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

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

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

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

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

Everywhere I Look I See Avatars

It seems like everyone has an avatar.

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

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

The Shifting Meaning of 'Avatar'

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

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

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

The use of these terms often signalled cultural divides.

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

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

The WOW of Avatars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Steve Bannon moved on to other things.

There were other worlds to conquer.

The Promise of the 3D Avatar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avatars Today, And A Shuffling of Signals

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

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

Take a few examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's ONE avatar, MANY worlds:

The Next Level of Avatar Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Will YOU Be In The Metaverse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Will Be INSIDE The Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discord & Walls of Text

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

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

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

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

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

But there will now be some other forces at play:

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

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

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

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

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

The Clean Well-Lit Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, put it another way:

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

Spaces and People: Contracts on the Blockchain

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

Today, I would revise this slightly:

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

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

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

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

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

The Metaverse Doesn't Need to be the Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it's time to flip the script.

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

There's a moment when you log back in to single player mode in Grand Theft Auto.

The camera pulls back. Your character (Franklin, say) is walking out of a store and is waving goodbye to someone off camera. Then the camera slowly moves into a new position, hovering just above and behind Franklin, locking itself into third-person "game position".

It's a powerful illusion: first, that the game world was persistent: you might have logged off, but life in Los Santos went on without you. And second, that your avatar also lives a life of its own when you're not around. Sometimes you log back in and he's coming out of a movie theatre or cruising women on the street or exiting a convenience store.

The camera snaps back into place and you now inhabit the game character. You've taken over the controls.

Persistence in Games and Virtual Worlds

The GTA moment was seminal because it helped to reinforce the idea of persistent worlds. It provided a hint that when we log out, the worlds will continue without us.

And persistence is one of the key definitions of the Metaverse (a term which has otherwise become a sort of collective emblem of a shift in technologies rather than a specific destination).

More recently, a game like Rust has carried persistence into a deep game mechanic: the assets you create will be destroyed or stolen by other players when you log off. And so players band together, share calendars and set up schedules to guard their forts around the clock. The fact that the whole world gets reset once a month just adds...I don't know, a sense of existential futility or something.

An upcoming game like Seed (which I've come to believe will help us imagine new paradigms for the Metaverse) will drive that persistence deep into layers related to economies, wellness, politics and culture.

And so world persistence is profound on its own. But if your concept of persistence is driven mostly by multi-player game platforms, then you're probably missing the deeper point: that persistence speaks to it being a world, which indicates something which isn't static, which changes and does more than deliver a series of grinds and quests according to a pre-determined schedule.

Sure, when you log into GTA or RDR there are already people online doing stuff, but the world itself hasn't particularly changed since the last time you logged in.

Minecraft is more world-like because its persistence is coded right down to the atom. Everything is subject to change. Everything can be re-shaped by other players. By the time you log in again, someone will have opened a portal or built a castle.

But what kind of 'world' is it when the people who inhabit it can stop time? Why is it that if the world is persistent, its citizens can simply log in or log off?

Should our avatars be static in worlds that will increasingly have the physics, economies and environments of the physical one (or imagined versions of the same)?

Avatars and Characters: What's The Difference

For me, the GTA moment was more profound for its hint that our avatars might have lives of their own.

But before we go there, we should take a brief moment to note the difference between an avatar and a game character. And maybe it's enough to say this:

• When a 'gamer' enters a virtual world, they often think of their avatar as their 'character'. They will talk about the avatar in the third person - "my character". They will talk about playing. There is a remove between the player and their representation.
• But at some point, you see a shift (at least in a fully realized virtual environment). Their 'character' becomes YOU. It is not some third party.  You might be controlling that emblem of yourself. but you're not 'playing' it.
• There are neurological reasons for this. The brain has difficulty distinguishing between the physical and virtual manifestations of our 'selves'
• And so, when I talk about semi-autonomous avatars, I am not talking about game characters who are part of some story in which our sense of agency is limited.

Franklin in GTA is a character. You might identify with him, you might immerse in his life story, but he isn't YOU.

Set up a new 'toon for GTA Online, however, and you're getting a lot closer to being an avatar. The 'character' you use to play Fortnite is an avatar (especially when you spring for the skins) even if its life is mostly a series of grinds and the occasional Kaskade concert. And certainly when you log-in to Spatial.io your representation is clearly a version of you.

As we spend more and more of our time in synthetic worlds, these avatars, these extensions of ourselves, are US. Your avatar will have closets filled with clothes and NFT-backed sneakers, you will live in a $500,000 virtual house, and you'll head to a concert with 1.2 million other avatars (sharded, but still). Or...maybe not YOU (or ME), but someone will!

Semi-Autonomous Avatars and Why It Matters

There are ideas we have about the Metaverse. Some of them have become so firmly ingrained that we stop questioning the assumptions.

The idea of a semi-autonomous avatar challenges a few of those assumptions:

That the Metaverse is a VR-only experience

This comes, of course, from Snow Crash and Ready Player One. The idea that we slip into our avatar like a skin. That an avatar only exists when we don a pair of goggles and log-in. That the correlation between how our body moves and the movement of our avatar is one-to-one.

But the Metaverse will defy the gadgets that we use to access it. As I've written previously, many people will have their first experience of the Metaverse while sitting in their car.

A semi-autonomous avatar reminds us that there will be 'instances' and sections of the Metaverse where our digital selves can act at least semi-independently of the devices we wear. We might be able to observe or control them through things other than glasses.

That we will want to move seamlessly between worlds

This is a key tenet/conventional wisdom of the Metaverse. It's this idea that we want to log in to some kind of waiting room and use it to pop in and out of a constellation of virtual worlds.  

I've never entirely understood this idea. I suppose it's driven by our experience of the Web - as if we move around Websites seamlessly (when in fact there are still a million friction points that prevent our identities, wallets, permissions and 'inventory' from travelling with us as we surf).

Regardless, it doesn't necessarily solve a clearly identified problem. WHY do I want my avatar to jump from Minecraft to Fortnite again? And if I could LEAVE a version of my avatar back in Minecraft to guard my farm, wouldn't I?

I get the idea of IDENTITY. But more often than not most users prefer to slip between identities rather than be burdened with a single one. It's no different than the personas we 'wear' as we move from home, to work, to community. We bring different selves.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't create standards or that we shouldn't be able to bring our avatar from one world to another. It IS to say that there are other use cases as well.

That the Metaverse is a "lean-forward" medium

It's a 'truth' given that there are only two types of media: lean back and lean forward.

Matthew Ball has reinforced the dichotomy between two types of companies as he looks at the future of entertainment:

"Just as gaming seeks Hollywood to adapt their stories in order to build love, Hollywood seeks out gaming to adapt theirs. But in this latter case, Hollywood faces existential threats".

Hollywood can create love. But in his calculation it hasn't mastered the art of the lean-forward experience.

In a macro sense, this division might be true. But it ignores the very messy middle: the worlds which aren't love. Which don't even require much attention.

Pop into GTA these days and listen to the chat. If you run into a group with any experience at the game, you get the sense that they're barely paying attention: they're running another supply quest for their motorcycle club but mostly trash talking other people in the channel.

Attend a virtual dance and you can't even be sure half the people have their eyes on the computer. They're probably watching Netflix or streaming onto Twitch instead where they're chatting up their superfans.

In fact, I'd propose that there is a significant majority of content that is successful because it allows for split attention. Your avatar is there, it's dancing, but there isn't really anyone home.

The semi-autonomous part? At least it has some good pre-recorded dance moves.

The Metaverse is Entertainment

Which brings us to a final myth (although I could go on): which is that the Metaverse will be entertainment.

If I can imbue my avatar with a set of automations, it can also perform tasks. An avatar that can perform tasks, in worlds which will have their own economies, is an avatar that can make money.

Large chunks of the Metaverse will have economies and auctions and shop keepers and fashion shows. It will have round table discussions on the state of bitcoin and mini stock markets where you can trade NFTs.

But even putting that aside, the speed with which automation is becoming a key underpinning of the Internet itself means that the Metaverse will adapt those same technologies.

I have a workflow which connects Tweets to Airtable and over to Notion and then back to an email reminder system and ToDoIst item. I use Automate.io to hook it all up. I take a single action and it creates a cascade of value through a series of systems.

All I need to do is hook it up to GPT-3 and it could maybe even just auto-generate these posts! I'd have a fully functioning enterprise that required almost zero human intervention.

DAUs will be set up in the Metaverse. They will mostly run themselves and exist entirely in a synthetic world. We will able to participate in them (or our avatars will) and we will be able to vote and take actions. And some of those actions we'll be able to automate.

In other words, because there will be economic value in the Metaverse, many of us will want to maximize the value that our avatars create.

The Ambient Metaverse  

Currently, the idea of a semi-autonomous avatar brings scripting hacks and automated farmers to mind. They're considered hacks because they're associated with game environments and are used to bypass the (written or unwritten) rules.

Or, they're not considered ways to make an avatar autonomous: the macros you use in Warcraft are just enhancements. Primarily because they're seen to aid the player....who is controlling a character.

But our avatars will end up with all sorts of macros and sub-routines. They will be able to act a bit on their own and give the appearance of presence.

I know people who leave their avatars logged in and resting in a virtual bed while their human controllers sleep. They feel a need to send a signal to others in the synthetic world that they are 'present' even if the human behind the avatar is asleep.

On the other end of the spectrum, our avatars may be mostly invisible. We'll move through virtual worlds seen through our glasses or while driving our cars. In those cases, the autonomy of our avatars will have some real meaning because the sub-routines that they perform will be a large point of our presence in those corners of the Metaverse.

We have lived with the myth of Ready Player One: a lean-forward, entertainment and game-focused 'Metaverse' (owned, mind you, by a benevolent dictator) that you log into when you throw on a haptic suit and some goggles.

The reality is that the Metaverse will often be ambient. We'll skim it. We'll dip in and out or barely even notice it. It will be always on and it (and our avatar) will live a life of its own whether we pay attention to it or not.

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

Let's start a conversation. As a subscriber, all you need to do is hit reply.