Where do we live in the digital world?

I’ve often thought that wizards in Harry Potter would have a terrible sense of geography and oftentimes, an unhealthily low step count. By being able to instantly ‘disapparate’ anywhere in the world, would wizards understand time and distance and actually, would they even need to? If that was the case, suddenly proximity would be eliminated as a consideration in basically every decision and Zoopla’s search criteria would need to get a lot more imaginative.

I recently read about?“Portl”?— a company that allows you to broadcast a 3D and life size hologram of yourself anywhere in the world. An experience which is simultaneously one step closer to Harry Potter’s disapparation, and also the purveyor of a far richer experience than a zoom head and shoulders square. For me, as someone who has never gamed and was presented with a digital thesaurus instead of a gameboy, this is the first time I can start to understand the metaverse.

Despite the digital world playing such a significant part of our lives, the real world is often just easier to understand in its physicality. What we make, what we do, where we go — there is a concrete discreteness that makes it more tangible to capture, value and govern than our virtual counterpart. Or perhaps that’s true only to a generation who did not grow up with the internet with their lives captured digitally from the first instagram post of their gender reveal. Many children today won’t have ever handled physical money.

There’s a generation(s) who are already comfortable with the blurred lines between the virtual and physical world where birthday parties held in Roblox wearing a brand new pair of digital shoes are completely normal. Much like Harry Potter, physical proximity is no longer a barrier and inside the likes of Roblox and Fortnite people gain unparalleled access to people, opportunities, expression and creativity that they might never have in the physical world.

For those thinking surely it’s just a game — did the internet, social media and tech giants ultimately change the way you do business or perceive the world? Undoubtedly. So many new technologies are games until they’re not. Fantasy and fiction, until they’re not. Our imaginations, as author?Karen Armstrong?said “is the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge”. Opting to live intensely alongside manifestations of our imaginations accelerates the creation of new behaviours and businesses that we have to take seriously.

The metaverse — a 3D immersive or augmented reality virtual world, will at some stage coexist with our analogue existence. However, it’s growing and evolving on the backdrop of Big Tech GAFAM Crew (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) vs Web 3.0.

Web 3.0, as the name suggests, follows web 1.0 and web 2.0. Web 1.0 was the first version of the internet — a sort of public library meets postal service. Web 2.0 followed in which the advent of cloud, social and always being connected via a phone gave rise to new platform companies. To continue the analogy, Web 2.0 is a bit like turning the public library meets postal service, into a giant mall with a cinema, bowling alley and a plethora of dodgy back alleys for nefarious activities. The trouble with Web 2.0 is that it produced a monopoly of these ‘malls’ owned by a few players meaning influencing how the malls should adapt to have less CCTV or better reward customers, is now nigh on impossible.

Web 3.0 is in its infancy, but is powered by the people who would rather have an independent high street than a massive mall and, if we are expected to coexist with our digital spaces in the metaverse, would like them to be built with as much collaboration, participation and localisation as our physical worlds. Web 3.0 makes room for the parish council meeting in a way that web 2.0 would dismiss with a maniacal evil laugh. I won’t stretch this analogy out any further…

Web 3.0 strives to be open (built by everyone), trustless (as the trust is implicitly built into the system) and permissionless (anyone can participate without the authorisation of a governing body). Via decentralised data networks, edge computing and artificial intelligence it enables, “?a future where distributed users and machines are able to interact with data, value and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties. The result: a composable human-centric & privacy preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web. “?Fabric Ventures

Suddenly, NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens) or unique digital assets that are verified and stored using blockchain technology, don’t seem like a gimmicky digital version of a pokemon card, but rather integral pieces of ownership of the internet. We would be horrified if we didn’t own any assets or get compensated for working in the physical world, and so doing the same in the digital world makes complete sense.

Artists like 18 year old?FEWOCiOUS?have made millions. In March 2021, FEWOCiOUS collaborated with digital sneaker company RTKFT and sold the NFT shoes for?$3.1 million?in a mere 7 minutes. This boom in the creator economy will eventually give rise to a middle class and with it will make NFTs a central part of earning a living.

Web 3.0 is integral to creating a digital metaverse that reflects the needs and values we expect in the physical world. The internet is built on information, not understanding and so we have to very actively determine how that information manifests. Zuckerberg recently announced his ambitions for “Meta”

“If you’re in the metaverse every day, then you’ll need digital clothes and digital tools and different experiences. Our goal is to help the members reach a billion people and hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce,”?Zuckerberg said, according to the WSJ.

I’m not entirely convinced Zuckerberg will abandon his Web 2.0 Fortress for his version of the metaverse and so could conceivably create the world’s largest nation state with an unparalleled data surveillance that simply doesn’t exist in the physical world. New technology can exist as a game until it can’t. Facebook was a fun social platform, until it became the subject of intense government scrutiny wielding immense power.

“[W]here, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” (Roosevelt 1958)

Roosevelt said this of human rights in 1958 and it remains applicable as we consider the impact the digital world is having on human rights in both digital and physical realms. We have already seen that Data sets to train AI introduces biases that impact people’s livelihoods. As we move towards the metaverse where human cultures become digitally hybridised we shall have to consider this even more closely.

“The key task of digital ethics is to make us aware of the challenges and options for individual and social life design. The digital medium is an opportunity for the subjects of the 21st century to transform themselves and their relations in and with the world. This implies allowing each other to articulate ourselves in the digital network, while taking care of historical, cultural and geographical singularities. An ethical intercultural dialogue is needed in order to understand and foster human cultural diversity. Hereby we must look for common ethical principles so that digital cultures can become a genuine expression of human liberty and creativity”?Rafael Cappuro

Web 3.0 will allow us to actively shape those “small places, close to home” Where do we live in the digital world? You decide.