A new study reveals that youth are vulnerable to various forms of harm in the metaverse, including bullying, harassment, and sexual exploitation. Using data from over 5,000 U.S. teens, researchers found significant incidents of hate speech, sexual harassment, and grooming behavior in virtual reality (VR) spaces.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rex Woodbury did a nice job when he summarized three 'superpowers' that AI will unlock:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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).
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?
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 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.
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.
It seems to me that a lot of the sense-making around AI centers around a few profound lines of enquiry:
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:
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.
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:
The idea of an AIMythos, therefore, has a pragmatic purpose:
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.
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:
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 will AIMythos look like? At first glance, it might not look dissimilar to today's storyworlds, interactive games, or fandoms.
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:
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.
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.
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.
And so I arrive at a working hypothesis for this new age:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
As @Dusanwriter pointed out, Second Life had 'NFTs' from the start. As this image shows, I can create a digital atom that can be sold/transferred/mixed by others, with attribution. pic.twitter.com/p9Je77H7c7
— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) July 7, 2021
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.
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.
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:
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:
What it didn't have was:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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).
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:
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.
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:
My own turtle? Technology is a conscious choice made by imperfect people.
Do your own research.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s one version of what a map of the Metaverse could be. This isn’t a proposal, really…it’s a thought experiment.
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:
[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.
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:
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?
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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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].
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 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.
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.
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.
None of this is possible for Facebook without an open Metaverse. At the simplest level, the above scenarios aren't possible unless:
Now, I don't know what Facebook's real plans are. But the above speculation serves a few purposes:
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.
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 may be the closest thing we have right now to a Metaverse. Although it's privately owned, it embodies a few general principles:
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:
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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?
My first test with #PhotogramTree by @romainderrien!
— alban denoyel (@albn) June 22, 2021
Only 50 photos, processed in medium mode.
On @Sketchfab: https://t.co/0lZbfZyHfn#objectcapture pic.twitter.com/ek6tC8uVX1
But what about something a bit bigger?
New #photogrammetry capture, The Henry VII (Lady) Chapel at Westminster Abbey. Bit lower quality this one because I photographed it while walking round as a tourist but the ceiling alone is worth it.
— David Fletcher (@artfletch) June 17, 2021
3D/VR: https://t.co/6bo031qExM pic.twitter.com/Q7bjlXsteA
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.”
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.
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:
I gotta print this out. AR is also the “recoupling” of place and story. Campfires and cave walls. Place will have resonance in a meaningful way again. Magic circles and myth. https://t.co/IQQEFOiv8t
— Doug Thompson #AR (@Dusanwriter) June 23, 2021
"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.
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)?
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:
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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