convoluted excuse to change the Island up every now and then, to launch new skins and cosmetic enhancements (their main source of revenue outside of sponsorship), to justify new enemy characters and weapons, and to create partnerships with Ferrari or Marvel.

It's a story of powerful forces trying to control access, superheroes arriving via rifts in reality, and...well, and YOU, a foot soldier struggling to survive yet another mission loop on a constantly changing island.

The narrative isn't really needed to play the game, anymore than you need to purchase a custom character.

This isn't Red Dead Redemption solo play where the story is the main driver of gameplay (I miss you, Dutch, delusional though you might have been!)

We're here for the fun. We're here to bash and shoot stuff with our friends. And we're here for the occassional concert or DJ gig.

The narrative mainly seems to server a larger purpose: it explains why, in spite (or because of) all these secret agents and heroes and mysterious portals, a lot of content can come IN but we can never really leave.

Until, maybe, the day that you can.

The Show Bible for the Metaverse

It's not like Epic is keeping this a secret.

In an interview with The Verge, creative creative officer Donald Mustard said that all those licensed characters were more than just an excuse to sell more skins:

"But Mustard says that it’s also a critical part of the storyline, nodding to something he and others at Epic have eagerly talked about creating — the Metaverse, comprised of characters and storylines from countless films, shows, and games all in one place.

Creating the Season 6 opener with the Russo Brothers, who know a thing or two about creating property-spanning universes, is another obvious nod in that direction.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, has been talking about Fortnite as something that transcends gaming, and has explicitly linked it to the Metaverse (the fact that one place he said this was in a court room just adds gravitas).

And so we return to the Rift Tour.

"A musical journey into magical new realities."

Ariana Grande might not let us go there after the concert is done, but she might hint that our ability to travel between worlds is on its way.

Tools, Film Grammar and Distribution

Movies can extend their 'film grammar' in part by changes in technology.

James Cameron is perhaps the most famous for this: Avatar, for example, was using Mandalorian-style technologies long before music stars were filming on LED stages. With real-time compositing, Cameron was able to see his actors ON the CGI sets during filming.

More profound shifts in the grammar of storytelling occur when we shift media. From radio to screen, from silent films to 'talkies', from network television to cable, and from TV to taped and streamed.

The transition to virtual worlds has resulted in a similar and profound shift in the 'grammar' of storytelling. This shift builds off of the profound advancements in game-based storytelling and other immersive arts. And it translates it through the lens of highly concurrent experiences.

These shifts in media create a cascade: changes in media are the results of advances in technology. More advances in technology provide new tools to storytellers. The storytellers get better at their craft, which attracts wider attention from the distributers, (whether movie theatres, cable channels or Playstation).

What Happens When You Own The Full Pipeline?

But what happens when one company is the company that builds the cameras and tells the stories and has the capacity to distribute them?

You now have the perfect virtuous circle: they can test the 'film grammar' of the new medium, refine gameplay, figure out how to hold a virtual concert, get data on user-generated content (through its Creative mode), and find out which licensed content 'pulls' more than others.  

By providing the Unreal tools and the Epic marketplace to other developers they can both help to guide a shared library of best practices and learn from others.

They're not constrained to a particular film type like a movie studio would be. Because they're the ones making the film.

Oh, and they can also distribute the experience.

Epic's fight to get Fortnite on consoles was a genius-level achievement on par with what Steve Jobs did with the record companies for the iPod.

Launching their own app store helps to insulate them against - well, against things like Apple booting Fortnite from iOS.

A Story Built on a Road Map

And so Epic has a great deal of control over its product road map.

It knows how quickly it can develop new features for Unreal, it knows what pieces it's missing (and can acquire some of those pieces), and it can sequence changes to its payment systems, identity and log-in and marketplaces.

Fortnite is creating a mythology of a future Metaverse. Fortnite uses all of the technology that Epic creates. Fortnite therefore can 'attach' its storylines to that road map.

Tim Sweeney has made it clear, for example, that Fortnite is being transitioned to UE5. Will Fortnite take advantage of the advanced rendering and realism offered by Lumen and Nanite?

Would YOU?

Maybe you'd leave Fortnite Island alone and preserve the cartoon-ish gameplay. But maybe you'd create a storyline about how certain 'rifts' actually lead to highly realistic worlds.

Imagine jumping through a rift in Fortnite and landing in a "Thor World" spin-off: a highly detailed and rendered version of Asgard.

Myths and Stories Make The Metaverse

My nephew really doesn't care about the finer points of "what is the Metaverse".

By the time the Metaverse is actually here, we won't even need the name. We'll just be "in" the space which is online:

But imagine a 12 year old today spending time in Fortnite. Coupled with the dense cinematic universes of Marvel and Star Wars, these are the mythologies with which they're growing up (I'll leave aside cultural commentary).  

They'll probably remember that they went to their first concert in Fortnite or Roblox the same way I remember seeing Supertramp. They'll probably remember interacting with their favourite characters or the month they ran around dressed as Deadpool.

The breadcrumbs and Easter Eggs were all there. They were participating in a story about the how and why worlds existed and how they became interconnected.

And if all of those worlds interconnect in a seamless way....then they'll have arrived in the Metaverse.

We just won't call it that. It will just appear.

One day you're hanging out with friends at an Ariana Grande concert and the next you're teleporting through the 'Rift' to visit Batman or to kill Aliens next to a digital Sigourney Weaver.

The only thing missing are the Bored Apes.

Stories from the Ground Up

There's another storyline. And it has nothing to do with Disney/Epic cross-licensing, Sony Music or using Unreal to recreate Mandalorian in your living room.

And it starts with the Bored Ape Yacht club:

Instead of Marvel characters and Kratos it has...well, it has bored apes:

(Maybe the only cross-over thing here is the banana skin in Fortnite. I toyed with some sort of analogy about the Bored Apes eating Fortnite for lunch).

Now, at first glance, the Bored Apes seem like edgy cartoon characters. Much like the narrative in Fortnite, they don't seem like much more than an excuse for something else: to sell art work or t-shirts or craft beer.

In fact, they really aren't anything more than the above images. 10,000 of them.

But there has been almost $100 million in trading value for those images.

Sure, it's not quite the same money that Fortnite has pulled in.

And the Bored Apes don't really exist anywhere in particular.

You can't wear them like a skin in a virtual world. You pretty much just throw one up as your Twitter profile photo.

But scratch the surface and there's more to it. First, you're joining a 'club', a sort of fan community with its own benefits.

As the New Yorker explains:

When a buyer makes his Twitter avatar an image...it’s a sign of allegiance, and also a signal to other buyers in the club to follow him on social media. (“I changed my picture to the ape and I got hundreds of Twitter followers the first day,” Swenson said.) The center of most clubs is Discord, the real-time chat app. Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Discord server has more than thirteen thousand members...The mutual investment, both social and financial, forms a kind of bond among club members within the wider Internet bedlam.

The creators of the Bored Apes had identified an opportunity: instead of simply creating limited series artworks and selling them “We were seeing the opportunities to make something with a larger story arc”. (Emphasis added).

As the New Yorker outlines it, these types of works :

...whether of people or monkeys or ghosts...were fairly generic. Bored Ape Yacht Club, by comparison, created rich and detailed iconography drawn from its founders’ personal tastes. The setting of an Everglades “yacht club” (an ironic appellation) was meant to evoke places like Churchill’s Pub, a well-worn Miami music venue that Gargamel and Goner frequented. “We were deeply inspired by eighties hardcore, punk rock, nineties hip-hop,” Goner said...From the scenes of an apocalyptic tiki bar on its Web site to the jaunty style of the apes themselves, Bored Ape Yacht Club felt more like the plans for a triple-A video game... The combination of sophisticated visuals, subcultural fashion accessories (shades of Hot Topic), and literary pretension made the Bored Ape universe catnip to a certain crypto-bro demographic."

And that crypto-bro demographic is important because the Bored Ape images are NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

Your ownership of one of the 10,000 apes is memorialized on the blockchain. There is one token per ape, and therefore only one person can "own" it at a time.

You can sell your NFT (your ape) off. Although be warned: the price keeps climbing. Digital scarcity has been created. You're joining an exclusive club....and it's a club of Bored Apes but it's a club nonetheless.

Membership has its privileges.

But aside from digital scarcity (which frankly can have echoes of the scarcity of Beanie Babies), there's something else that drives the success of Bored Apes.

Because by owning one, you can commercialize the asset:

(Bored Apes) was also one of the first clubs to offer individual buyers the commercial rights to the apes they own: each member is allowed to brand his own projects or products and sell them independently. In the three months since the club launched, Bored Ape owners have put the cartoon primates on lines of craft beer and created animated YouTube series, made painted replicas, and designed skateboard decks. Kyle Swenson, the clothing reseller, launched a publication called the Bored Ape Gazette, to cover the community.

The Primitives of the Metaverse

And so we start to see the other way that the story of the Metaverse unfolds.

At the level of Fortnite, a large-scale world is the backdrop for complex stories that unfold on a pre-determined schedule of chapters and seasons. The stories get bigger and bolder, the stars get bigger, the world changes...until other worlds are added, and we follow along, tracking the mythology of the Metaverse as it materializes around us.

At the level of Bored Apes, the Internet is rebuilt from the ground up with the primitives of story.

The story isn't preassembled. Instead, the components of the show bible are created, and instead of passing a copy off to a show runner or writer, they are auctioned off.

The only thing that was created were a bunch of primitives. How people assemble these primitives is an exercise in community building, commerce, collaboration and imagination.

This idea: that NFTs represent creative primitives, is comparable  to the 'prims' of Second Life:

In Second Life the entire world was built from the prim up.

A cube could be shaped and connected to another cube. The resulting shape could have a texture thrown on top. Suddenly, you have a chair or table or dress.

The genius of the prim, however, lay in what Philip points out above: the permission system and the "For Sale" field.

Because once you've used your prims to create a dress, you can now sell it. And the next person has permissions for whether they can copy, modify or transfer that dress, and more importantly, they can include it in their own personal story.

They wear the dress to a wedding, they put the chair in their virtual house, they have dinner at the table with their family (other people, represented by avatars, living an often full second life).

NFTs As Creative Prims

NFTs have a bit of a definition problem, in the same way that the word 'Metaverse' can elicit strong reactions.

It's a technological affordance and a bunch of things can spin out of that affordance: from providing a trustworthy ledger for real-world art, for example, to creating speculative buying clubs for fancy JPEG art works through DAOs.

But let's focus on the Bored Apes (which, by the way, have inspired dozens of similar storylines).

The images at the heart of Bored Apes are just little granular pieces of content. They're not unlike prims.

They contain contracts for how they can be used. Their elements can be remixed, combined, and repurposed. They can be spun off into separate stories. They can be the basis of a new line of t-shirts or can be used like a high-signal version of the skins in Fortnite.

The promise of NFTs (and the blockchain) therefore is that we can create the primitives for large-scale storytelling.

And that the stories can travel further and reach more people. This is facilitated, first, because we can have 'skin in the game' (there's a financial upside, similar to how the dress maker in Second Life can sell the creation); and second because right now you don't need a particular skill set to change your Twitter profile in order to participate in the narrative.

The Road Map for NFTs

But just like Epic has a road map for its technology, there's a presumed/collective road map for the Bored Apes (and similar ventures).

Namely, that eventually, we'll move beyond remixing GIFs and JPEGs and start remixing larger and larger chunks of story.

The Bored Apes represent the ultimate  unbundling of IP (think of all of those characters running around Fortnite) into its smallest components.

Eventually, those little chunks of story content will be easier to reassemble, view, display, remix and turn into story.

In the Bored Apes narrative of the future Metaverse, a demand will be created by the distributed nature of all of those little chunks of story.

As the pool of primitives grows and as more people own those primitives (whether unbundled IP from a big brand like Coke or a Bored Ape), we'll want a place to play, to create and to share.

The owners of all of those Bored Apes and digital paintings and creative prims are going to demand a home. And the creators are going to demand better and more distributed tools to remix their primitives.

The Convergence of Story

This probably sounds like a showdown between Fortnite and the Bored Apes.

I don't believe it is.

It might be a showdown, of sorts, between different narratives. My recent post about the Metaverse generated - well, it generated a lot of discussion.

And aside from the highly technical reasons why it's important to 'get granular' about what we mean when we use the word "metaverse", it's an indicator that we all want a voice in our shared future.

Interconnected worlds are coming. Stories are being told about what those worlds will be, how they'll connect, and who will own the gates, experiences, and myths.

As I was writing this post, Tim Sweeney had this to say:

And I personally believe Tim when he says that we all benefit from a Metaverse that is open (which has has said many times). That it can't be owned by any one person.

The Primitives of Scans and 3D Content

I also believe that Fortnite isn't the only narrative that Epic is building. Yes, it's creating a particular mythology and storyline that leads us to a future in which worlds interconnect.

But so is Sketchfab, which Epic just purchased.

As I outlined in my post at the time, Sketchfab represents something more than just a marketplace for 3D content.

The photogrammetry that it hosts, for example, is another form of storytelling primitive. They are digital Polaroids which we'll eventually be able to collect, place, and co-create. They also represent the blurring of the lines between physical and digital realities.

Interconnected worlds won't just exist when you log in: they'll exist when you walk around the very real neighborhoods on the other side of your front door.

I actually believe that the narrative for Sketchfab and the narrative for Fortnite will converge: at some point, Epic will open everything up, and you'll be able to spin up your own island, or collect your own Sketchfab photo album, and you won't be locked into a proprietary "Unreal/Epic" model.

Epic will still make money entertaining and creating games (and helping other developers to do the same) but they will 'release' the 'kernels' for the Metaverse itself.

This Is The Moment The Story Changed

Today, we're seeing something that may, in the course of time, be more important than the emergence of edge networks or Lumen real-time rendering: we're all co-creating a shared mythology of what the Metaverse will be.

The narratives have "legs". We seem to have a hit or two on our hands.

We're collecting the creative primitives that will be used to build it while at the same time we're participating INSIDE a narrative about the interconnection of worlds.

And most of us are having a really, really fun time along the way.

Let's set a date for after the Rift has occurred and the worlds started to metastasize, grow and connect.

We'll share some stories about how we were there, back when the narrative of the Metaverse left behind the old tropes of 1990s science fiction (some of us got there sooner) and became something bigger, and more generous, and more fun.

Let's remember back to that time we saw Ariana Grande together and it made us feel like kids again. Let's remember how big the possibilities felt, whether we were hanging out in the virtual world of Discord at the Bored Apes Yacht Club, or were on an island dressed as a banana and we danced together.

Because really, there will be so many stories we'll be able to tell.

Facebook is all in on the metaverse.

Their intention is to pivot from being a media to metaverse company:

“And my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with the Verge.

Today, Andrew Bosworth (Boz) who leads Facebook Reality Labs, announced the formation of a metaverse product group that will pull in heavyweights from Instagram (Vishal Shah, head of product) and Facebook Gaming (Vivek Sharma will lead the Horizon teams, and Oculus OG while Jason Rubin will lead the Content team).

Continents on the Metaverse

Facebook joins Epic Games (makers of Fortnite), Niantic (makers of Pokémon Go, which is creating a metaverse at physical world-scale), Roblox and Apple (who will never call it the metaverse) in trying to build the next evolution in computing.

I recently wrote that the metaverse is a sort of cultural proxy term for a major shift in computing:

• From one that is (mostly) flat and two-dimensional to one which is spatial
• From a time when reality itself is separate from the digital, to a time when real-time digital content is mapped directly onto our own world (truly a "meta" layer on physical reality)
• From a time when 3D environments are mostly for games, to one when we consume the majority of our entertainment and spend increasing amounts of our social and work time in 3D digital spaces.

The evidence of this shift can be found in everything from user hours 'in-worlds' to how much money is being spent, from virtual concerts that pull in millions of concurrent attendees to the increased capacity for our phones to take 3D snapshots or to scan the room with LiDAR in order to enhance augmented reality.

These provable trendlines, however, don't make a "metaverse". The Metaverse implies travel. It implies that we can move easily between 3D experiences as easily as we click a link in a browser.

(Although, there are a lot of bottlenecks with this too, as you experience everytime you hit a sign-up form, paywall or need to enter your credit card number YET AGAIN).

Imagine needing a browsers for social media, and then another for shopping, and another to read the news.

That's the experience of the metaverse today: you need one client for Roblox, you need an app to play Pokemon Go, you need a different app for Fortnite and you even need special equipment to jump into VR.

And just like the web, you also need different 'identities' (sign-ups) and wallets to fully participate in these spaces.

The continents are getting bigger but there's no way to move between them and we can't easily take our identity, possessions and money with us.

As Facebook describes it: "But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces -- so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next."

Oh: I bolded the word "our". We'll come back to that.

The Cultural Layer of the Metaverse and the Tech Stack

Right now, culturally, the metaverse is a big amorphous blob against which a lot of ideas are being attached.

Most people have never heard of it. Most people don't care whether Hololens will ever become a consumer device and they aren't sitting at home wondering about the FOV on a pair of Nreal glasses. They only care whether it sounds cool and what they'll be able to do once they get there - even if "there" is some generalized future.

Javier interpreted my observation of this fact as a disservice:

And Javier is right: because beneath all of this top level noise is the hard work of creating the actual technology that will make it work, and the even tougher job of creating the standards that will help make all of this seamless interconnectivity possible.

We can talk for days in generalities about 'the metaverse'.

But that talk MATTERS, because culture eventually translates into requests for development, for projects.

"Give me one of those NFT things," is what they're yelling right now in some headquarters somewhere. And next up (believe me, I've been asked): "get me onto the Metaverse!"

Meanwhile, programmers and developers sit in a room and actually make stuff.

And what they develop will have embedded values. Code is not agnostic. Code makes a statement about what we believe, whether it's through insisting that you use your real name and birth gender or that transactions be distributed (or centralized).

Code becomes culture and culture becomes code. Usually the former, as anonymized email, lack of micropayments and other design choices in how the Internet was built makes clear.

Which brings us back to that "our" word that Boz used: "But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces."

Now, maybe when he said "OUR" and "WE" he meant all of us: but unless we're all reporting in to this new product team that he mentioned in the next paragraph, I think he's really talking about Facebook.

And so let's be concrete: we'd better be concerned about who's making the decisions about how all of these worlds will interconnect; how anonymity, pseudoanonymity and identity will be handled (signed in with your Facebook account into VR lately?); who will have access to our bank records once we arrive;  whether users will value sex or shopping, creativity or socializing; and how the whole damn thing will be paid for in the first place.

You Build the World

We're at an inflection point. The buzz will die down. Or, more accurately, it will come in waves. Everyone will talk about the metaverse for a few weeks and then people will get back to work.

But Facebook's announcement is another proof point that the largest players around are making huge and very public bets on the 'metaverse'.

But we all have agency here. Facebook doesn't have an ordained right to determine what the metaverse should be, or how the connective tissue should be designed.

Thankfully, I actually have some faith in the Reality Labs team and their willingness to publish, share, and participate in open source initiatives. (Their bosses on the other hand are a different story).

The storylines are being drawn: some of them highly tangible and specific (passthrough VR!) and some of them vague and aspirational.

At the one end of the spectrum are the big players like Facebook. And they'll either become....well, Facebook, but making even more money from the ever-greater amounts of time we spend with them.

Or, they might become AOL. Trying to build a giant closed garden and then discovering it all blown away by the tsunami of a more open metaverse.

Because at the other end of the spectrum is a grass-roots led version of the metaverse. One in which NFTs aren't just over-inflated fan clubs, but a proof of concept that value can be decentralized and ripped from the control of centralized corporations and governments.

In this more open metaverse, maybe the values of creativity, beautiful code and co-creation can help to get these new worlds right.

In truth, both will exist: huge continents and smaller islands, open seas and walled kingdoms.

But perhaps the interplay between the two will allow for a convergence of culture and code which values the user first, and the very human experience of entering whole new worlds.

In 2007 I discovered 'reflective architecture', an idea explored by Jon Brouchoud, an architect who was working in Second Life.

It was the concept that in a virtual environment buildings can move, shift, and morph based on user presence. Instead of buildings and environments as static objects, the 'affordances' of a programmable space allowed for them to have a computable relationship to the audience/user/visitor.

While today the idea might seem obvious, at the time it was a leading-edge idea that an architect could actually WORK in a virtual environment, let alone change our concept of space through his explorations.

Walking through one of Jon's experiments created a mental shift for me: first, because we didn't need to "port" standard concepts of what a space can be into virtual environments.

Later, I worked with Jon on the design of the Metanomics stage, the first serious virtual talk show:

This helped me to realize that his work also helped to open up new ways of thinking about the physical world and our relationship to space.

It took almost 15 years to achieve a similar shift in thinking.

And it happened because of Pico Velasquez.

Pico Velasquez and Walls That Talk

It doesn't happen often. I mean - how many Zoom calls, webinars and online 'events' have you been to? Especially over the last year? How many of them blur into each other?

But this session with Pico Velasquez may be the best hour you spend this year.

Sure, you might lose the sense of being there. Because one of the joys of the session was Pico's rapid-fire mind, which was able to lift off of the audience 'back chat' and questions like someone who can design a building, chat with her best friend, write a blog post and cook dinner at the same time.

Pico gave a tour of her work. And the session inverted the experience I had with Jon.

Where Jon showed that virtual environments can be living, breathing entities (with an implication for the physical world), Pico demonstrated that physical spaces can be computable, and that this has an implication for the Metaverse.

While deceptively simple, her work on Bloom, for example, was a living canvas that used a Unity game engine back end to create a narrative that responded to time of day and presence.

Pico gave us a hint of her process during the presentation:

Which resulted in a space that responds to people being nearby (watch the video for the full effect):

Her work on The Oculus, the main entrance to the new Seminole Hard Rock Casino & Hotel has a similar immersive and responsive quality:

Four Pillars for the Metaverse

Once Burning Man and the Social Galaxy (a project with Kenzo Digital for Samsung) came up, Pico started to shift into discussing the Metaverse.

Pico spoke to four main threads that challenge how we think about the spatial 'construction' of the Metaverse:

1. Multiple Layers of Content are Merging

Live streaming, gaming and social media are coming together. Whether it's streaming evolving to have a chat or a game evolving to have more social events (like concerts in Fortnite), there are now multiple 'layers' of content in virtual space.

2. We Need to Design for a New Spatial Dimension

Similar to the shift from radio to TV, it takes time to adapt to a new medium. This has long been the premise of my collaborator, Marty Keltz (who produced The Magic School Bus): that each shift in media requires a new "film grammar".

First, we port over our previous grammar and then we create a new one.

Pico points out that much of virtual/Metaverse architecture is ...static buildings. And that the narrative isn't spatial but linear.

3. We Need to Think About Adaptable Spaces

On this, she really looped me right back to reflective architecture, which I spoke about at the top. But she brought some interesting new dimensions, commenting that Metaverse architecture can be adaptable across multiple variables including audience demographics.

4. Generative Design Is a Key Tool

Similar to my thinking about autonomous avatars, this is the work of a space being dynamic and generative - that forests, for example, should grow.

I'll be coming back to this a lot in the coming weeks. Because it speaks to two key ideas:

• That there will be parts of the Metaverse that exist, grow and thrive without even necessarily needing users. This will be highly relevant to mirror world contexts for enterprise, but will also create deep experiences and time scales that aren't normally visible in game or virtual worlds.
• That automation, generative design, autonomous agents, DAOs and other AI/computable experiences will lead to the Metaverse itself being sentient. We think of the Singularity as the moment when a 'computer' is as smart as a human: but I think we may be too anthropomorphic in how we view intelligence. The planet is an intelligent system. It might be that the Metaverse achieves the Turing Test for being an ecosystem before a computer passes the Turing Test for being human.

The Lines are Blurring Between the Physical and Digital

I have a feeling I'm going to circle back on Pico's talk several times. And this is a decidedly incomplete synopsis.

If nothing else, it reminds us that the lessons we're learning are now easily crossing boundaries between the physical and the 'meta' spatial world (which we're calling the Metaverse).

An architect can use a game engine to power a physical room, and then bring those tools and lessons into the Metaverse.

Tools (like Unreal 5) are evolving to allow things like fully destructible and generative spaces. This will allow for digital spaces that don't just mimic the physical world but can transcend it.

But perhaps most of all, it's a reminder that we're at a key inflection point, when cross-collaboration with other disciplines can generate profound value.

Just as fashion designers are bringing their skills into the design of digital fashion, and architects are bringing their skills in spatial development, all of us can play some role in this new world.

It has an economy, people, places, games, and work to do. Just like the real world.

It's time for all hands on deck as we shape a world that we can imagine, and that what may results are lessons that can make our physical world better too.

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Epic Games has bought Sketchfab. A further definitive sign that Epic intends to be the primary driver of the Metaverse.

If you're reading this, there's probably no need for me to outline the players. But jump over to Techcrunch or Engadget if you want a primer.

The short version: Sketchfab hosts a lot of 3D models and makes it easy to view, buy and use them; Epic is a game engine (and Fortnite). Or maybe Epic is Fortnite (and a game engine).

But this is about more than developers or marketplaces for 3D models. Because putting aside Epic's grand designs for the Metaverse, Sketchfab itself has created an important trajectory for our spatial computing future.

The Metaverse is Bigger Than You Think

There's a concept for the Metaverse. It's based primarily on two books. And it circles around the idea that at some point, we'll throw on a pair of VR goggles and we'll enter a universe which has a fidelity that matches our own.

Being a universe, it will have its own culture and economy. We'll be able to hang out in seedy bars or play...well, play some future version of Fortnite with our friends. We'll be able to earn a living, whether through some super-charged version of Axie Infinity or by sitting around in our virtual homes answering questions posed by the Mechanical Turk (while Bezos smiles down at us from space).

But I think this vision is too narrow. I'll take the most obvious reasons:

• Building out the "worldscape" of the Metaverse will take time. Fortnite island is small. And even if you bolt on No Man's Sky-type generative content, we're still a long way from moving beyond islands towards something truly expansive. And so this vision of a universe we log into is the biggest lift there is.
• This is fine. We don't NEED a universe-sized Metaverse. And yet it will still compete against a world which is already pretty darn huge: our own. You can layer a lot of really cool content on top of the physical world that we've already built. Therefore, a big chunk of how we experience the Metaverse can happen as we walk around downtown.
• The most successful franchises today are multi-platform. Which means that there is already a pipeline and movement towards experiences that bridge phones, VR headsets, television sets and future optical devices. VR is not how most of us will experience the Metaverse.
• The convergence of AI with spatial computing will facilitate worlds that look nothing like how we imagined them. It's feasibile that entire universes will exist that have their own cultures, economies, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), autonomous avatars and reason for being ....that don't even particularly require any users.

Which speaks to a point I made on Twitter in response to a question about virtual world economies:

I've tried to write about this before. And I realizes it falls on deaf ears. But I still see no reason why we can't at least partly equate, for example, driving a Tesla (or Tesla driving us) as being an experience of the Metaverse. Your car, afterall, will soon become a physical, metal avatar moving through a digital space.

But there are two other reasons why the Metaverse won't be exactly how we imagine. And that's where Sketchfab comes in.

Because in buying it, Epic isn't just buying a marketplace for 3D content that can be used to populate the Metaverse. It's buying two other things which have a deeper value.

Sketchfab: Headless CMS for 3D Content

Epic has bought distribution. Sketchfab is a headless CMS for 3D content. Which means that better than any other platform in the world today, it is allowing content developers to distribute to the web or VR, to game engines or augmented reality.

Epic writes (bold added):

Sketchfab makes it easy to discover, edit, buy, and sell 3D content directly through their web-based service and is home to 4 million 3D assets. Their technology has integrations across every major 3D creation tool and publishing platform and is compatible across all major browsers and operating systems, on both desktop and mobile. By joining forces, Epic and Sketchfab will be able to make 3D, AR and VR content more accessible and grow the creator ecosystem, which are critical to an open and interconnected Metaverse.

Headless CMS has been around for a while. But it's really only gained significant traction in the last few years. And it's the idea that the content should be cleanly separated from its display.

You can write an article in Wordpress. And the article gets displayed within the Wordpress template. Sure, it looks OK on mobile. But it doesn't look so good as an Instagram story.

You can write a chunk of content in a headless CMS, however, and by semantically tagging that content it can be consumed by Instagram for a story, a blog site as a blog post, and as a snippet on a main page. The content doesn't care WHERE it will be displayed.

And that's what Sketchfab does.

And this is important, I think, because the Metaverse will be built in large part off of existing paradigms, technology stacks and frameworks.

As much as I'd like to just toss the whole Internet out and start over, there is a path- of-least-resistance to adapting what we've learned already to a world of spatial computing.

In buying Sketchfab, Epic has bought a distribution platform. It's like buying a company that can convert a theatre play into a movie, TV show and youTube clip with the touch of a button.

SketchFab Is A Memory Box

Epic recently purchased Capturing Reality which gave it a photogrammetry powerhouse. It was a natural extension of Quixel, which is a library of "megascans" used by developers.

But Sketchfab has become the place everyone else goes to post and share their scans.

We're not quite ready to assemble 3D photo albums of a wedding or our trip to Cancun. But it will come.

Because with photogrammetry now accessible to anyone with a decent phone camera (and at an even higher degree of fidelity if you also have LiDAR), we're about to achieve peak velocity for scanning.

Photogrammetry is to 2021 what the Polaroid was in the 50's: poised to become a cultural phenomenon.

In fact, if the only thing that Sketchfab did was distribute scans at the scale they do today, that alone would be worth the purchase price to Epic.

And this points to another shift in how we think about the Metaverse: that it will include both crafted and scanned content, that we will be able to create landscapes composed entirely of 3D images of our relatives or pets, or we will choose to live in accurate digital recreations of our own homes (and how meta is that?)

The lines between where and WHAT is digital and physical will soon cease to have meaning.

Everything will have a digital layer. Some of those layers will be private and walled off and used by enterprise, some of them will be accessible to everyone, and many of them will create new forms of inequality because you will need to be priviledged enough to afford the devices to see what might be critically important content.

Sketchfab captured something elusive: the first headless CMS for 3D content, which makes distributing a 3D asset as easy as hitting publish on a blog. And a place where amateur (and professional) communities, best practices and assets are being built around 3D scans.

Which means, by extension, that Sketchfab has created a toolkit for sharing stories about place.

Which, to me, is the primary definition of what the Metaverse will be.

Varjo is launching Reality Cloud today and with it a new type of interaction for the Metaverse: the ability to 'teleport' to another physical world location.

The company has created a cloud-based system (synonomous in many respects to the concept of the AR Cloud) that allows a user in one location to 'teleport' into the location of another. This works because the location to which you teleport is scanned, in real-time, by the first user.

Venture Beat has a detailed overview of the launch announcement where they describe how Reality Cloud will work:

The Varjo Reality Cloud shares the details of a room in photorealistic detail, showing someone remotely located a view of the room in real time. Varjo lets one person scan a 3D space and another person experience it virtually at almost the same time, as it can transfer the necessary data in compact streams of 10 megabits to 30 megabits per second with almost no time delays, the company said.

(You can watch the launch announcement later today, June 24th, at 12:00 p.m. EST).

Scan Everything

I've been a big fan of scanning and photogrammetry. The addition of LiDAR to the iPhone and Apple's launch of Object Capture were two more advances towards a time when taking a 3D scan of an object or environment will become as easy as taking a photograph (OK, or a series of photographs).

I mean, doesn't this make you hungry?

But what about something a bit bigger?

Now imagine being able to view these scans, to walk through them and touch them, in real time.

What Varjo has done takes scanning to a whole new level. Instead of taking a series of photos, processing them, refining your model and uploading it to Sketchfab - the entire process now happens in real-time, and the results can be streamed to someone in another country.

Stand in a factory in Texas and a manager in Singapore can 'teleport in' to help troubleshoot an issue on the assembly line.

“You can you can be anywhere in the world,” Toikkanen said. “You can scan your surroundings, not just a 3D object or something like that. You can digitize the world around you if you like. And do that in super high fidelity, through Varjo Reality Cloud, so anybody anywhere in the world can join you in that location and see it exactly the way you see it, in perfect color, with lights and reflections, and so forth.”

Metaverse Interactions

If Reality Cloud measures up, the applications for enterprise are massive. This is 'remote work' on steroids.

Sure, you've been able to recreate a physical setting before. But this is a real-time recreation. It can potentially provide a sense of presence that truly makes the concept of teleportation real.

It can make training more efficient, allow expertise to 'move' around the world without needing to fly, and can connect remote locations with the ease of wearing a pair of glasses.

A New Strategic Lens for the Metaverse

But more than the enterprise applications, what interests me more is how Varjo Reality Cloud gives a sense of the ways in which the Metaverse will not always be how we imagine it.

It's part of a broader strategic thesis that I've been working on. One which is based on my personal lens, which sees three phases in the Metaverse 'story':

I'm going to dive into this in a lot more detail over the coming weeks.

My analysis is using a unique set of algorithms to 'decode' the Metaverse. You can  sign-up at Noodle and Sprout and you'll get a series of emails explaining how this works, and also get weekly analytics on Metaverse news.

But I'll hit here briefly on phase one in the graphic above: presumptions.

Because it's time to start breaking down our presumptions about what the Metaverse is, how it will look, how and why we'll move through it, and therefore the kinds of standards and protocols we need to support it.

Varjo has demonstrated with Reality Cloud that mirror worlds may play as important a role as imagined ones, and that 'synthetic universes' won't always involve NFTs for shoes and houses or Marvel spin-offs and licensed characters.

Often, we will slip between variations of the physical world: replicas of reality, updated in real-time.

Varjo has added a new interaction type to our Metaverse toolkit.

As Venture Beat reports:

“It’s a metaverse grounded in reality,” (Toikkanen) said. “You can engage on a completely different level than you have ever been in the history of communications. It really does change things in a big way. Both for businesses as well as for private individuals. You can teleport to other people, to your family,  or you can teleport to a work project.”

Indeed, Varjo will be the first of many companies and open source/open community initiatives that transform how we communicate, how we share stories, and how we work and play.

Aiden Wolf called AR the decoupling of culture and infrastructure. But perhaps it's something more:

"Place" itself is changing forever. And we're going to build an entirely new culture on top.

There's a moment when you log back in to single player mode in Grand Theft Auto.

The camera pulls back. Your character (Franklin, say) is walking out of a store and is waving goodbye to someone off camera. Then the camera slowly moves into a new position, hovering just above and behind Franklin, locking itself into third-person "game position".

It's a powerful illusion: first, that the game world was persistent: you might have logged off, but life in Los Santos went on without you. And second, that your avatar also lives a life of its own when you're not around. Sometimes you log back in and he's coming out of a movie theatre or cruising women on the street or exiting a convenience store.

The camera snaps back into place and you now inhabit the game character. You've taken over the controls.

Persistence in Games and Virtual Worlds

The GTA moment was seminal because it helped to reinforce the idea of persistent worlds. It provided a hint that when we log out, the worlds will continue without us.

And persistence is one of the key definitions of the Metaverse (a term which has otherwise become a sort of collective emblem of a shift in technologies rather than a specific destination).

More recently, a game like Rust has carried persistence into a deep game mechanic: the assets you create will be destroyed or stolen by other players when you log off. And so players band together, share calendars and set up schedules to guard their forts around the clock. The fact that the whole world gets reset once a month just adds...I don't know, a sense of existential futility or something.

An upcoming game like Seed (which I've come to believe will help us imagine new paradigms for the Metaverse) will drive that persistence deep into layers related to economies, wellness, politics and culture.

And so world persistence is profound on its own. But if your concept of persistence is driven mostly by multi-player game platforms, then you're probably missing the deeper point: that persistence speaks to it being a world, which indicates something which isn't static, which changes and does more than deliver a series of grinds and quests according to a pre-determined schedule.

Sure, when you log into GTA or RDR there are already people online doing stuff, but the world itself hasn't particularly changed since the last time you logged in.

Minecraft is more world-like because its persistence is coded right down to the atom. Everything is subject to change. Everything can be re-shaped by other players. By the time you log in again, someone will have opened a portal or built a castle.

But what kind of 'world' is it when the people who inhabit it can stop time? Why is it that if the world is persistent, its citizens can simply log in or log off?

Should our avatars be static in worlds that will increasingly have the physics, economies and environments of the physical one (or imagined versions of the same)?

Avatars and Characters: What's The Difference

For me, the GTA moment was more profound for its hint that our avatars might have lives of their own.

But before we go there, we should take a brief moment to note the difference between an avatar and a game character. And maybe it's enough to say this:

• When a 'gamer' enters a virtual world, they often think of their avatar as their 'character'. They will talk about the avatar in the third person - "my character". They will talk about playing. There is a remove between the player and their representation.
• But at some point, you see a shift (at least in a fully realized virtual environment). Their 'character' becomes YOU. It is not some third party.  You might be controlling that emblem of yourself. but you're not 'playing' it.
• There are neurological reasons for this. The brain has difficulty distinguishing between the physical and virtual manifestations of our 'selves'
• And so, when I talk about semi-autonomous avatars, I am not talking about game characters who are part of some story in which our sense of agency is limited.

Franklin in GTA is a character. You might identify with him, you might immerse in his life story, but he isn't YOU.

Set up a new 'toon for GTA Online, however, and you're getting a lot closer to being an avatar. The 'character' you use to play Fortnite is an avatar (especially when you spring for the skins) even if its life is mostly a series of grinds and the occasional Kaskade concert. And certainly when you log-in to Spatial.io your representation is clearly a version of you.

As we spend more and more of our time in synthetic worlds, these avatars, these extensions of ourselves, are US. Your avatar will have closets filled with clothes and NFT-backed sneakers, you will live in a $500,000 virtual house, and you'll head to a concert with 1.2 million other avatars (sharded, but still). Or...maybe not YOU (or ME), but someone will!

Semi-Autonomous Avatars and Why It Matters

There are ideas we have about the Metaverse. Some of them have become so firmly ingrained that we stop questioning the assumptions.

The idea of a semi-autonomous avatar challenges a few of those assumptions:

That the Metaverse is a VR-only experience

This comes, of course, from Snow Crash and Ready Player One. The idea that we slip into our avatar like a skin. That an avatar only exists when we don a pair of goggles and log-in. That the correlation between how our body moves and the movement of our avatar is one-to-one.

But the Metaverse will defy the gadgets that we use to access it. As I've written previously, many people will have their first experience of the Metaverse while sitting in their car.

A semi-autonomous avatar reminds us that there will be 'instances' and sections of the Metaverse where our digital selves can act at least semi-independently of the devices we wear. We might be able to observe or control them through things other than glasses.

That we will want to move seamlessly between worlds

This is a key tenet/conventional wisdom of the Metaverse. It's this idea that we want to log in to some kind of waiting room and use it to pop in and out of a constellation of virtual worlds.  

I've never entirely understood this idea. I suppose it's driven by our experience of the Web - as if we move around Websites seamlessly (when in fact there are still a million friction points that prevent our identities, wallets, permissions and 'inventory' from travelling with us as we surf).

Regardless, it doesn't necessarily solve a clearly identified problem. WHY do I want my avatar to jump from Minecraft to Fortnite again? And if I could LEAVE a version of my avatar back in Minecraft to guard my farm, wouldn't I?

I get the idea of IDENTITY. But more often than not most users prefer to slip between identities rather than be burdened with a single one. It's no different than the personas we 'wear' as we move from home, to work, to community. We bring different selves.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't create standards or that we shouldn't be able to bring our avatar from one world to another. It IS to say that there are other use cases as well.

That the Metaverse is a "lean-forward" medium

It's a 'truth' given that there are only two types of media: lean back and lean forward.

Matthew Ball has reinforced the dichotomy between two types of companies as he looks at the future of entertainment:

"Just as gaming seeks Hollywood to adapt their stories in order to build love, Hollywood seeks out gaming to adapt theirs. But in this latter case, Hollywood faces existential threats".

Hollywood can create love. But in his calculation it hasn't mastered the art of the lean-forward experience.

In a macro sense, this division might be true. But it ignores the very messy middle: the worlds which aren't love. Which don't even require much attention.

Pop into GTA these days and listen to the chat. If you run into a group with any experience at the game, you get the sense that they're barely paying attention: they're running another supply quest for their motorcycle club but mostly trash talking other people in the channel.

Attend a virtual dance and you can't even be sure half the people have their eyes on the computer. They're probably watching Netflix or streaming onto Twitch instead where they're chatting up their superfans.

In fact, I'd propose that there is a significant majority of content that is successful because it allows for split attention. Your avatar is there, it's dancing, but there isn't really anyone home.

The semi-autonomous part? At least it has some good pre-recorded dance moves.

The Metaverse is Entertainment

Which brings us to a final myth (although I could go on): which is that the Metaverse will be entertainment.

If I can imbue my avatar with a set of automations, it can also perform tasks. An avatar that can perform tasks, in worlds which will have their own economies, is an avatar that can make money.

Large chunks of the Metaverse will have economies and auctions and shop keepers and fashion shows. It will have round table discussions on the state of bitcoin and mini stock markets where you can trade NFTs.

But even putting that aside, the speed with which automation is becoming a key underpinning of the Internet itself means that the Metaverse will adapt those same technologies.

I have a workflow which connects Tweets to Airtable and over to Notion and then back to an email reminder system and ToDoIst item. I use Automate.io to hook it all up. I take a single action and it creates a cascade of value through a series of systems.

All I need to do is hook it up to GPT-3 and it could maybe even just auto-generate these posts! I'd have a fully functioning enterprise that required almost zero human intervention.

DAUs will be set up in the Metaverse. They will mostly run themselves and exist entirely in a synthetic world. We will able to participate in them (or our avatars will) and we will be able to vote and take actions. And some of those actions we'll be able to automate.

In other words, because there will be economic value in the Metaverse, many of us will want to maximize the value that our avatars create.

The Ambient Metaverse  

Currently, the idea of a semi-autonomous avatar brings scripting hacks and automated farmers to mind. They're considered hacks because they're associated with game environments and are used to bypass the (written or unwritten) rules.

Or, they're not considered ways to make an avatar autonomous: the macros you use in Warcraft are just enhancements. Primarily because they're seen to aid the player....who is controlling a character.

But our avatars will end up with all sorts of macros and sub-routines. They will be able to act a bit on their own and give the appearance of presence.

I know people who leave their avatars logged in and resting in a virtual bed while their human controllers sleep. They feel a need to send a signal to others in the synthetic world that they are 'present' even if the human behind the avatar is asleep.

On the other end of the spectrum, our avatars may be mostly invisible. We'll move through virtual worlds seen through our glasses or while driving our cars. In those cases, the autonomy of our avatars will have some real meaning because the sub-routines that they perform will be a large point of our presence in those corners of the Metaverse.

We have lived with the myth of Ready Player One: a lean-forward, entertainment and game-focused 'Metaverse' (owned, mind you, by a benevolent dictator) that you log into when you throw on a haptic suit and some goggles.

The reality is that the Metaverse will often be ambient. We'll skim it. We'll dip in and out or barely even notice it. It will be always on and it (and our avatar) will live a life of its own whether we pay attention to it or not.

We're in this together. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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