Making the Metaverse (more) Human, An Anthropological Theory

A Series of Drafts for My Gatherverse Talk

I was chosen to be a part of the Gatherverse Summit!

I tried to write a script for a 20min talk, roughly 2000 words, but every time I tried to figure out a section, I ended up writing wayyyyyy more than intended.

Then Chris gave me the honor of closing the summit!! Which really is an amazing privilege… but I had to shorten my talk to just 10 minutes!!!!

So now I had to figure out how to say in 10 minutes what took me over an hour and a couple thousand words to even begin saying before…

(Check out my podcast where I first started drafting all of this here)

I figured I’d share my drafts in this newsletter, because I did have a LOT that I wanted to communicate, with very little time to do it.

I feel good about what I ended up submitting, but I’m super proud of what I wrote in these drafts too! Don’t worry, my actual talk ended up being quite different than these drafts, so there aren’t really much spoilers here.

Below, you will find nearly all my iterations for this talk, which includes somewhat complete rants about:

• Private property - How the idea of property is propaganda perpetuated by people in power, and those who (were taught to) want that power.

• Capitalism 2.0 - How the Metaverse, as it is touted today, is quickly becoming just another avenue to accelerate the worst parts of capitalism.

• Hopes & Dreams - What people wish the metaverse was, and what we could be doing instead

• NFTs - How they can be done better

• Luddites - Reiterating how right they were about how we made our selves slaves to technology, rather than using it as a crafter does their tools

• Self-governance - How people who don’t understand systems assume authority is necessary when really, the design of the environment determines how people behave themselves

• And more!! :D

Without further ado… enjoy!

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Ideas:

• The role of community in the metaverse

• How to build an open, interoperable metaverse

• Design principles of the metaverse

• How to turn a dystopian idea into a real (good) place

• Praxis in the Metaverse

• How to make the Metaverse truly humanity-first .. a theory

Application

If providing a talk, what would you like to speak about?

The metaverse is ramping up, but most people still have never tried VR and don't understand the potential (or the risks and limitations) of living in a world where much of it is only accessible virtually. I operated a highly-rated VR arcade where I helped thousands of people experience VR and tried hundreds of experiences myself.

Furthermore, I am now actively designing experiences at a future technologies company and am involved in a group passionate about making an open, interoperable metaverse. 

I'd like to share my insights, learnings, and ideas from my experiences. I will speak about the various things to consider if we want to build a truly open, inclusive, and community-driven metaverse.

Title:

Making the Metaverse (More) Human, An Anthropological Theory

OR

Humanity-First Metaverse, A Meta-Revolutionary Manifesto

OR

The Future-First Metaverse, A Manifesto for Radical Change

Summary:

-- V1 --

The metaverse as a term is meaningless. Due to this arbitrary nature, it is prone to being defined by any individual’s or organization’s dreams and ambitions. This is a terribly convenient excuse for corporate brands to use it as a buzzword for everything… but also an awesome opportunity for people to imagine their own future. One’s definition of the metaverse spotlights one’s own desires (or fears) for the future. If we wa

-- V2 --

Technology is not neutral. It is beholden to the inherent biases of its creators and consumers. Our economy is fundamentally apathetic of human 

-- V3 --

Many of the biggest problems in our modern-day society stems from pathological anti-social behavior. Narcissism, sociopathy, apathy, even psychopathy run amok due to the emphasis on profit, power, and growth rather than human empowerment. As we see today, the metaverse will just continue this trend of dehumanization in pursuit of ever expanding growth.

During this talk, I want to reframe the concept of human society to break us out of this constrained way of viewing human nature. I will then use this new perspective to imagine a new, more humane future to inspire actionable hope. Finally, I want to put forth some ideas on how we can actively keep the metaverse, and thus humanity, more open, interoperable, and egalitarian. 

-- V4 -- 

I am a self-professed technowizard in training. Meaning I spend my time figuring out how to create a better world using magical technology. In this talk, I’d like to explore radical ideas that inspire us to build a better future by applying lessons from our long past. I will combine my own personal history operating one of the highest-rated VR arcades in the world, with stories uncovered from archeological data that covers over 300,000 years of human history, and even 4 billion years of Earth’s history. Using these wisdoms, I will propose a number of ideas that envision what the metaverse could be in 5, 10, 50, 100, and even 1000+ years in the future.

Awareness is always the first step of solving a problem. So we will start this adventure through time and space with the origins of the metaverse. 

Why is there so much hype for the ‘metaverse’? Is this dystopian or tech optimism? Are NFTs valuable or just a scam? Is it too late to save the world? How can we face climate change, war, inequality, poverty, pandemics, pollution, and so much more all while just trying to make rent and find friends? These are just a few questions that I will (try to) answer in a quick, but comprehensive way. From capitalism to solarpunk, tyranny to anarchy, extremism to revolution, solitude to community; I will do my best to share actionable ideas on how to make sense of the world and build towards a better one.

-- V5 --

The metaverse as a term is meaningless. Due to this arbitrary nature, it is prone to being defined by any individual’s or organization’s dreams and ambitions. This is a terribly convenient excuse for corporate brands to use it as a buzzword for everything… but also an awesome opportunity for people to imagine their own future.

As a self-professed ‘technowizard’ (in training), who has spent his entire life dreaming of futures with sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic, I want to inspire others to dream big too. But I also want to apply lessons from what we’ve learned from the Universe thus far to inform those ambitious dreams.

I will combine my own personal history operating one of the highest-rated VR arcades in the world, with stories uncovered from scientific data that covers over 300,000 years of human history, and even 4 billion years of Earth’s history. Using these wisdoms, I will propose a number of ideas that envision what the metaverse could be in 5, 10, 50, 100, and even 1000+ years in the future.

Awareness is always the first step of solving a problem. So we will start this adventure through time and space with the origins of the metaverse. 

Why is there so much hype for the ‘metaverse’? Is this dystopian or tech optimism? Are NFTs valuable or just a scam? Is it too late to save the world? How can we face climate change, war, inequality, poverty, pandemics, pollution, and so much more all while just trying to make rent and find friends? These are just a few questions that I will (try to) answer in a quick, but comprehensive way. From capitalism to solarpunk, tyranny to anarchy, extremism to revolution, solitude to community; I will do my best to share actionable ideas on how to make sense of the world and build towards a better one.

The metaverse is not just a means of escape or profit, but an extension of our mind's ability to simulate possible futures so that we can make better, more informed decisions. The metaverse is a manifestation of our consciousness. Let's make sure we are using it to live out our greatest potential!

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How to make the Metaverse truly humanity-first .. a theory

Outline

• Introduction

  • Professional background

  • Passion background

  • Goals and Dreams (Biases)

  • Everyone is biased, intelligence is collective (segue)

• Why is the metaverse dystopian?

  • Snow Crash

  • Privatization

  • Infinite growth/profit (Capitalism 2.0)

  • Escapism

• Why is the metaverse hopeful?

  • Creativity and Imagination

  • Immersion and Community

  • Empathy and Inclusion

  • Anarchy and Freedom

• What can the metaverse be?

  • Meaningless (decentralization)

  • Access to real-world resources (praxis)

  • Simulations of real-world possibility (imagination)

  • Magical - Do magic!!

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Extended Outline

• Introduction

  • Professional background

  • Passion background

    For years I’ve been rearing to get my hands on a VR headset. I’ve been reading about VRMMORPGs since elementary school! Though I was able to get to VR meetups (remember those?), to try out the technology, I was too poor to afford a headset, or even a computer to run it. 

    So I tried to build my own virtual worlds on the web (in 2016). Unfortunately, this (Flubbiverse.com) was the extent of my experiments with tools like aframe, because I just wasn’t much of a programmer.

  • Goals and Dreams (Biases)

    • Anarchist mostly, though haven’t read much theory, just makes sense to me

    • I want to live in a better world

  • Everyone is biased, intelligence is collective (segue)

    • Objectivity is a horizon, we are never there, just ever approaching

    • Thus stating one’s subjectivity clearly is important

    • Study about how collective intelligence is better than any one genius, and show how much of this talk is pulled from a number of sources

• Why is the metaverse dystopian?

  • Snow Crash

    • Was a blatant cautionary tale of capitalism

    • The whole thing was literally owned by monopolies

    • Lack of individual protections created complete dependency on privatized interest groups to take over

  • Privatization

    • A brief history - The idea that one can ‘own property’ that one is not actually using goes back to the days of feudalism and the first dictatorships. This is one of the first examples of the dehumanization of human society. 

      • It was always about the extension of power over others, not any sort of human well-being

      • For a long time, nobles and dictators were the only ones allowed to own land

      • The Enlightenment period was spearheaded not by the ideals of freedom from the tyranny of nobility, but for merchants to gain the privilege of owning land that nobles had exclusively. They then excluded other commoners from gaining this same ‘right’

      • The ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself is propaganda blaming the deleterious effect private property had on public thoroughfares on the commoners when it was actually the private property owners that caused the problem.

    • Segue - All of this related because that’s exactly what is happening with the internet:

      • Previously public access to website creation tools and media sharing is increasingly privatized, which blights the bit of public areas left. The bulk of the internet is thus divided up amongst private interests who each can set their own fiefdoms (ie terms and services) in which people are expected to follow

    • The idea of IP itself is a continuation of this technological feudalism. Most small-time creators (ie commoners) do not benefit from IP. It is a system that heavily favors those who already have the power to enforce (and steal) so called ‘IP’

      • If we really wanted to reward people for their creations, we would simply come up with ways to more easily document contribution and reward directly based on how many people used that creation, similar to a blockchain (more on this later)

    • The idea of virtual property, items, and any other digitally copyable media being ‘scarce’ is an incredibly unethical method of drumming up attention/desire based on the worst parts of the human psyche, similar to using addiction to sell cigarettes by the pack. Just because it's normalized doesn’t make it okay. The reality is that it usually costs very little to copy anything available online. The only reason to make it exclusive is to once again, abuse a position of power and/or hack inflate a supposed ‘value’.

    • Artificial scarcity is absolutely disgusting

    • No true privacy - due to the fact that there are no public platforms online, that means all of one’s privacy is at the mercy of a private corporation. As we’ve seen, and they do not care about your privacy… only how much profits they may be able to get out of your data. Even the laws they are supposed to follow to protect this data is inherently flawed, limited, and usually years if not decades behind the times. 

    • Privatization 

    • The idea that one can ‘own property’ that one is not actually using goes back to the days of feudalism and the first authoritarians prior to that. This is one of the first examples of the dehumanization of human society. 

    • Private property is not some ancient human concept that people have always held dear. Owning land was about as sane as owning air for most cultures throughout history. 

    • Despite how much we commodify even basic needs like food and water, we still don’t think about owning air. Sure we have personal space, and even airspace above property, but its all very fluid and contextual to the land.

    • Similarly with land… most cultures did not think of the land they were on at any one time as ‘theirs’. Because most cultures were nomadic for most of human history. It was only when people began to farm in one place for an extended period of time AND coerce others to work on that land, that folks thought about the land itself as something they could ‘own’. I won’t get much into it now, but you can look it up yourself. One cannot have property without also limiting someone else’s freedom, and using violence to protect that property.

    • Nomadic cultures didn’t even have ‘hunting territories’ as some people claim, the archeological evidence shows that they actually shared or came to agreements to hunt/forage with any other groups of people they came across. Because there was a shared assumption of abundance.

    • It’s only when some people realized they could stay in one place, coerce some people to get food and water while they relaxed, kill anyone who disagreed, and raid other settlements, that property became a viable strategy. 

    • The point here is that the idea of property did not come about out of some shared identity or morality or expression of liberty, it came from authoritarians who realized that it was easier to claim some land for yourself, to force other people to produce things on that land, and to steal land that other people claimed (or take ‘unclaimed’ land) for yourself. This is the birth of states. 

    • From this violent beginning we see the creation of tyranny.. Of people granted power over others by ‘God’ and enforced by military might. For the next few thousand years, owning land was exclusive to those who had the power to enact violence upon anyone who disagreed. Nobles, dictators, etc… 

    • People are reduced to whether or not they own land… and whose land they are living.

    • The Enlightenment period was spearheaded not by the ideals of freedom from the tyranny of nobility, but for merchants to gain the privilege of owning land that nobles had exclusively. They then excluded other commoners from gaining this same ‘right’

    • The ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself is propaganda blaming the deleterious effect private property had on public thoroughfares on the commoners when it was actually the private property owners that caused the problem.

  • Infinite growth/profit - Capitalism 2.0

    • Further abuse and exploitation (unsustainable extraction) - the current metaverse is a reflection of the world we live in.. it is capitalism run amok. 

    • Meaningless commodification/consumerism - its consumption for consumption’s sake… people are often only seen as ‘users’ and ‘customers’.. ie important only for the so called ‘value’ they can give the business. (its not about the name, you can your customers ‘humans’ but the reality of a business is that is there to extract money). Any and everything is commoditized because that’s literally what it means to ‘own the means of production’. The idea that these products ‘solve the users problems’ is almost often proven wrong by the proliferation of monetization schemes and lack of humanistic success metrics… Many businesses don’t’ measure the improved quality of life thanks to their product, and instead focus on the quantitative values such as engagement, roi, risk, etc that are meant to 

    • Worsening inequality and poverty - Wealth gap just widens since the people who can afford such equipment and software are the only ones who can therefore use it (to make more money). Meanwhile, people who don’t even have reliable access to internet can’t participate. 

    • Growth should be slow… steady… sustainable… regenerative (rather than exploitative) 

    • The luddites were right… they were not a bunch of technically illiterate people scared of progress or regressive thinkers… No. They were technicians. They were the workers who provided maintenance to the industrial age machines. They knew the technology better than anyone else at the time. It was due to that knowledge that they raged against the machine.
      They knew that the combination of technological progress and capitalism would reduce humans to mere machines themselves. They knew that people would be compared or constrained more and more to the “efficiency” of machines. Machines dont sleep, dont eat, dont make (nearly as many) mistakes as humans, can be scaled up and down, don’t need healthcare, followed directions unquestioningly, etc… so why care about the needs of human workers when machines would be increasingly more valuable and less bothersome? They produce more with less costs, exponentially. 

      They knew that the value of human labor would plummet. 

      But even worse than that, today we see this everywhere… not just in factories and farms, but even in the supposed ‘gig economy’ with content producers on social media and freelancers in code and design. Humans are increasingly having to constrain ourselves to the ‘will’ of machines, of algorithms and data mining, and so on…

      If you want to make content on youtube, especially in a sustainable way, its extremely difficult to do so without molding your content for the algorithm… for advertisers and sponsors. This gets so bad that you practically have a youtube credit system, and if you do one too many videos that don’t do numbers, then your entire channel will suffer thereafter. 

      This will continue with virtual worlds. Imagine a platform (or several) where instead of videos or podcasts or music, people also create virtual worlds for you to experience. I’m sure entrepreneurs will realize the need for not just a platform to serve the metaverse, but to discover all the virtual worlds in one’s metaverse… therefore all these problems with content discovery, and moderation will transfer into this new system. And because of course they need to make money to provide this “valuable” service.. But want to make it as ‘convenient’ and ‘accessible’ as possible, it will all be free…. And the cost of that freedom will be your privacy, your data, and even your sanity.

      The reason social media is so terrible today is not due to some failing of human nature. Human nature is merely social and adaptive… it adapts to whatever environment it is in, for good or bad. And the current environments are incentivized to make profit, and they do so by manipulating the environment so that everyone is tunneled into little echo chambers and rabbit holes that spike engagement rates and ad-revenue. 

      Imagine this in a virtual world, where everywhere you look is being recorded and analyzed by a company with hundreds or thousands of engineers and designers trying to figure out the best place to place this ad, or that political message, or see how you react to this A/B tested feature.. They will control what virtual worlds are popular, mostly indirectly, through metaverse maps that highlight the most ‘engaging’ worlds and ignore the others. 

      You best believe that the talk shows that can spend hundreds of millions of dollars will have virtual worlds that get a whole lot of traffic… the Joe Rogans that can spark internet mania will have billion-dollar deals to maintain a virtual world where all the cooky conspiracies can become a reality. 

      Every item and moment from the physical world and every other world can and will be commoditized… you can buy and sell any and every part of your life. This would all create massive levels of economic growth. You’d have exponentially more wealth flying around then ever before… all at the low low cost of humanity. 

  • Escapism

    • Running/hiding from our problems - It’s a space for people to pretend nothing is happening in the real world… and the valid need for a break is twisted into a justification for completely ignoring the real world for the virtual…

    • Further delusion/doomerism/dystopia-worship - Its a space where people complain about corruption and think the only way to solve it is by killing or otherwise dominating millions or even billions of other people… 

    • Egregious loss of potential - Its a space where creativity is often limited to the restrictive rules and tools of a platform, or lack of accessible tools to create one’s own platform…

• Why is the metaverse hopeful?

  • Creativity and Imagination - space for people to express themselves… to live out their imaginations… to be wizards, explorers, heroes, and so on… Despite the dystopian origins, there is an inherent utopian dream in being able to visualize (and even live within) one’s imaginations … The pure idea of 3D immersive worlds that allows one to mold your own reality is just too attractive an idea to be constrained by the dystopic origins.

  • Immersion and Community - This 3D world allows one to not just pretend that you live in a different world.. But to *actually* go there. Coupled with the ability to then share this world with others, and you have something that is just way too promising to be scared away from. This calls to a deeper desire in humans to dream, to tell stories, and to share those imaginations. You can actually *be* in a community in a way that was only ever possible if you were lucky enough to physically be able to find that community. Where the internet allows one to build communities with people across the world, virtual worlds allows one to be immersed in that community in a way that begins to approach physical communities. As the tech gets better, so should the communal connectivity.

  • Empathy and Inclusion - It’s easy to forget that people are people when you’re only connected via text and images. Being able to actually communicate with an avatar, with what feels like another person, creates a powerful anthropomorphic instinct… an urge to humanize each other more. Of course, its not perfect.. It can easily be used for anonymity in places where avatars don’t have persistent reputation… but it’s often better than no avatars. Furthermore, its incredibly inclusive to people who don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. For people who feel like they were born in the wrong body, or just want to try a different identity then they are stuck with IRL, virtual avatars are inherently inclusive

  • Anarchy and Freedom - There’s also an inherent freedom that comes with a new world. Akin to the ‘old western’ days, where people could explore new lands where new rules have yet to be established. Its not merely an exploration of chaos, but an escape of current power structures… people are running *from* hegemony, just as much if not more than they are running to create new empires. Humans have an instinct to rail against authority, despite the rampant, all-encompassing authority in our society, the fact that people regularly build spaces where no authority holds power is evidence for humanity’s desire for anarchy. Anarchy is simply living free from authority… its a state of egalitarianism in which every person has the most freedom to live life how they want to live it. Virtual worlds allow us nearly untapped potential to live freely… to only ever associate with rules that one volunteers to follow.

    • Thus the initial dystopian origins… Neil Stephenson’s metaverse was dystopic precisely because of the authoritarian platform owners. The idea that there will be one ‘metaverse’ owned by a single (or conglomerate) authority is a manifestation of the worst parts of the concept. 

    • What makes the metaverse the metaverse, is any and everyone being able to spin up their own worlds. And those people being able to trade, travel, and create across the worlds if they so desire. Its ultimate freedom. Not power. Not profit. Not property. 

• What can the metaverse be?

  • Meaningless (decentralization) - The fact that the word ‘metaverse’ is meaningless is a good thing. Everyone *should* have their own definition of the metaverse. And everyone .. as in every individual, should have the tools and freedom to create their own metaverse, their own virtual world. The term ‘metaverse’ itself will likely fade to the background like ‘internet’. If anyone says that there can only be one ‘metaverse’... realize that this can only be true if that one is the internet itself. And just like the internet, the idea that private organizations should own all or most of it is inherently dystopian and limiting. An internet… a metaverse in which corporations or governments own it, is one where we have very little freedom.

    • Everybody can make their own worlds - its useful to use platforms, tools, and services from other people… but capitalism makes it harder and harder to decentralize that power once its established, its creates a zero-sum game where the first (or ‘best’) to scale takes all (or at least most). The idea of IP further supports these hegemonies and hampers, rather than encourages, creativity, innovation or even competition. The only way for this not to be a zero-sum game, is through infinite, accelerating (exponential) growth… an inherently unsustainable and almost literally cancerous.

      • People should be able to create virtual environments as easily (or even more easily) than creating websites. 

      • These environments should be customizable, dynamic, and ‘realistic’ (ie self-consistent)

      • People should be able to create avatars, items, and systems that are also dynamic, customizable, etc

      • These creations should be able to interoperate with other creations if they so desire (either made using standards, or able to be copied and remade with interoperable standards)

      • They should be able to serve/store these on their own hardware or public hardware

    • Access to real-world resources (praxis) - again, its not about escapism, its about freedom. The technologies behind the metaverse all can grant powerful abilities for real-world impact

      • XR spectrum
        AR for augmenting
        VR for simulating

      • Computer learning spectrum

        Machine learning 

        Machine vision

      • Computing spectrum

        Edge Computing

        Spatial computing

    • See available resources - See history, food, medicine, real opportunities, etc

    • See who needs help and what they need - real news, real crime (ie people in distress, not what authorities think is a problem), visualize how infections spread, etc

    • See corruption in real-time - carbon, pollution, environmental destruction, etc

  • Simulations of real-world possibility (imagination) - can actually show what reality you are living in (or want to live in). Can live out idealisms to test their practicality. Can agree on and share actual realities, rather than perceived realities

    • Simulate better communities

    • Simulate better diets

    • Simulate better technologies

  • Magical - Do magic!!

    • Better Games (more diverse and interactive games)

    • Better Creation Tools (more innovation and invention)

    • Better Education (more engaging learning (and free thinking))

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Random Sections

The following 3 sections are all sort of rants that I wrote down during sparks of inspiration. I realized they were all too long to be included in my talk.

Rant 1 - NFTs

What if NFTs could be used to express gratitude, show the abundance of creativity, and even encourage recycling rather than bullshit scams built on artificial scarcity?

For thousands of years, many societies utilized extensive gift-giving economies that was inherently more sustainable and personal. When someone gives you a gift, you feel indebted to them, and gracious for their generosity. If it’s personalized, you feel incredibly seen.. Like this person actually knows you and cares for you. Even if they are just freely giving away things they don’t want or need anymore to anyone, you tend to be more appreciative of the gift. You might wonder as to its history.. Who else has owned this thing? What is it’s story?
Or you might simply be happy that you are getting even more use out of something that someone else no longer could use. You feel like you are participating in a grand cycle of use. You are a part of something beautiful just by using what someone else no longer needs.

However, the very idea of owning things and selling things; of mass producing something and selling it either at a premium and/or to many others… this transactive economy destroys all of that.

The very act of giving away something purely for monetary gain reduces or completely flips the act of giving on its head. Instead of either party feeling good about the act of two humans sharing something intimate, both parties are focused more on the transaction itself.. The ‘value’ of the transaction.. Ie the money. The exchange therefore becomes cold and clinical. It abstracts away the joy of giving and receiving something, and replaces it with this currency that is only valuable due to its use for yet more transactions. So instead of you appreciating the human that used before, or the item you are getting and wondering as to its story, you care more about the money lost or gained. The idea of you buying something that was used before now becomes a detractor for most people.. The ‘used’ nature just makes you think about how much money you could have lost or gained.

And of course, with mass production, there is an assumption that most every item should be new. You don’t really care about the individuals who produced it. You don’t really think about how much effort and resources and time went into producing this thing. Due to the proliferation of machines in our production, you don’t even care about the craftsmanship much beyond the visual design. You have no reason nor incentive to truly care about the expertise, the thought, or even the exploited resources it took to create this.

Then of course there is debt! A gift exchange makes you feel indebted in a way that makes you want to give back. Its a soft reciprocity that is still incredibly powerful. You’re not thinking about the exact ‘value’ that you ‘need’ to give back… just have a vague feeling that you should probably pay this forward in some way. This nuance engages your social skills and intelligence. Making you view this person or others more closely. You notice their likes/dislikes, their quirks and desires. Their relationships and creations. In this way, you can devise your own gift that speaks to them.

But in a monetary system, debt becomes a burden. Its nothing more than a method of extracting future profits, especially coupled with interest. When you give someone something they cannot afford, instead of that being an incredibly generous moment of massive altruism and compassion, it becomes a massive power over that person. You essentially enslave them to your person for however long it takes for them to ‘pay you back’. They are now thinking about what they need to do make more money, often by any means necessary. They aren’t thinking or caring about other people, much less you in a good light. They are just thinking about how to remove this burden.

If we want to make NFTs more human, we have to realize that its the underlying economy that makes almost every facet of our society anti-human, anti-social, and inherently exploitative. It’s Goodhart’s Law run amok. Where we care more about the unit of measurement than what we are actually measuring.

 What if NFTs were simply a method of expressing gratitude and giving credit where credit is due?

Instead of the farce that is ‘intellectual property’ and capitalizing on any and everything you can get your hands on, we could be using it to shed light on the hands that create, and the cycle of use, and the communities that come together because they care for each other, rather than because they share a goal of making money.

Here’s an example:

You pick up a dresser that someone was giving away. You notice that it is great quality despite being used already. You’re curious to see who created it since the previous owner did not. Because a digital twin of this specific dresser was minted on the blockchain, you can see that there’s actually a long line of people who have owned this dresser.

There is some art on the side that comes from Person X, and there’s nice carvings etched into another side from Person Y. Person W enjoyed using this dresser for their first child’s nursery. Person V used it for books. They even gave some book recommendations based on what fits well in this dresser and showed how to convert it from a dresser to a bookshelf.

All down the line, you see a rich history of people using this very item for years in so many different ways, on down to the individual parts which also came from recycled pieces of other furniture. It warms your heart that you are continuing this tradition anew. Even if it is destroyed by malcontents or accidents (which perhaps it has been), the immutable nature of the digital NFT is like its DNA.. its soul, if you will, allowing you to reincarnate this object to continue its journey.

You feel incredibly connected to everybody who has contributed to its journey, and perhaps you send your own gift to everyone who has opted-in to sharing their virtual address. And just like that, you’ve not only participated in a mass gift exchange, but also was able to make all of those people aware of your gratitude.

This is how we can make the metaverse (and technologies therein) more human.. By actually building systems that encourage human interaction, that appreciate human creativity, that foster human gratitude, that reward environmental sustainability. This is the Metaverse. Or at least what it can be.

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Rant 2 - The Luddites Were Right (Redux)

The Metaverse today is fucked because the world is fucked. We've built a world in which humans are slaves to our own creations.

What makes people future forward is not being able to design a space or item that *look * like some arbitrary idea of the future… 

Nor is the fact that we can buy anything from anywhere at anytime a sign that we're living in some post-scarcity 'future' where everything is abundant. Because 

Living for the future means realizing ones present comforts should not come at the cost of your future comforts.

It's realizing that you can strike a balance between being comfortable now, and also being comfortable in the future. 

It's realizing that sometimes you'll have to do a bit of work, or sacrifice a bit of convenience in order to gain future dividends later.

Today, we are suffering for all the shortcuts and myopic comforts our ancestors took to feed their lifestyle and build their idea of a future that was not based in reality.

They shoveled the idea of progress without really considering what is being consumed to create that progress. They failed to realize that their progress was a dead end.

Now we have to find a way to back out and take a more sensible route.

The future is not something you can control, it's something you adapt to. And if we aren't ready to change, and change drastically, than we will be left behind and forgotten in due time.

Our world has been increasingly anti-human. How many of us live in places where we can easily get anything we need… without depending on technological creation? How many of us can walk to the store without a car? How many of us can grow or find a full meal without spending money? How many of us can spend their whole week, working outside on our own projects and being physically active?

The luddites were right. They were not anti-technologists. They were the expert mechanics and crafters who knew how technology worked more than anyone else! They were not just worried about machines replacing humans. They were worried about humans being increasingly compared to machines. Our worth and ‘value’ being seen in less and less subjective terms such as creativity, connection, and feeling… and instead more in terms of impersonal, abstract qualities like profit, productivity, and efficiency. 

Here’s a simple example that everybody can likely relate to:

Keyboards are a great technology that augments and enhances writing. It allows people to write far more quickly, in a medium that can be more easily shared. It does replace writing in *some* aspects, but only where appropriate (usually). Most of us can choose if we want to write something via a pen or a keyboard. Furthermore, the product of our words is not made more valuable just because it was typed faster on a keyboard. (If anything, handwritten notes are often more valuable, because we know it came from someone who took their time writing it!)

But imagine if everyone was required to write any and everything on a keyboard. And if you couldn’t afford a keyboard, you’d lose access to key parts of our society. Imagine your success and ‘value’ as a writer was more about how quickly and efficiently you could write, rather than the actual quality or substance of your writing. 

This is what we’ve done with many areas of our society, in which we let technology run away with our freedom, where the technology becomes the metric of success and value rather than the actual people using it. 

Cars are a real-world example of this. Cars are an amazing achievement of technological progress. They allow us to get to point A to point B far more quickly and comfortably than merely walking or using a horse. But we’ve nearly enslaved ourselves to this one method of transport in many places that surfer from urban sprawl. Across much of America, for instance, if you don’t own a car, you can’t easily go anywhere! Not to school, or church, or work, or even to get food.

But today I don’t just want to propose a metaverse that is not merely ‘humanity-first’... because its too late for that. We have to think about more than just ourselves. We have to think about our environment and all the creatures on this Earth that are going extinct due to our collective sociopathic behavior. We can even think about sentient life forms that we might meet in the future from other planets, or even our own creations, if we survive long enough… We can give them far more if we live than from our dust if we die.

Therefore, I propose to build a metaverse that is future-first. Meaning something that does not borrow from the future, but instead builds a better future. This future should be one in which our lives are better, not in terms of wealth or some biased, abstract idea of ‘development’.. But in terms of qualitative well-being. We need to have instances of technology that directly address and empower the well-being of our ourselves as holistic human beings, and the well-being of the environment as our natural habitat and home. In doing so, we can ensure the health of our descendants for generations to come. 

The more we prioritize things like profit, production, and power, the less we will be able to enjoy those things in the future. This is because the growth of those things necessitates the consumption of energy that we would otherwise use for human and environmental development!

The development of ‘civilization’ is not the same thing as the development of humans. Having better technology, or more ways to make money, does not necessarily lead to bettering our lives. If anything, it tends to abstract away from the material needs of humans or the environment. 

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Rant 3 - Self-Governance

Raph Koster is absolutely great! I learn so much from watching his talks. Here is a new one he did about the metaverse https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/27/raph-kosters-real-talk-about-a-real-metaverse/?fbclid=IwAR0lQSilLSHv449xvgZRmPkbHpRwg39UxaI9jpk6NVzJIpWR8buW2Tz4oLM 

But one thing he said really bothers me as just really misguided. The idea that people dont want to ‘govern themselves’ is a very jaded and bad idea. Its understandable! I definitely see why he and others would think something like this, especially after being involved with virtual worlds for so long… but I think what he is missing here is an understanding of what it means to ‘self-govern’... and more importantly what it means to be human.

Many people love to assume that humans have ‘free-will’, I’ve talked about this before, but it deserves reiteration because it is absolutely *critical* to understanding how and why the world is the way it is. If you believe humans have 100% ‘free will’ than that means you believe it ultimately comes down to our choices… that our decisions make the difference in our lives, and thus the life we have today is a result of those choices.

Though I do agree that choice (or at least perceived choice) is important, there is just wayyyy too much evidence against free will (the way it is commonly understood) to be a thing.

The reality is that humans, just like any other animal and life-form on this world, just like every single thing in the universe, is subject to influences from the environment. We respond to the environments we live in and perceive. That environment is one holistic ‘metaverse’ made of nigh infinite amount of other environments that are both material and immaterial. 

As I explained in my last two newsletters, environments can be anything from the physical environment to ones mental landscape. It can be the social strata of our lives, to the economy and technology that make our society run. 

Many of these environments are completely organic and distinct from us.. We don’t have any part in their creation. But many other environments are created by us! Usually without our conscious effort, but sometimes, … sometimes we actually understand that we are consciously creating an environment in which other people will be influenced. We call that design. Whenever we design a new thing, we are creating an environment that will determine how other humans behave.

Games are a great example of this. A game is one big environment with many others within it. Game designers have to determine everything from the economy to the gameplay to the virtual landscape. All of these and more will not only constrain or direct the players’ freedom… but determine how they will behave, directly or indirectly. When players do something ‘wrong’ in that game, its largely due to bad design… things you didnt consider people would abuse or exploit or just ignore. 

Thus we come back to the idea of ‘self-governance’. What do we mean by governing oneself? I cant say exactly what Koster was thinking when he said that, but the common understanding of that concept probably is something about people choosing to follow the rules. People deciding to ‘do the right thing’. 

But here’s the problem… what is the right thing? How do you know what the rules are? Even if you are told the rules, why should you agree to play by them? These may seem like obvious things, but they are the core of human society. Why bother even following any of the rules we put forth? It’s because of the environments. The social environment we have evolved within has made us extremely sensitive to interpersonal relationships. We care about how others see us.. And how they interact with us. We make choices based on how others will react, will think, and so on. Even if you deem yourself an ‘independent’ ‘self-motivated’ or ‘free thinker’ the fact that you are a human being able to read this means that you are already inseparably a part of this social ‘contract’. The very concept of language is dependent upon understanding what other people think and feel and say. 

Furthermore, there is the legal environment… a system of punishment that is authorized to dispense violence if you don’t follow the rules other people have set out. Then there’s your own mental environment.. Your personal desires and perceptions and values. Your own psychological condition. Plus there’s your economic environment. Your family environment. Your culture. Your history. And so on… 

The point is that no game, despite its completely artificial and ‘self-contained’ system, exists in a vacuum. The very fact that we all live in this world together means any thing in that world is subject to incalculably numerous other influences. It’s not that people don’t want to ‘govern themselves’... its that the governance of alllll the other environments in our life has a huge influence on whatever set of environments or perceptions make up the ‘self’.

So when we create virtual worlds… we’re not merely creating a ‘blank slate’ with rules that people are expected to comply with… we’re creating yet another set of environments that is just as prone to the nigh infinite amount of outside influences as anything else.

Thus is the importance of good design. A good design takes into consideration the most influential of these environments… It allows you, as the creator of a thing (ie an app, game, service, virtual world, etc), to consider what preconceived notions those people have… what desires, what problems, what values, etc… The more you are able to understand the people who will be using your thing, the better you can design it to work with those environments, rather than against them. And the more you will be able to predict, or at least not hold expectations, for unsavory behaviors. 

It’s not that people dont *want* to self-govern… its that it truly is incredibly hard to do; especially for the vast majority of us that don’t understand what governs us in the first place, or even what makes up the ‘self’ that we identify with.

I came here today in hopes to provide a wakeup call. To shed light on the absolute insanity that is virtual capitalism (and hierarchy in general). To show people alternatives. To scream into the void, perhaps in vain, about the cliff we are about to rush right off. It doesn’t even matter if you put diverse looking people at the cap table, because that table is historically and currently built off the backs of slaves, pollution, exploitation, and burrowing from our own future.

Our entire system of so-called ‘progress’ and ‘wealth’ is on loan from the future. And the collateral is all of humanity.

We need to use this technology not to produce yet more products and consumption and profit and ‘growth’... but to give back what has been taken over the last few hundred years. Not merely to sustain, but to regenerate and recuperate; to grant more freedoms to more people; to rip that power out of the clutches of those pyscho/sociopathic narcissists who are hoarding the bulk of the power and wealth for themselves and then insisting we thank them for the honor of our own subservience.

We need to use the metaverse to effect radical change.

We can do that by coming together; not as capitalists or entrepreneurs or politicians or economists or influencers or any of that other crap that got us into this mess… but as individuals. As fellow humans who want to come together to build a better world for ourselves, our children, and all future generations for millennia to come. We need to come together as people who want to actually be a part of this world rather than sovereigns and gods and rulers. We need to gather together, you and me, to build a world that makes sense. That is less abstract. That is more direct. That is more personal. More social. More environmentally conscious. More human.

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Full Draft/Script

Introduction

I wanted to be a trillionaire… but then I saw the billionaires and found them lacking… 

Also, I want to preemptively say that I have never read any communist literature. I am not an academic, I never went to college. I am going to have a lot of critiques for capitalism and states, because I have done a ton of research into history and have seen a troubling pattern in the anthropological data. This is merely my own thoughts distilled and simplified. I welcome discussion and disagreement, but only if its actually critical thought and not just proof of one’s indoctrination that you’re not willing or able to put aside. 

With that being said, let’s just jump into it. :P

Why is the metaverse dystopian?

Snow Crash

You can’t have a conversation about the ‘metaverse’ without talking about its origins: Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. It coined the term in 1994 (though it was likely inspired by William Gibson’s Cyberspace in Burning Chrome and Neuromancer a decade earlier).

It was an almost glaringly obvious dig at capitalism; depicting a world where the US fell apart into corporate fiefdoms. In this world, the metaverse was the reality where people actually lived life, instead of the hellscape that was the real world. But the metaverse was owned by two monopolies: a hardware company that owned all the servers, and a media company that owned all the software… Information was (literally) power, and corporations did what they could to control it.

People in the real world depended on the corporations for stability, protection, and living in general. The only rights were those granted by whatever conglomerate was in charge of your city. This is the origins of the metaverse. But before we delve into that, lets take a detour to talk about the concept of private property.

Privatization 

The idea that one can ‘own property’ that one is not actually using goes back to the days of feudalism and the first authoritarians prior to that. This is one of the first examples of the dehumanization of human society. 

Private property is not some ancient human concept that people have always held dear. Owning land was about as sane as owning air for most cultures. 

They did not think of the land they were on at any one time as ‘theirs’. Because most cultures were nomadic for most of human history.

Land was just a feature of where you happened to be at the time. From it, sprung life. People by and large viewed land as abundant. There was no need to fight over hunting territories because there was always more out there. There were always better spots. And even if there wasn’t, one could easily share. And all parties would see for themselves when it was time to stop hunting/foraging in that area and move on to the next. It was abundant because people knew when to let it replenish. (xyz source)

It was only when people began to farm in one place for an extended period of time; when they tried to force the land to give more than it could give, that the idea of owning land came about. Furthermore, farming is hard, for hundreds of years it was far more difficult to farm than it was to forage. So it became a better strategy to force others to work the land. And it was far more practical to raid other settlements to steal their resources. Thus war.

I won’t get much into it now, but you can look it up (or just think about) yourself. One cannot have property without also limiting everyone else’s freedom to move through land that was previously shared between all, and using violence to protect that property.

From this violent beginning we see the creation of tyranny.. Of might makes right. For the next few thousand years, owning land was exclusive to those who had the power to use violence to obtain land. Thus the previous abundance of land became a scarce resource… not because there was a finite amount, but because of certain people who wanted to conquer or carve out their own land.

Private property reduces people to those who own land, and those who do not… It created inequality and class. It created scarcity. 

The Enlightenment period was spearheaded not by the ideals of freedom from the tyranny of nobility, but for merchants to gain the privilege of owning land that nobles had exclusively. They then excluded other commoners from gaining this same ‘right’.

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself is propaganda blaming the deleterious effect private property had on public thoroughfares on the commoners, when it was actually the private property owners that caused the problem. (xyz source)

Thus is the origins of capitalism. From the very beginning, it was not about creating freedom and wealth for everybody, it was about the expansion of property. Of owning not just land, but people, products, and even ideas.

Capitalism 2.0

This is all directly related to our current state of affairs. The idea of IP itself is a continuation of this technological feudalism. Most small-time creators (ie commoners) do not benefit from IP. It is a system that heavily favors those who already have the power to enforce (and steal) property.

IP does not foster creativity, innovation, or even progress. Because it does not reward those things. It only rewards power. It is a tool for the compounding of power.

If we really wanted to reward people for their creations, we would simply come up with ways to more easily document creations publicly, and give rewards directly based on how many people used or were inspired by that creation, similar, in fact, to a blockchain (more on this later). It would not be an exclusive right to create that thing, because that would necessarily limit the creativity and freedom of other people to innovate further. IP does not care about the way humans work, it is a tool for authority, and it requires (the threat of) violence to be upheld.

The problem with capitalism is the foundations of capitalism: owning the means of production. Capital. The very idea that you can own any and everything that produces something, is inherently dehumanizing. It reduces everything and everyone to mere products. To dollars and cents. To profit and loss. Even the ‘market forces’ meant to cater to ‘market demand’ only actually measures purchasing power. Meaning if you can’t or don’t buy things, your needs are invisible to the market.

The current internet is a reflection of the world we live in.. it is capitalism run amok. 

Much of the market is just meaningless commodification/consumerism - its consumption for consumption’s sake. People are often only seen as ‘users’ and ‘customers’.. i.e. important only for the so called ‘value’ they can give the business. (Its not about the name, you can call your customers 'humans’, but the reality of a business is that it is there to extract money). Any and everything is commoditized because that’s literally what it means to ‘own the means of production’. The idea that these products ‘solve the users' problems’ is almost always proven wrong by the proliferation of monetization schemes and lack of humanistic success metrics… Many businesses don’t measure the improved quality of life thanks to their product, and instead focus on the quantitative values such as engagement, ROI, risk, etc 

Even nonprofit organizations at scale reduce their work down to units that can be measured on a spreadsheet. This is just the inevitable result of living in a world where everything and everyone is reduced to capital.

The luddites were right… they were not a bunch of technically illiterate people scared of progress or regressive thinkers… No. They were technicians. They were the workers who provided maintenance to the industrial age machines. They knew the technology better than anyone else at the time. It was due to that knowledge that they raged against the machine.
They knew that the combination of technological progress and capitalism would reduce humans to mere machines themselves. They knew that people would be compared or constrained more and more to the “efficiency” of machines. Machines don't sleep, don't eat, don't make (nearly as many) mistakes as humans, can be scaled up and down, don’t need healthcare, follow directions unquestioningly, etc… so why care about the needs of human workers when machines would be increasingly more valuable and less bothersome? They produce more with less costs, exponentially. 

The luddites were futurists. They knew that the value of human labor would plummet. They knew that people would be increasingly threatened not just by replacement, but by the dehumanization of work, of community, of life. They were right.

Today, our lives are controlled by machines. Our environments favor machines over humans. Everything from food production to transportation to entertainment is irrevocably dependent on machines. Most of us, at least in America and similar places, can’t even imagine the idea of walking to the store without a car. Our entire community is no longer hospitable to humans. You need a car if you want to get anywhere in most car-dependent cities. Our homes are not allowed (or able) to be built by hand. Our news and media is practically controlled by how much it is subordinate to the algorithms which biases ad revenue.

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Draft, V2

Introduction

I had multiple titles for this talk, several versions and hours worth of things to say. But I only have 10 minutes. And for some reason, Chris entrusted me to bring this incredible summit to a close. 

So for the next few minutes, please keep an open mind, heart, and imagination as I share my dream for humanity. 

I really wanted to call this talk: The Future-First Metaverse, A Manifesto for Radical Change

… but the other title won out on the votes. Before I explain why this latter title is my favorite, let me tell you a little bit about who I am.

Recently, I began calling myself a ‘TechnoWizard in training’ because I am learning how to massively change the world for the better, through sufficiently advanced technology. 

But for most of my short adult life, I called myself a Trillionaire in the making. I wanted to be the richest person in the world, and I was going to do so by inventing the future. 

Since pre-school I dreamt of flying through the stars… since 3rd grade I tried to invent hovercars. Throughout my adolescent years, I attempted to create mass producible, environmentally friendly flying vehicles. And when that failed, I tried to create software that would allow me, and anyone else, to design things that don’t exist yet… I wanted to create a metaverse for creativty.. That would use creativity to fight depression, loneliness, and poverty. All my greatest enemies. 

But I didnt have the skill. I didnt have the means. I didnt even have the mental health or confidence to do so. Because for my entire life, I was impoverished, suicidally depressed, lonely, and just smart enough to know how stupid I was. For a long time, it seemed my only real gift was my ambition… my big dreams. 

After much stumbling and soul searching, I eventually made my own opportunities. I worked at fortune 500 companies, at startups, and finally hit my stride when I helped turn a modest virtual reality arcade into one of the highest rated VR centers in the world, on a shoestring budget. It was there that I learned the value of customer centricity.. That I realized how much more important it was to address people directly, rather than depend on technology to fix problems on its own.

Then I finally found something else I seem to be good at… design. I took to it with gusto. Doing a bootcamp, an apprenticeship, internships, and more.

Now I get to use my newfound skills to help organizations design user-friendly experiences.

But this talk goes far beyond careers and business. This talk is about our future as a people.. As a planet. 

You may think I’m being melodramatic… I am. And yet I am still understating the problem we are facing as a species. 

Let me be transparent with you. My dream is to explore space, to talk to other sentient lifeforms, to build complex, elegant super cities that feel like living creatures. I want to explore the oceans. I want to be able to manifest things directly with my mind, and design entire realities full of yet more incredible lifeforms and environments to explore. I want to be immortal. I want the freedom to create anything that I can imagine. I am sharing with you these things, because I’m going to be very critical of our modern day society… not because I’m a cynic, but because I want ultimate freedom. 

I want to be clear with you, I’m going to be using anarchist concepts throughout this talk. That is my bias. I am speaking it plainly because everybody has a bias. If somebody thinks they’re being objective, they dont understand how reality, or the human mind works. Reality, as we see it as sentient creatures, is subjective. That is the entire dream of the metaverse… to create our own realities.

For a long time, I have been deeply dissatisfied with the reality I have been forced to live in. I thought the 21st century would be like Star Trek or Back to the Future or the Jetsons. Perhaps those spoiled me… but I look at where we are today and I nearly cry for how utterly we’ve failed to live up to those dreams.

Even when I look at how far we’ve come compared to real history.. Not the propaganda and ignorant history that is commonly believed, but when I look at the anthropological data of how far we’ve come… I nearly drown in despair. Because for all our technology and wealth, we are worse off in almost every aspect that matters. Our mental health, our emotional intelligence, our sense of purpose, our curiosity, our adaptability, our creativity, our physical fitness, our survivability…our freedom. In so many ways, we’ve failed our ancestors. And the one thing that got us to this point in our evolution…, the thing that paved the way for intelligence and technology: our social skills, has all but evaporated. Worse. It has been commoditized and weaponized.

The current trajectory of the metaverse is what happens when a social creature loses their social advantage. What is being built right now, is dystopian.

Why is the metaverse dystopian?

Dark Origins

It’s only natural… The very origin of the metaverse is a dystopian novel. Snow Crash was clearly a cautionary tale of capitalism. It showed us what a world could look like if corporations had their way and owned everything. As we see today, the more companies have power over the very basics of our lives, the more we will become dependent on tyrannical power. 

This is not even an anti-capitalist thing to say. You may have heard of the letter that was sent from all the top executives in the oil industry to President Bush in the early 2000s. That letter all but begged him to regulate their industry, because they feared what would happen if they were allowed to continue doing their jobs unfettered. It was their legal responsibility to increase the profits of the shareholders, which meant finding ways to get more oil, and to profit off of that oil. An action that went directly against the well-being of the planet, and encouraged terrible exploitation. 

This is the inherent problem with capitalism. It requires you to put the interests of a few, above that of the many. It continuously and necessarily requires the exploitation of people, environment, and more to achieve that economic growth.

Its not just capitalism, its nations, states, and any government or authoritarian social system in which people are required to do as you say, or risk violence

Refusing to address the subjectivity of reality is a practice in escapism. 

The metaverse is dystopian because people are using it to run or hide from real problems. People want to pretend nothing is happening in the world… they want to take a break from the stress and the anxiety we all face… forever. 

People want to pretend that we can just sell virtual stuff and that will be enough. But Imma keep it real… virtual stores, and virtual real estate, and even virtual schools that teach the same lack of critical thinking, is not solving anything. 

Capitalism 2.0

The metaverse is dystopian because it's just a continuation and acceleration of capitalism. Let me explain why that’s bad with a brief history of private property.

Property is not some unalienable, immemorial human right. Its a tool for propaganda.

• Brief history of private property (ie requires authority)

  • Land was abundant with nomadic cultures 

  • Settling down & patrilocality created ideas of authority (cant have property without taking it and using (threat of) violence to keep it)

  • Origins of patriarchy > aristocracy > capitalists

  • Debunking tragedy of the commons

• Infinite growth

• Current metaverse very likely to make both worse

  • Platforms that own your reality

  • Companies as ultimate authority over your life

• Capitalism makes it harder and harder to decentralize that power once its established, its creates a zero-sum game where the first (or ‘best’) to scale takes all (or at least most). The idea of IP further supports these hegemonies and hampers, rather than encourages, creativity, innovation or even competition. The only way for this not to be a zero-sum game, is through infinite, accelerating (exponential) growth… an inherently unsustainable and almost literally cancerous.

Why is the metaverse hopeful?

• Creativity and Imagination

  space for people to express themselves… to live out their imaginations… to be wizards, explorers, heroes, and so on… Despite the dystopian origins, there is an inherent utopian dream in being able to visualize (and even live within) one’s imaginations … The pure idea of 3D immersive worlds that allows one to mold your own reality is just too attractive an idea to be constrained by the dystopic origins.

• Immersion and Community

  This 3D world allows one to not just pretend that you live in a different world.. But to *actually* go there. Coupled with the ability to then share this world with others, and you have something that is just way too promising to be scared away from. This calls to a deeper desire in humans to dream, to tell stories, and to share those imaginations. You can actually *be* in a community in a way that was only ever possible if you were lucky enough to physically be able to find that community. Where the internet allows one to build communities with people across the world, virtual worlds allows one to be immersed in that community in a way that begins to approach physical communities. As the tech gets better, so should the communal connectivity.

• Empathy and Inclusion

  It’s easy to forget that people are people when you’re only connected via text and images. Being able to actually communicate with an avatar, with what feels like another person, creates a powerful anthropomorphic instinct… an urge to humanize each other more. Of course, its not perfect.. It can easily be used for anonymity in places where avatars don’t have persistent reputation… but it’s often better than no avatars. Furthermore, its incredibly inclusive to people who don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. For people who feel like they were born in the wrong body, or just want to try a different identity then they are stuck with IRL, virtual avatars are inherently inclusive

• Anarchy and Freedom

  There’s also an inherent freedom that comes with a new world. Akin to the ‘old western’ days, where people could explore new lands where new rules have yet to be established. Its not merely an exploration of chaos, but an escape of current power structures… people are running *from* hegemony, just as much if not more than they are running to create new empires. Humans have an instinct to rail against authority, despite the rampant, all-encompassing authority in our society, the fact that people regularly build spaces where no authority holds power is evidence for humanity’s desire for anarchy. Anarchy is simply living free from authority… its a state of egalitarianism in which every person has the most freedom to live life how they want to live it. Virtual worlds allow us nearly untapped potential to live freely… to only ever associate with rules that one volunteers to follow.

Thus the initial dystopian origins… Neil Stephenson’s metaverse was dystopic precisely because of the authoritarian platform owners. The idea that there will be one ‘metaverse’ owned by a single (or conglomerate) authority is a manifestation of the worst parts of the concept. 

What makes the metaverse the metaverse, is any and everyone being able to spin up their own worlds. And those people being able to trade, travel, and create across the worlds if they so desire. Its ultimate freedom. Not power. Not profit. Not property. 

It’s important to dream big dreams. To be a little idealistic, in how we dream about our future. Because if we cannot even imagine what a truly better world looks like… how can we ever say we are building one? So I’ll end this with some radically good ways in which we can build the metaverse. Perhaps we’ll never get there… but I think we should try.

What can the metaverse be?

• The Metaverse is Meaningfully Decentralized

  The fact that the word ‘metaverse’ is meaningless is a good thing. Everyone *should* have their own definition of the metaverse. And everyone .. as in every individual, should have the tools and freedom to create their own metaverse, their own virtual world. The term ‘metaverse’ itself will likely fade to the background like ‘internet’. If anyone says that there can only be one ‘metaverse’... realize that this can only be true if that one is the internet itself. And just like the internet, the idea that private organizations should own all or most of it is inherently dystopian and limiting. An internet… a metaverse in which corporations or governments own it, is one where we have very little freedom.

  Imagine a reality where everybody can make their own worlds. Where we still have platforms, tools, and services supplied by other people and organization, but the ultimate ownership of one’s worlds is nobody’s, thus it is your own. If the underlying structure is free to everybody, and no one owns it, then everybody can benefit, and no power can be used to break it. .. not without breaking the internet itself at least.

  A reality in which we all can spin up a world or traverse worlds, or copy and remix any world just as easily and freely as you can breathe the air and (hopefully once again) walk the earth, is one that is more magical, equal, joyful, and rejuvenating.

  Can you imagine that? Being rejuvenated by your time online?

• The Metaverse is Praxis

  It need not be just a way to consume, to argue, or to escape the real world… but instead to find access to real-world resources, to strategize plans of action to solve real-world problems, and foster collaborative action to make real-world impact.

  These all allow you to do powerful things, such as see the real history of any time or place, educating people by being immersed in anthropological evidence; to make our food and products more transparent, and see the real waste, pollution, or exploitation in our supply chains.

  To visualize the complexity of human society, so that news and justice and law can actually be done based on nuance, data, and empathy rather than classist politicizing and power imbalances.

  We can make our technology a symbiotic part of nature, rather than a terrible parasite for which we cling to in willful ignorance of the harm it is doing to our own environment.

• The Metaverse is Magic

  Not in the sense of inscrutability, but in the power of our imaginations. The fact that we can look upon the world, and dare to understand it… to change it… to mold it and ourselves in such a way that its secrets become our tools. That is the magic of technology.

  And those tools.. That technology… that magic can be used for selfish purposes. For profit and for power. For destruction and ruin… Or it can be used to create. It can be used to create not just some nebulous opportunity or monetary wealth, but to create material, qualitative, holistic and regenerative abundance.

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My actual talk ended up being quite different than all of the above! But it does have some of these elements. Be sure to sign up for the event!

If for some reason, you want to hear yet more about this talk, I shared my experience writing it (along with a certain fanfiction I was obsessed with that played a part in my procrastination) in another podcast episode here.

I will be the closing talk of the summit around 4:50pm EST on February 25th :D

Get your free tickets here!!

As always, please share with me your thoughts if you managed to get all the way to the end. I’m not ashamed (though still embarrassed) to say that I really crave some conversation. I often feel alone, despite being in an amazing relationship, with a loving family, and great friends/associates. I just don’t have anyone I can really talk to about like 60-80% of the things I want to talk about on a day-to-day basis. So if you actually read all the way down here then perhaps you will enjoy some direct conversation with me as well!

If you don’t wanna talk with me (but especially if you do), maybe you’d be down with sharing. :D

Thank you.