Web2 And The Metaverse: The Permanent State Of Web3 And The Quasi-Realities Which Spiral Around It.

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

- Ray Bradbury

“I’m looking forward to the day when my daughter finds a rolled-up 1,000-pixel-by-1,000-pixel color screen in her cereal packet, with a magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge”

- Tim Berners-Lee - 1995

“I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition."

- Flaubert

We sit as the only enlightened beings on the throne of experience; the pinnacle of consciousness and the only representative of a curious, creative and intelligent mind in this, or any universe. Until there is proof to the contrary, we are heading into the future alone, the architects of our own existence.

That future will be technological, the blurring of multiple realities; the fusing of the digital — accessible via our devices — with the physical world.

It will be omnipresent, the last or permanent state of the internet and all the quasi-realities which spiral around it. It will be known as the Metaverse, the cultural, financial, and artistic extension of ourselves, the digital representation of the human race.

Get used to the hyperbole, the Metaverse doesn’t do anything by half.

In the minds of some, the Metaverse is the end game for #web3, for others, just the beginning. Regardless of your standpoint, the reality is a long way off. We’re still in our internet pyjamas, the Sun barely over the terracotta horizon.

Internet 1.0 Verses Internet 2.0

Internet 2.0 is the internet you are using right now, in January 2022. Mostly. The enlightened, active offspring of the passive interaction of its forbearer: internet 1.0, the already comical and out-dated dial-up genesis of the world-wide-web.

The opening bars of the internet were static pages and questionably looking content. It was populated by a small number of techno-maniacs who, most likely, had no real idea what they were doing, and even less clue about where they were going.

Do you remember Tripod and Geocities , Encarta and AltaVista and Lycos ?

Good for you.

The rest of us were too busy watching MTV and 24-hour Rolling News, becoming familiar with a new culture which was dying before it was born. The internet was taking shape behind our backs and most of us were oblivious. Either that, or not yet born.

As the US rolled into Iraq for a second time, Myspace was deploying its own weapon of mass distraction. Brad Greenspan , Chris DeWolfe, Josh Berman and the celebrity face of Myspace Tom (Anderson) opened the doors to user content and information sharing. Facebook, of course, barged past them, ransacking the entrance hall and painting the walls a colour you would never dream of.

Blogger, Medium, Twitter, Wikipedia, Email, Chrome, Docs, Flickr, BitClout , Slack, and a whole load of other crap followed. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exploded onto the keynote stage. Blogging, podcasting, auctions, streaming, and MMORPG ’s (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) swept through in its wake, changing the way the internet was used. And how the internet is used is key to what the internet is.

Concrete shops and institutions crumbled, retail was transformed, hand-held technologies gave way to multi-coloured online versions of their animate selves. NFTs were born. The founders took control of the middle of the chess board. The East coast mindset got railroaded; the blockchain gave us the tools for a decentralised financial, information, and cultural revolution.

And it wasn’t even 10 a.m.

Coffee?

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”

Flaubert

Internet 2.0 is the social participation Internet 1.0 never was. It’s the first chorus to the opening crescendo of the Metaverse. It is easy and interoperable, to some degree. You don’t need to work for CERN to build your own site.

Internet 2.0 is about misspelt words (hodl, Tumblr, Flickr, Bickr) and emojis and shared platforms and networking and email and docs and easy access to the world of cinema and TV and illegal streaming and legal streaming and rampaging news sites and auctions and fake news and fake tits and fake lives projected against perfect backdrops for all the world – or non-of the world, depending on your marketing budget – to see. It’s a quagmire of genius and confusion, complication and widespread simplicity.

It’s about the dumbing down and the building up, the ripping away and the raucous sound of creativity.

It is, as they say, a reflection of us all.

All our foibles in a 180 characters.

Tweet deck.

Shipwreck.

Marketing deck.

But who saw it coming?

Surely someone saw it coming?

.

.

.

Didn’t they?

It didn’t just evolve organically like some kind of fucking salamander, sprouting legs and walking on land because of fluke mutations in its damn genetic code, did it?

Predicting the future of the Internet from Internet 1.0

Predictions from the 1990s on what the internet would end up being ranged from bat-shit crazy to enlightened sage. Such is the clarity of hindsight, we can attribute such descriptions.

From the absurd to the sublime, predictions and superforecasts roared around internet 1.0 like an out of control plague of very slow, low-definition, digital locust.

Robert Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet) wrote an article for Info World in December 1995. Do you know what he said?

“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

That’s like Intel building microchips and saying, ‘ah, you know what? This is bullshit.”

In 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll said,

“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

The enlightened threw chance to the wind. String theory long shots mean we can all walk through walls.

Not everyone was so reckless. Fence sitters like Anthony Rutkowski said,

“These technologies are going to profoundly affect the way we perceive our humanity. We all have ideas to share and stories to tell and now we really can.”

On her Random House bio, it says Sherry Turkle is the ‘Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained an AB in Social Studies and later a PhD in Sociology and Personality Psychology at Harvard University.’ She knows her shit. In 1996 she said,

“People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use. Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation.”

What all this tells us is – Sherry aside – the absurdity of trying to predict the future.

But in order to explain the Metaverse, or give you examples of what the Metaverse might be, you have to kind of predict the future.

Oculus rift .

Facebook Horizon.

The Rift Valley.

Carl Steadman and co. couldn’t predict the future because there was nothing to base predictions on. And all prediction comes from experience. That, or imagination and some kind of animal insight mixed up in the blind chaos of luck.

Whereas in the 1990s we were clueless about the what lay ahead, we aren’t starting from scratch any more.

Coupled with that, how we predict the future is mutating. The computing power to model an infinite number of inputs and outputs and scenarios and crush the course of millennia down to a micro-byte is not only within reach, but here. Just as you couldn’t predict the weather in the 1870s and now you can – to some degree – so we can predict what the future of the internet will be with more clarity than we once could.

So let’s cast aside the broken glasses of hindsight and look through the prism of VR and AR and AR headsets. Let’s get intimate with the Metaverse. In as much as you can be intimate with polygon graphics. Let’s have a look what the Metaverse is, isn’t, what it could become, and what the upsides, downside and financial fallout could be.

And ask, “Will we all wear wearables?”

Come on.

Really?

The tired old tropes: What is the Metaverse

The Metaverse is an internet of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces where people work, play, and socialize together. Via AR and MR, the physical domain will merge with the virtual.

Admittedly that is vague and stolen from Wikipedia.

Besides, the physical world is a persistent, shared, 3D space where people work, play, and socializes together. Why would you need / want to replace that?

To understand what a Metaverse is, perhaps you need to imagine how we work, play and socialise together in the future. Or at least how we could.

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more real than others?

- Richard K Dick

The physical and digital realities merge

Augmented reality adds to your existing reality by projecting data (in the form of images, video, info etc) over your field of vision. Virtual reality replaces your existing perception and sensory input with a completely new world. It’s the headset you are all familiar with. Either that or eyeball implants, and we aren’t ready for that.

As an aside, virtual headsets have been a thing since the 1830s . Don’t be so enamoured by how quickly it has infiltrated our culture.

The Metaverse will funnel both virtual and augmented reality. It will fuse the digital with the concrete. It will be instantaneous and indistinguishable. It has to take internet 2.0 and expand on it exponentially; polish, mutate and advance it until it is houses everything humanity does both inside and outside the internet, only bigger, brighter, faster, decentralised, instant and everywhere.

What the Metaverse has to do/will do /could do/ must do* is why Second Life isn’t a Metaverse. It is isolated from the physical and lacks any sort of compatability with any other realm. Yes, you can buy and sell avatars and goods and consumables for an in-game currency and then exchange that for real world money, but that isn’t the fusing of the physical and the virtual. It isn’t a Metaverse. It’s a virtual reality. Distinct, separate, over there.

*delete and choose according to your wishes

It’s also singular, and the Metaverse will be very much a collection of worlds and experiences.

Right then. Now we have the merging of the virtual and the physical out of the way, it’s time to ask yourself…

what the hell can you do in the Metaverse?

Matthew Ball , former head of content at Amazon and Metaverse thought-leader, explains the 7 fundamentals of a utopian Metaverse as: a persistent (always on), synchronous and live universe which spans the digital and physical worlds with total inclusion (no cap on the number of people), a fully-functioning economy, and with unprecedented interoperability. It is populated by content and experience.

Sounds like a blast. Sounds like the integration of the internet into our very being; a bona fide Matrix; a digital utopia where all is possible, everywhere, all the time, in high definition clarity. Infinite, vibrant, alive and buzzing with art and culture and shopping and finance and sport; always on, mutating and merging, expanding and changing as the desires, ideas, whims and curiosity of the population catapult around the imagination of the human mind. It will be complex and sublime, peaceful and raucous, foreign and exciting.

It will be like life, only more. Or less. Depending on how you view consciousness.

“I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” – Cypher – The Matrix 1999

That kind of jazz.

So where are we? What does the Metaverse look like today?

The Metaverse is in utero. There is, as I have said, no Metaverse as yet.

But there are two types of platform which have taken over the reigns bequeathed by Second Life and push us onwards towards web 3.0. The experimental playgrounds and technologies which will make the Metaverse, in all its ridiculous glory, a reality. One day. Now they are proto-realms or worlds, the dust which will one day come together and build the star.

Decentraland , Axie Infinity , Cryptovoxels , and The Sandbox are virtual worlds where you buy virtual land and then build, create and design… well… whatever your imagination can produce. These parcels of lands can be traded as NFTs on market places like Open Sea.

At the moment they are the epitome of niche. Decentraland averaged around 10,000 daily users in April. That isn’t much more than the Apocalypse Daddy.

I know, right?

Quality over quantity.

Then there are the platforms you are perhaps more familiar with if you’re not a crypto-head: Roblox , Minecraft and Fortnite .

As your kids have fruitlessly tried to explain, these are digital spaces where players can experience the future. An entertainment paradise of like-minded individuals and communities dancing and singing and talking and loving on virtual landscapes of astonishing artistic beauty and complexity.

When Marshmello (he’s a DJ) played a concert in Fortnite, the whole universe went ape-shit.

These three platforms are mainstream, massively adopted, thunderous experiences with hundreds of millions of players fighting, dancing, exploring and dying.

5.2 million people are playing Fortnite as you read this.

1.8 million people are playing Roblox as you read this.

3.5 million are playing Minecraft.

Those figures are “for any one moment.” They are not daily numbers.

The three platforms combined have almost one billion players. By 2024, I’d hedge my bets that it will have doubled.

Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite not only can change the world and bring about the Metaverse, they already are advancing the technologies to do it. In 5, 10, 20, 50 or however many years the Metaverse needs to truly transform the “internet”, these worlds could well be part of the greater Metaverse whole.

Not one of them, all of them, linked together in instant, synchronous, technological beauty.

Yeah. That is why the Metaverse is a big deal.

But not yet the Metaverse

When rapper Travis Scott ‘went’ into Fortnite and played to twelve million people, he didn’t really play to twelve million people simultaneously. The technology doesn’t exist for that. Instead he played 10000 concerts all a little out-of-sync so it gave the impression it was one giant musical love in. The technique is called sharding (Ethereum will be doing something akin to this in its Ethereum 2.0 incarnation later this year. But that’s another story I want to try and understand.) and I have no idea how it works. I do know that the interconnected simultaneous nature of the Metaverse won’t be a reality until we don’t need sharding for twelve million people to be together.

As insane and beautiful and complex and stunning as the Travis Scott Fortnite concert was, as wonderful and inclusive and exciting as the idea is, it’s still not the Metaverse.

But it’s getting there.

They are stepping stones. Internet 2.147.

NFTs and the Metaverse

NFTs are the financial bridge which link the Metaverse to the future of real-estate, gaming, fashion, finance, culture and beyond.

NFTs are, along with Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft?and the technologies therein, the second catalyst to the Metaverse.

Whereas the internet was born from research and government, the Metaverse will grow from the human ‘need’ for the consumption of art and content. Although artists like Beeple will take swipes at the mainstream, they will be slight and barely draw blood. To really make it a bloodbath, NFTs and gaming – the world’s biggest entertainment machine – will take the Metaverse to the masses, accelerate its adoption and fuel the fires of technological progress.

Gaming is driving millennials into virtual worlds. NFTs are monetising it. Once they are both in, they are not going to leave. Their children will join. Once you have a market and the infrastructure, goods and services in place, it’s goodnight Vienna to internet 2.0. Not in any evil nefarious way, the Metaverse won’t cackle an evil villainous laugh as the youth of tomorrow is pulled unwillingly into a voracious virtual / physical alternative dimension to the current manifestation of whatever number of universes we are in.

Just as you didn’t choose to use email and social media and video streaming and online news and never read a book again, neither will the next generations choose the Metaverse. The natural and logical progression, based on the mindset and technology which permeates both gaming and humanity, will make those decisions for them.

Hey, I didn’t write the rule book. The future always scares the comfortable status quo.

The advantages of the Metaverse?

The financial gains of the Metaverse do not need repeating here. The market value of cryptocurrency stands at 1.3 trillion today. It is a fledgling as the Metaverse and yet the two are inextricably linked and wound up in the future of humanity.

Use a calculator, add some zeros to whatever number you come up with, and work from there. Where there is money there will be investment, corruption and institutions will flock like seagulls and ants to a fucking picnic.

Outside of gaming and the financial returns of whatever crypto-currencies and blockchain (and hopefully open-sourced) technologies the Metaverse is built on, what else will the Metaverse be good for?

Culture for everyone

Coronavirus has amplified the affects of isolation. It has created millions, if not billions, of lonely, bored, lifeless people.

Access to the worlds culture and art is really very very limited. There are only 55,000 museums in the world. 31,000 of those are in the USA.

Of those 55,000 how many house the world’s masterpieces? How many of these museums are worth a visit?

There are only 32 museums in the world which house significant dinosaur fossil collections.

There are less than 20 original Da Vinci’s in the world and they are housed in a handful of galleries.

All the Monet’s are stashed In Paris, London, New York, Copenhagen or the underground bunkers of a horde of private collectors.

The Metaverse will take this distribution bias and eviscerate it. You will be able to view art anywhere. From a field outside Lyon, Wuhan, Rio, Addis Ababa, or The Mekong Delta. And it will be immersive, real, 3D.

Sport, exercise, culture, shopping, all the things which keep people on the edges of humanity and society because they don’t live in the huge Metro-poles of the Earth will be granted access. The fallout from this will be leaps in Education and the improvements in the mental health of millions.

As well as a whole lotta fun.

Or at least it could be.

The downside of the Metaverse: gatekeepers, GAFFA and the end of civilisation

History has a habit of fucking things up. Of rolling the dice and bankrupting the casino with its insatiable greed and corruption. More often than not big business, power and money sit at the helm of the battering ram of progression.

Yes, the Metaverse could follow the path of utopian dreamers like Balaji S Srinivasan and become a truly decentralised wonderland which makes it possible for everyone on earth to participate in the culture, thrive in the economy and travel to the far reaches of their own and others’ imaginations in a completely decentralised Metaverse: devoid of a central power, bereft of gatekeepers and autocracy.

lternatively, Amazon and Facebook could create it and, before the fans in your internet 2.0 laptop stop spinning, sucked in a billion souls to their own bludgeoning Metaverses. And it will be too late. Humanity will be staring down the barrel of the current incarnation of internet 2.0, only exponentially worse, exponentially warped. Polarised, opinionated. Ugly.

A downgrade in a universe of upgrades.

The Metaverse and internet 3.0 could be more centralised than 2021.

"The technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Tweet

Make no mistake. Amazon and Zuckerberg are coming.?Google are coming. Apple are coming. The Chinese are coming. And that could be it. The gate-keepers to the Metaverse. Whether Amazon uses Ethereum or creates its own cryptocurrency or harnesses the power of both; whether Facebook calls its coin Dieu or Zucko or Tom in a nod to the original genius of Myspace, it doesn’t matter. They will create tidal waves in a duckpond, relatively speaking.

And that is where we are going next.

Who will build the Metaverse?

Who will own the Metaverse??

How will our behaviours have to change to live with the Metaverse?

And what happens if you don’t want to go in the Metaverse?

Sign up for the next instalment.

Part 2 Coming Soon.

The Metaverse: A disclaimer

What you have just read is me trying to understand the Metaverse. **trying**. I don’t pretend to know what it is or will be. I hide behind flowers and long sentences which make me happy to write but often lack clarity and understanding. If you disagree with anything I have written, it means you know more than I do. And I’d like to improve. Let me know and I will modify my thoughts accordingly.