A Deep Dive into the Ethics of the Metaverse

Over a month ago, I had the honor to speak on an AIXR panel discussing Ethics in the Metaverse. Weeks later, I finally made some time to share a very extended version of my answers from the stream.

It was a great talk, but we only had 45 minutes to share our thoughts. All the other speakers (and the moderator) had some great insights, so please take a look!

Approaching the Metaverse from an Ethical Standpoint: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | AIXR (livestorm.co)

There was so much more I wanted to say on this topic, so if you are interested in some in-depth analysis on the ethics of the metaverse, then please grab a drink and a snack, cuz this is going to be a long one!

First, let’s define the Metaverse…

Looking at the origin of the word from Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the term was clearly referring to a shared virtual world where every and anyone around the planet could explore in a three-dimensional urban environment (known as ‘the Street’) online. People had avatars, could hang out in virtual clubs, had to take virtual transit, and could buy from virtual stores.

But it is absolutely imperative that we also recognize two other facts about this origin for the purpose of this article:

1. The story took place in a dystopian world, where one or two companies essentially owned the entirety of the internet. The real world was a capitalist hellscape where companies ran neo-fiefdoms as their own governments. So people often fled to the metaverse as a means of escape. But even there, they were often limited by their real-world circumstances… as poor people could only afford stock avatars with no customization options, among other limitations.
2. The book was written in the 90s, before much of the internet was even created and when basic 3D graphics was hot stuff. This book was absolutely revolutionary for its time, but Stephenson had no way of knowing where the internet would go. Thus, his rendition of the futuristic internet, aka the Metaverse, is ridiculously small and almost one-dimensional compared to the vast complexity of the modern internet.

All that said, many folks today tend to define the metaverse as either a virtual world where people can explore three-dimensional space; or, more inclusively, as the entirety of the internet where people can live, work, and play in a virtual universe just as easily as in the ‘real world’ (ie the physical world aka ‘base reality’ aka ‘meat space’). This latter option is how I see the term, as it seems much more future-proof and adaptive.

If you define the ‘metaverse’ as simply any virtual world, you often fall into this silly marketing and lack of sense-making where companies say they are ‘building a metaverse’ even though nobody is using their products, or only a certain demographic is actually exploring that virtual world. Is Second Life a metaverse? Fortnite? Roblox? Decentraland? Horzion Worlds? Etc… All of these are merely virtual worlds built for specific purposes and audiences. None of them are all-inclusive. Some of them aren’t even popular, despite the massive amount of money being shoveled into them.

On the other hand, if you define the ‘metaverse’ as simply the future of the internet, where people can live, work, and play; then you can include the entirety of the internet today, and start thinking about how the internet can be made ever more immersive and interactive.

Either way, these definitions should provide a firm foundation for understanding how to approach ethics in the metaverse. Because now you can understand why companies and individuals get so excited about the idea, and why there is already a battle to build this future.

Whoever ‘owns’ the metaverse, gets to decide the future of humanity.

Just think about how much power governments and corporations alike have today due to the internet. Some governments can completely control their citizens’ access to information and connection… and some companies are essentially their own governing nations, with more daily users than some countries’ populations!

I know that was a long intro, but I hope you understand why I took the time to do so. Now we can finally get into the questions.

Q1 - What are the top three things you’d regulate first in the metaverse?

I often see regulation as a sort of last effort or stop-gap to a runaway problem. If regulation is required, its usually because we either didn’t grasp the consequences soon enough, or don’t understand the incentives causing said consequences. In my opinion, the best regulations are not those that constrain actions (because those constraints are almost always more easily circumnavigated by larger organizations while smaller ones struggle to comply), but ones that enable more people to participate more sustainably. Good regulations create incentive or create space for more opportunity and accountability. Its descriptive rather than prescriptive.

It’s with this in mind that I gave my answers.

1. Accessibility - making it easy for anybody to access this technology

Though accessibility for disabilities is absolutely critical, this point is actually larger than that. This refers to the digital divide, where many people, even to this day, do not have access (at least reliably) to the internet. It's estimated around 15% amount of adults in the US do not use the internet. Roughly 2-3Billion people don’t have access to the internet worldwide. These people are constantly being left behind and forgotten. Even among folks who do use the internet, a high percentage are not actually technically literate. They do not have the skills or knowledge to be able to make the most out of Google’s search engine, much less create their own websites. In a day and age where most opportunities are found through software and hardware technologies, many people are just along for the ride and have little to no say in how their life will unfold as a result of this tech.

Despite what tech bros and business investors like to say, its NOT because people don’t want to figure things out or just want to be ‘told what to do’. Its not because most people would rather be consumers rather than producers. Its because this tech is not Designed to let them take ownership. Most technologies are inherently inaccessible. Its not that people 'value' the convenience of not having to think about owning their data or creating technologies, its that these monopolistic companies make it inconvenient to do so in the first place.

People shouldn’t have to figure these things out. Most people are already trying to figure out how to survive under capitalism. Technology should not add to this load. It should instead be designed so intuitively, that people are able to focus more on how they can fulfill their potential rather than figure out how to use the technology. And the tech Certainly should not need to convince people they need this thing that they really don’t. If the product is designed well enough, it would be self-evident that it is valuable. Ethical marketing more serves to help people find what they need, rather than manipulating people into thinking the need something they don't actually want.

So, I’d ‘regulate’ how easy it is to find, build, and utilize the ‘metaverse’ for each person’s demonstrated need. I'd use regulations to incentivize companies to share ownership, be sustainable or even regenerative, and encourage participatory production rather than passive consumption.

Just like with disability-related accessibility, the digital divide and technical literacy is a problem that can be solved in large part with better design... and of course, real consequences for being in-accessible.

2. Interoperability - making it as easy as possible to transfer data between virtual worlds. Incentivizing open standards and data transferring/ownership.

This is incredibly important if we want to build a more open internet, instead of the collection of mostly closed gardens that exists today. The fact that companies and platforms utilize dark design patterns to ‘lock-in’ users to their service is a complete travesty. We are normalizing and even rewarding unethical behavior whenever we allow apps to own consumer data, require people sign labyrinthian ToS and Privacy statements that nobody has the time or ability to read, and of course rent out things you buy from them like your content library for games, music, and other media.

Interoperability means you can take your information and bring it to any other service (or even just make your own) whenever you like. This information includes things like profiles, posts, friends lists, media, and maybe even browsing habits and other data used to fuel the algorithms for the recommendation engines that make these platforms useful. Requiring platforms to allow this free-flow of data means they will have to actually compete with one another to offer the best service, rather than merely build their own monopolies. Platforms today don’t need to care about good user experience, customer service, or ethical behaviors because they’ve made it nearly impossible for any real competition to crop up. Any potential alternatives are acquired, copied to death, or pushed out the market via ridiculous VC-backed funding allowing for unsustainable business models.

We need regulation that actually leaves space for competition by incentivizing free flow of data, owned by the people creating said data.

3. Regulation tools - empowering communities to regulate themselves from the ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these regulations should themselves be possible through bottom-up decentralized, egalitarian power. This means that instead of these regulations being passed down from on-high by a handful of people behind closed doors (many of which aren’t even representative of average internet denizens), they can be created and enforced by everyday people. Each individual should be able to hold, understand, and choose what to do with their data. This is like having your own ID, birth certificate, wallet, and even food preferences in your pocket. Individuals should be able to come together as a co-op style community to decide how their data can be used en-masse.

This means any algorithms and APIs that depend on massive amounts of user data should be transparent to the communities who’s data it is borrowing. This also means that any algorithm that depends on secrecy to work should be re-assessed. Does Google’s search engine really have to be completely under wraps? If search engines can be more distributed, than Google will have less power to decide who gets to be ‘ranked first’ on the internet. Instead, rankings would be transparently localized. Any gaming of the system would therefore be easier to spot, just like how biased Wikipedia articles are fairly easy to fix and catch due to the accountability.

Bottom-up regulation means more accountability, more opportunity for community participation (and ownership), as well as more adaptability to changing circumstances.

Q2 - Companies seem to be dictating the rules and regulations of the Metaverse/internet right now. Governments are doing very little. It seems that if we leave regulations to the people, it will take a very long time. Do you think it should be the platforms that start these regulations, or the government?

I like to frame this in terms of the practical tools you can put in place. I often hear some great theories and ideas on enacting regulations, everything from government reforms to ‘trust-less’ DAOs and more. But it seems to me that these ideas are often mostly idealistic or not adaptive. People need actual tools they can use today to take matters into their hands so that they are no longer ceding control of their lives over to either the corporate or government institutions.

But first, some background:

Somebody on the panel mentioned offhandedly how people don’t like anarchy after a day. He implied that anarchy was something with no rules or law. This is a classic misunderstanding.

Anarchy is often used as a throw-away term for ‘chaos’ or ‘free-for-all’ or even a precursor to despotism. But anyone who actually studies anarchism will know that this is propaganda that many of us are basically indoctrinated to believe. Anarchism has been one of the most important and most successful movements which has aided both revolutions from autocratic governments, and social rights movements such as the labor and civil rights movements.

Always remember, ‘anarchism’ literally means ‘without rulers’ NOT ‘without rules’. Having rules is an important part of what makes anarchism work. It requires people to actually participate in creating, maintaining, and enforcing the rules. It reduces (if not eliminates) the ability for corruption, abuse, and irrelevancy of rules precisely because of this participatory system.

When nations fall into chaos, that is NOT the same as anarchy. One does not simply fall into anarchism, it is a system, like any other system of governance, that requires thought and effort to maintain. Anarchy is a system of self-governance that requires things like direct democracy, or consensus-building, or some other method of egalitarian decision-making.

That’s why anarchism is a huge inspiration for how we can develop the tools, mechanisms, and governance models that show people how to develop rich communities.

I shared some quick call outs to the Indigenous cultures that inspired anarchism, like the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, who were fairly egalitarian and even had constitutions they regularly updated. This federation of communities employed (what many would consider as) anarchistic principles, where governance was achieved through a bottom-up, consensus-building approach.

I spoke about the Hiawatha Belt, which has a really amazing story about how 5 of the big native nations in Northwest America making up the Haudenosaunee came together to form a lasting bond of peace. Many other cultures have used similar methods of symbology and record keeping to maintain their self-governance.

In fact, pictographic language is one of the oldest forms of language precisely because it was so successful at recording events passed down for generations. Even today, we use icons, emojis, and gifs to communicate a lot of information very quickly.

Another concept I didn’t have time to bring up was the power of oral history. Many indigenous cultures around the world were deemed ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilized’ by Europeans because they did not use written language. But it was the oral language that allowed these cultures to pass on knowledge for thousands of years! Today, most people can’t even read books written just 200 or so years ago, much less in the Elizabethan age. Yet, many of us know stories that are thousands of years old! This is because written language is less egalitarian than oral. Where oral language utilizes rhythm and adds new details to contextualize and modernize old wisdoms; written language often ‘freezes’ that knowledge in the time it was written, making it far less adaptive and far easier to mis-interpret when translating into modern language. Furthermore, because most people could not read for most of human history, only a select few things were even recorded via text. That usually being the thoughts and activities of the rich and powerful. We would (and mostly still do) have very little knowledge of how the average person lived if not for rare journals from ‘commoners’ who were fortunate to be able to read and write.

Oral language was and still is far more accessible, preferable, and open then written language (just look at the rise of podcasts!). How can we utilize this understanding to make the metaverse more open and long-lasting?

I think it would help a lot of us to think about our communities as anarchistic ones because it forces us to think about how to create a community that is inclusive, consensual, self-sufficient, and equitable. It requires us to create governance models with intent, and to regularly assess those models to ensure we are maintaining the lifestyle we want to live.

By learning from the successful (and unsuccessful) examples of anarchism throughout history, we can create a better internet today and into the future.

To drive my point home, I also mentioned how the idealistic dreams of the early web did not pan out and instead lead to today’s monopoly-driven internet precisely because of the lack of easy-to-use (anarchistic) tools for the average person to create their own digital communities.

So, to bring all of these seemingly tangential, unrelated ideas together into practical tools, here’s what I think people can do to quickly create bottom-up regulations:

• Crowdsource standards of ethical processes, technologies, and UX patterns that actually work --> this empowers the people to form their own knowledge bases.
• Create active communities of people where you are getting to know the people in that community on a personal level. Be tool agnostic so the community can connect through any and everything as simple as text groups and meetups to gaming groups, project working groups, on up to living neighborhoods --> this enables people to connect on a deeper level without depending completely on platforms to provide (and thus control) those relationships.
• Have regular discussions with your community where you are making important decisions together, providing help for each other, and just bonding together. Practice documenting the process as well as what is discussed for future reference --> this allows people to create their own cultures, traditions, wisdoms, and so on with far more intent.
• Make those documents accessible and even engaging to look at. Better yet, communicate said documentation through stories --> this incentivizes people to get to know their history and actually internalize wisdoms across generations.
• Create ‘dual power’ systems, where your community can offer the same or similar services as these large-scale incentives by sharing resources, skills, and services directly --> this encourages people to be their own ‘masters’ and learn how to help themselves
• Value voluntary association to create a culture of fractalization, federation, and decentralization. Encourage people to leave amiably (and come back without issue) if disagreements cannot be reconciled peaceably --> this ensures we don’t replicate problems of scale, where communities get too big to actually be a community. Once a community can no longer utilize consensus and direct democracy, it may be a good sign that it is too big. At that point, some amount of force/violence is almost always at play to keep people who disagree in line.
• Foster solidarity, mutual aid, and direct action with other communities who share your values. Actually get your people to help other people, and ensure that help is meaningful to those other people --> this demonstrates external 'power', such that people realize the power of institutions is in the people, and the people have the ability to build or destroy them so long as they actually recognize and use that power when necessary.

The ‘secret’ for efficient, fast, and powerful bottom-up regulations is building real, intimate, self-determined communities.

Q3 - What are the biggest risks we need to watch out for when designing the Metaverse for citizens and society?

Consolidation of power - the original conception of the metaverse came from a dystopian world where a monopoly controlled the entire internet.

This is already happening.

So we have to seriously consider why this consolidation of power is even able to happen, and what we can do to stop it.

I wish I had spent more time on this, so I’ll do that here.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article where I defined the metaverse, the entire idea behind the term is centered around being a far more immersive and pervasive environment than even the internet is today. Companies like Facebook/Meta see this as an opportunity to own far more than ever before. This is literally their entire manifesto behind going so hard into this space. Just as Apple (and Google) got to own most of the computing and mobile computing landscape, Facebook wants to own the spatial computing landscape.

This is why people really need to stop looking at just the day-to-day little mishaps of what is currently possible in today’s ‘metaverse’ and pay more attention to what can be possible. Most importantly, pay attention to who these organizations are setting up the environment to further control what will be possible.

Even Facebook’s current market cap disaster is not really surprising or much of a blocker since they are still leading by a long mile with sales of their Quest headsets compared to every other VR headset. Older folks should remember that even Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 90s. In fact, just like with Meta, it’s partnership with Microsoft was a huge boon! I have doubts that Microsoft will help as much as they helped Apple back then, but it puts things into perspective.

We need to pay attention to the partnerships Meta will do in the coming years with other big tech companies (and the acquisitions it is doing to destroy any burgeoning competition). This is how they are rigging the game.

But on a more basic level, the most fundamental problem of our entire society right now is the ability for individuals (and interest groups) to consolidate power. This allows them a huge amount of leverage in the market, in the government, and of course, on the internet.

If we are not tackling this most basic of issues, than we will not be able to solve the problem. No amount of regulations, technologies, or money will be able to fix the problems we face on the internet (or in ‘base reality’) if we are not destabilizing these massive centralizations of power.

Moderation, political manipulation, algorithmic bias, lack of accountability, privacy, and pretty much any other problem you can think of comes back to the fact that there is some monopoly or oligopoly with massive influence and control over our digital and physical lives.

So why is this happening? Because they are tilting the playing field. They are rebalancing the environment in their favor.

After we recognize the problem, we have to analyze why and how the problem is created.

I won’t go into the whole history of hierarchies here (I already did that in my 20K word newsletter :P), but it is critical to realize that power doesn’t just ‘happen’, nor is it necessarily ‘natural’.

The idea that people are just naturally selfish, greedy, or deposed to authoritarianism is a gross obfuscation of human (and just general) nature.

People are social. Life is adaptive. The environment and material conditions is what sets up the influences for how and why people (and life) adapts.

Therefore, much of ‘human nature’ is itself malleable. There are no essential behaviors that exist in humans separate from the environment, the environments we live in strongly influence the type of behaviors we see and use. So the greed, selfishness, and grasping for power that we see today is largely a result of the environment we have created for ourselves (or more accurately, that people in power have created) to incentivize this behavior.

There is a massive effort to consolidate power, because capitalism and statism reward people for doing so. The very definition of capitalism is to capitalize, meaning to take advantage, to exploit, to own, to accumulate. You can try to moralize why this is a good thing as much as you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is a system designed to reward people to act in their own self interest.

This means that no matter how good your intentions, your actual actions are inherently selfish. Thus, on the most basic of levels, our society encourages people to act in their own self interest. And, because we are fallible creatures with limited ability of foresight, plus social creatures with inherent, nearly inviolable tendency towards tribalism (which isn’t necessarily always a bad thing), that self interest is very often exclusionary and self-justifiable in nature.

Capitalism, and our pseudo-democratic government, encourages people to grasp for power. Companies are rewarded for how well they can exploit people and the environment with more wealth and more power.

The entire idea of capitalism being a free market is ridiculous, because the very people who work, chair the boards, invest, and benefit from ‘donations’ from companies are the same people who determine how laws are made and enforced. The biggest companies can therefore control the government, and the market.

Their used to be anti-trust laws that endeavored to avoid the creation of monopolies. But those laws have been steadily eroded by companies who wanted to maintain year-over-year growth.

Therefore, if we want to stop this consolidation of power, we have to change the environment that rewards and incentivizes the self-interested consolidation of power.

I won’t get into this right now, that will be its own long-form article, but I’m sure most of us would recognize the importance of putting measures in place that incentive the type of behaviors we actually want such as innovation, cooperation, sustainability, integrity, etc.

Capitalists claim our current system incentives these things, but anyone who has actually looked under the veneer of propaganda can attest that innovation, integrity, and so on are only ever rewarded so long as it doesn’t harm the bottom line. If innovation doesn’t look profitable, it won’t be invested in. The entire concept of mapping everything to profit inherently blinds people to the reality that not everything can be measured in such ways.

Bringing this back up to the technology level, that means many of the technologies we create are themselves in service of empowering self interest at the expense of other people. It poisons the well of productivity.

Our governments are full of people who are mostly trying to maximize their own gains rather than care for the people they are supposed to represent. Our companies are driven by people who seek to accumulate their own wealth rather than actually provide goods and services that help other people. Worse yet, even the people that truly do think they are doing what’s best for other people, fundamentally do not understand or actually care about what other people think about what’s best for themselves. People in power are incentivized to ignore, delude, or otherwise be apathetic about the actual harms they are doing.

Our brains are built to view the world as something we can change and understand, thus we have dozens, if not hundreds, of biases that allow us to justify this behavior as the ‘best we can do’ and ‘better than the alternatives’. Of course you’d say that if you are the one benefitting from such a system or THINK you should/will benefit from such a system. Of course you’d time and again ignore the legions of data, real-world consequences, and impending disasters as either inconsequential or the fault of something else other than the dominant system that has been in place for generations causing these very issues.

To bring this back around, the biggest threat to the metaverse is the consolidation of power, because it is a whole new frontier, plus an all too juicy opportunity, for the exponential growth of companies/institutions that have already been monopolizing the internet.

The metaverse has the potential to decentralize and distribute more power than ever before… or to centralize and consolidate more power than ever before. This is the true scope of the game they are rigging.

Q4 - What is possible to do to regulate or avoid all the speculation and scams with NFTs and cryptocurrency?

I didn’t get to answer this question, and I’ll keep my thoughts relatively short on this since I am not actively in the crypto space. However, as a long-time observer and a fan of the idea behind this technology, what has always frustrated me is how the entire field has been almost blindly jumping down the drain of profit-seeking rather than any real-world use cases. Crypto is a great example of how capitalistic, profit-first mentality is nonsensical. There have been so many lofty ideas about the benefit of this tech, but very little actual benefits for the average person a full decade and a half after its inception.

Crypto is so prone to scams and vapid speculation primarily because its been centered around currency first rather than real problems. Its the perfect proof that ‘value’ is actually meaningless. Classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

‘Value’ is not some real thing that you can measure and optimize, it is simply meant to be a container for what people actually care about. It is only something you measure after the fact, not before. You cannot simply create ‘value’ by creating a money-making machine… because you don’t actually have value until you have something people use and enjoy.

Money itself is meant to be a way for people to do or get more of what they want, it is not what people want. Capitalism loves to make us believe that money is the most important thing in the world, but really, as many people have realized, money is a way to measure what we actually want. Even then, it is an imperfect and often inadequate way of even doing that. Again, money is only *a way* to measure our desires, not the only way, and not always the most efficient way. More importantly, most people use most of their money just trying to survive under capitalism. Anything beyond survival is a 'nice-to-have'. If you get a type of 'money' that you can't actually use for your daily needs, than what use is it? Even investing for the future is a 'nice-to-have' if you're not sure you'll actually survive that long.

As they saying goes, "Don't invest what you can't afford to lose." If you are living paycheck-to-paycheck (which even people making over 100K a year in some cities are still doing), than there is not much you can afford to lose.

Crypto claims to be decentralized, yet only people who have some level of technical literacy, access to computers capable of using the tech, and the patience/time to figure this mess out can actually participate. So in reality, it is highly centralized.

Crypto such as NFTs claims to allow people to ‘own’ digital things, but the entire idea of ‘ownership’ is itself deeply flawed and exclusionary. The whole point of IP, copyright, and ‘private property’ is just to create monopolies.. to capitalize. It is not a useful or sustainable model of ownership. (A better model would be one of 'usufruct' where you only 'own' what you are using, and things that nobody is using goes back to a 'commons', ie a library economy. Another model is one of credit without ownership, so people are always given credit and can even get rewarded for their work, but the ownership is in the commons so anyone can innovate on the idea.)

There’s no real point in regulating crypto because the whole thing needs to be completely redesigned from scratch. Instead of it being focused on currency, it should be focused on the original concept of blockchain: record keeping.

The entire origin of currency was indeed to keep records. By ignoring this most basic of things and failing to perfect the dream of decentralized, immutable records is a waste.

This technology could have been used to democratize and make accessible everything from health to contracts to regulations themselves to credit and more.

We could have been using it to keep public officials accountable for their promises, to fulfill the idea of smart contracts so people can more easily negotiate with companies, to track pollution in the environment, to recreate the commons, to actually reward innovation outside of monopolies, and so much more. But it was used for the most corruption-prone ‘use case’ instead: making money.

Q5 - The necessity of regulating from the top-down and the possibility of doing so from the bottom-up. What do you think will be the way forward for the Metaverse? Direct democracy seems to be a big failure. And a bottom up approach may take too long or be inefficient.

I really wanted to question the assumption that direct democracy has been shown to be a failure. Because once again, looking at the long tail of history seems to actually indicate that direct democracy was only a ‘failure’ when the society was not actually direct or democratic. For instance, many ‘direct democracies’ we use as inspiration, like the Romans, were extremely limited in who they even allowed to participate in their democracy.

Likewise for the US during most of its history. Women, poor people, and black people could not vote. Yet they made up a large portion of the total population.

This shows that many ‘democracies’ were only such in name, but not in action. So long as only one or some groups of people have exclusive (or more weighted) power to vote, than it’s not really a democracy.

Yet again, indigenous peoples like the Mbuti or the Iroquois are better examples of direct democracy, only in these egalitarian communities did everyone have a chance to vote. Furthermore, they did not depend on some ballot every few years to voice the people’s opinion. Instead, they had weekly or even daily meetings where people would discuss various things to be decided. They talked about ‘politics’ all the time in a meaningful manner; this ensured everyone was organically educated on the topics they were voting on.

Furthermore, people only voted on the topics that actually had anything to do with them, so consensus was contextual. People couldn’t just block everything either, as they lost credibility if they did not have any valid criticisms. These systems worked for hundreds or even thousands of years in some cases.

We can very much bring a lot of this back and further strengthen them with modern day technology.

As for my actual answers, I mentioned two key elements:

1. Incentives - What incentives a certain type of behavior? Humans are not inherently violent or selfish or even altruistic, we are inherently social. We are adaptive. This means that our behaviors are dependent upon our social and physical environment. If there is an incentive to gain power, then people (especially those motivated by that) will exhibit behaviors centered around gaining and using power. So we need to create environments and cultures that incentivize the right type of behaviors and dis-incentivizes the worst kinds of behaviors we see today.
2. Material conditions - The reality of the world we live in (or at least the world we perceive) strongly influences our behaviors, desires, and imaginations. Just like the with the whole ‘Alpha Wolf’ mishap, if we are living in a perceived scarcity, than we will be far more likely to exhibit behaviors that allow us to fight for the scarce resources. But if we believe the world to be abundant, than we will act accordingly; exhibiting more cooperation, altruism, and even innovation.

One of the biggest problems with capitalism is that it creates the incessant feeling of artificial scarcity. Even when it is ‘growing the economy’ and ‘bringing people out of poverty’ (even though it has actually created far more poverty), the lived experience under capitalism is that there are a limited amount of resources to go around, so you have to get rich in order to get them. Even when there are actual limited resources, those limitations are abstracted so most people think more about their access to money, rather than their access to the resources. This means that idea of capitalism ‘managing scarce resources’ is all but useless, since having scarce resources can net you far more money if you exploit the scarcity.

This helps explain the perverse incentives to exploit people and resources for personal gain, even at the cost of the environment and the wellbeing of your fellow humans.

All this to say, top-down regulations leaves the system open for people who want to grasp for power to do so and even legalize their grasping. They can rig the game in their favor, or at the very least, get away with bending the rules by simply bribing or extorting the people who enforce said rules.

Bottom-up regulations, however, means a culture shift, where the actual people using the products and services no longer desire or stand for things they deem unsavory. The top-down approach is thought to work faster and at a wider scale, but anybody that has noticed how ‘fast’ the FCC has been able to regulate the internet can see that such an assumption is not often accurate. Say what you will about ‘cancel culture’, but it has become widely popular fairly quickly. In this day-and-age of global connection through the internet, cultural shifts can happen much faster than most any legal one. People just need access to better information for said cultural shifts to be appropriate and cohesive rather than reactionary and scattered.

Q6 - What is the good, bad, and ugly of Meta Connect?

I didn’t watch Connect prior to this talk, but after going back to watch it (and after trying the Quest Pro), I have much to say!

The Good - There was a lot of exciting technology announced!

• Face and eye tracking at multiple levels of fidelity (from the cartoony style of Horizons, to the ultra-realistic, meta-humans style)
• Muscle nerve-based controls for a super interesting way of hand tracking and being able to control an interface with very subtle muscle movements in your hand/wrist
• Cross-platform experiences where people can collaborate regardless of what hardware they are using (so being able to be in the same ‘room’ through a headset, video call, or phone).
• Worldbuilding tools utilizing interoperable 3D models via Sketchfab integrations
• Social sharing from VR to Messenger and Instagram
• Announcing the Quest Pro! A new device capable of utilizing many of these new technologies

The Bad - There was very little actually available Now! Most of these exciting features were ‘being worked on’ or ‘available later next year’. With the announcement of a new device, you’d expect most of these features to launching with the device instead of an undisclosed ‘later time’.

Many of the presentations and presenters (including Zuckerberg himself) just felt… off. They whole thing felt very stiff and ‘corporate’… even ‘soulless’. This is not a knock against those people, moreso how everything was presented. It just felt like they were reading off a script they’ve been forced to read over and over again. Very little ‘passion’ came through. And it wasn’t just me. Many of the comments echoed this same feeling.

In a field where much of the innovations are championed by passionate people, it is very apparent and concerning when that passion is not visible.

Big Tech has a LOT of problems, but for better or worse, charismatic tech leaders (engineers, designers, etc) play a big role in the field.

Just look at John Carmack’s talk for comparison. You can clearly see the difference.

The Ugly - Most damnably, this entire event felt like some of the worst parts of modern tech demos: pretentious, self-conceited, and out-of-touch. Most everything felt like high-level concepts and scripted events with little to no real ‘gameplay’… many of these exciting technologies felt like ‘solutions looking for a problem’.

This last point is so very painful for me to even say. XR technology has so many incredibly valuable use cases. There are a huge amount of current projects and future concepts that can solve real-world problems. But the way Facebook/Meta focuses on just cool technologies, or worse yet, ‘problems’ that most people don't actually care about, makes their entire approach seem utterly useless. They are taking a very promising technology and making it very clear that they just want to use it to extract the most profit from you. This sours the entire pool of technology

Combine that with how crypto bros packaged their grifts into this ‘metaverse’ name and you have the mess we have today.

XR and the ‘metaverse’ is an exciting idea that can very much change how people use the internet (and live their daily lives) for the better. But not when it is controlled by a monopolistic, profit-first private organization.

I would have loved to see them fully engage the open metaverse, webXR community, allowing their headsets to seamlessly work with any web-based virtual or augmented reality application. In fact, here are a few use cases they could have announced that would have made this whole ‘metaverse’ idea far more exciting:

• Two-way interoperability with any webxr or even other VR platforms (like Vive and Pico), thus allowing people to transfer items, avatars, and more between virtual worlds
• Opening up the hardware allowing devs and designers to create their own custom operating systems on the Quest 2 and Quest Pro
• Bringing back PCVR with Rift, allowing devs to push the boundaries of high-fidelity VR
• Creating a seamless API for cross-platform, asymmetric gameplay, allowing people on mobile, console, or PC to play in the same worlds with people in VR
• No longer requiring any account whatsoever to use the headset, allowing for true privacy, customizability, and ease-of-use.
• Redesigning the entire Oculus experience for the Quest Pro, allowing a truly spatial and social experience. You could do things like tie apps to your real world (ie launch a calendar app when you look at your real-world calendar, launch your whiteboard tool of choice when you look at your whiteboard, etc), integrate video/voice calls to your headset (so anytime you get a call on Teams, they pop up in your headset like a hologram, or at least a viewscreen), allow for multi-tasking so you can launch certain apps within other apps, etc.
• Allow the Quest Home to be multiplayer and fully customizable (so you can actually design your own ‘Home’ and invite people in).
• Support portals and other metaverse traversal standards to supercharge the efforts to spatialize the next era of hyperlinks. Imagine being able to jump between Beat Saber and VR Chat through a portal that quick-loads each application and even can give some sort of preview into what that portal leads to.
• Offering a ‘build-it-yourself’ simulation tool allowing everyday people to create their own simulations for any problem or idea they want to simulate. This would allow everything from teachers able to transfer their curriculums into engaging experiences, to technicians able to transfer their knowledge through skills-learning, to communities able to build virtual neighborhoods to more easily ‘live’ with people regardless of their physical location or limitations.

Announcing just some of these, or better yet, letting the many builders in the community share what they were able to do thanks to Meta’s backing, would have been far more organic, authentic, and rightfully hype. All the polish and effects that went into this production REALLY should have gone into the actual experiences.

But alas, they cared more about looking good to investors than the actual people buying and using these products… and now their investors are jumping ship seeing how many actual people hated it.

Q7 - Final Remarks?

Keep building tools. Keep building awesome stuff. Keep working with each other to build awesome communities.

Seriously.

People vastly underestimate what they can do on a personal and communal level these days by working together beyond a profit incentive. I’ve had the benefit of being a part of some amazing communities lately (such as the Open Metaverse Interoperability group), and I’ve been able to see how much meaningful change people can accomplish when they realize their ability to work together to tackle structural problems.

Let's build a better world together!