If we are to self-govern in the metaverse, away from centralized control by Facebook (or, more specifically, Meta), we must explore viable alternatives to governance structures for online resources. A metaverse is a nearly boundless online space of art, real estate, advertising, communication, exploration, and a connected digital reality that can be harnessed, played in, used, and coded for every purpose imaginable. The control of all these resources by one entity is a recipe for autocratic centralized control that enables the formation of private empires built on data, larger in Web 3.0 than even in Web 2.0.
Agreements and interactions between users and their avatars or digital personas (possibly called “profiles” still in this instance) form the core of the market and the spine of the whole metaverse. We’re accustomed to digital networked interactions today writ large; the evolution of the metaverse is a natural extension of how we interact, commune, and organize our nations and our world in the physical reality of atoms over bits.
Keep in mind this is a different subject than user agreements or terms of service for private organizations and servers, which likely will stay play a part in user governance for individual platforms, sites, and applications. When I speak of user governance here, it is more akin to the possible economic or market structures within the metaverse and its digital interactions that can be chosen in a decentralized, peer-to-peer “Fediverse” of Web3 applications forming a connected online world. This article is an explanation and a consideration of some adjacent possible economic and organizing structures we as users might choose to pursue in our metaverse.
The first question to arise is the value of the metaverse and how products and interactions can be monetized. It’s not all based on attention and ad space, as conventional Web 2.0 monetization is. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies might be powerful ownership and financial structures in the metaverse; digital real estate, such as in Decentraland, might be a burgeoning market. Space or territory ownership, networked enclaves of users, biometric data, and virtual media (in-world movies, music, games, etc.) might form economies worth purchasing for users of the marketplace. Anything currently valued in the real world can theoretically have value in the digital one.
Let’s look at some examples from virtual economies and massive connected online games. EVE Online utilizes an in-game currency to purchase minerals for shipbuilding or other pursuits; Ethereum sells gas, or the ability to make smart contract exchanges, as well as ether, its currency; World of Warcraft sells armor, weapons, goods, and other valued items with either in-game tokens or freemium prices with real-world money (most online games offer at least some such freemium starting economy that can turn into paid upgrading).
Real world economies run on simple economic values such as supply and demand. Scarcity is one of the prime movers of any economy: the less there is of something valuable, the more its value goes up (gold, precious stones, etc.). This can lead to the question of how digital abundance, a value directly appositional to scarcity, can ever lead to a valuable online marketplace. If we can make infinite amounts of something, why is that thing valuable? If a digital space is not the real space and lacks users, is it still valuable to own parts of it?
Part of the answer lies in how we value things in general. Many digital products are positional goods, i.e. their value isn’t inherent in the utility but is in the value individuals put on it compared to other goods of the same kind (think weapons in online games, designed armor and gadgets, trinkets, anything unique to a user that has social significance). This isn’t different from how we value many things in our own world. Sentimental value is a factor, as is social significance.
These principles form the value behind NFTs. Digital art and pieces of media are connected to a cryptographically secure hash that signifies it as being unique, even in the digital environment. This is the non-fungibility of the item or token: it can’t be exchanged, broken down, or otherwise changed, giving the original a value like an original painting versus a reproduction of one. Almost any item can be tokenized, such as real estate; fractional ownership can enable communities of individuals to own art, land, real estate, and other items of value that they couldn’t own themselves (like stocks in a company, valuable objects and parcels can have multiple holders of its value). This can provide neighborhoods and communities with shared resource ownership that they can capitalize on for their own chosen ends.
We’ve seen for many years that in-game upgrades can be a very lucrative source of revenue for game companies. Loot boxes and custom mods based on digital currency exchanged for real world currency can power the entire economies of games and build companies to be competitive with the established majors. Freemium (free + premium) means free to play, but costs money to do the really cool things. Naturally people have been susceptible to this, as they are to all sorts of upgrades and modifications.
Tokens and cryptocurrencies have distinct possible values in an online metaverse. The Brave internet browser has become known in recent years for providing a different monetization path for publishers, utilizing a Basic Attention Token (BAT) instead of cookies or third-party data sales. A metaverse might function in a similar way, automatically offering redeemable tokens and credits in exchange for attention. Watching political candidate speeches or looking at digital art might be automatically tracked, and the time spent can be redeemed as tokens directly and added to a wallet or a distributed ledger. We’re used to monetizing time already: Super Bowl ads are famously expensive for only 30 seconds, and YouTube registers an ad watch after only three seconds.
Users of the metaverse might make money through arbitrage of goods or services. For example, if two federated metaverses communicate on different servers, they might have a wealth of different products and goods, facilitating trade or a mercantile system. But if a connected metaverse on a single server grows so large as to have cumbersome geographies with goods of different value in different locations, a user can purchase an item for cheap in an area where it’s less valued and sell it for profit in another area where it isn’t so available and thus much more valuable. Enough users doing this across a wide geography can make the disparate values of the product meet, causing the arbitrage.
Facebook has made a lucrative business out of the gamification of social interactions. Likes, loves, reactions, and shares form a networked attention economy that fuels their ad business. It’s a much more conventional profit structure, very similar to network television selling ad space to fund its programs, showing ads to audiences. The metaverse might come to rely on this same principle, if history is any guide. Attention, ads, and pay-per-click might form the core profits of the metaverse the same as it’s funded so many industries of the past.
Physical and active matter manufacturing might be a future business in the metaverse that can be successfully monetized. Spimes, Bruce Sterling’s concept for objects tracked digitally through their entire lifespans, might be successfully tracked and manufactured in the metaverse to a level previously unimaginable. For instance, a person in the metaverse might precisely fabricate a digital item (meta-facturing, if you like); the item is then printed with a 3D (and eventually 4D) printer, to those same specifications; the physical object has its uses in the real world, wears out, and eventually has its constitutive filaments recycled.
The manufacture, provenance, uses, and entire life history of this project is available for anyone to see, certified in a ledger. Perhaps people will pay above a certain margin with tokens for a spime (let’s call them community-consented spime tokens, CCST for short) that has a chain of provenance in line with their values. Divestment is both an act and a right in our physical world. Many people only want to do business with companies that share their values or display ethical standards for manufacturing or social justice efforts. Much like how B corporations are certified for their conscientiousness, CCSTs registered on a public distributed ledger for a metaverse company display proven provenance and reliability. Recycled filaments would prove a very valuable creator of CCSTs, as that has real world sustainability ramifications. Digital factories with 3D and 4D printing connections might enable valuable industries to form.
Blogjects, or blogging objects, have a possible metaverse value. Digitally fabricated items or spaces might one day create their own stories, craft them with words, and allow them to be harvested for various uses, especially for marketing. Perhaps, in a metaverse bar or hangout, the patrons collectively create blogs automatically from their words and experiences and are rewarded with the currency or token of choice. This blog and others created from the web of digital stories of the bar can form the ad copy for a marketing agency selling this location as a desired hangout in the physical world.
The collection of individuals all interacting in the combined metaverse might form what in digital gaming is called a fair or a bazaar, where individuals sell their wares for what they desire. Theta Token, for instance, is a tokenized coin system for packaging bandwidth. Perhaps leftover bandwidth or other digital goods of the same make can be sold as tokens in a bazaar filled with tokens for similar products. This can be a barter or trade system, or it can be purchased directly with currencies like a freemium game. Free to look, costs to play.
With valuable resources existing in the metaverse, and legions of people and their eyeballs tuned to its environment, we can question what the most useful governance structures are for harnessing this new political economy.
If Facebook controls and operates the metaverse, and it’s the only one in town, then our governance structures are nearly nonexistent. It would be an autocratic capitalist system, the same as we have now. Mark Zuckerberg has retained majority voting rights in Facebook and now Meta; as a result, he’s the only one with the authority to make real decisions that affect billions of people. If Facebook is allowed to own and control the metaverse the way they’ve been able to dominate social networking, then governance, ownership, and organization is out of our hands. We’ll have to just take what we’re given and obey the terms of service, lest we get booted from the platform. Network effects and lock-in are still the values of this world.
If, however, decentralized platforms such as Decentraland and Kong are able to provide a viable federated metaverse alternative to the Meta-verse, then the users of the platforms that constitute its core functions have some choices to make. Throughout history, citizens have formed a wide variety of organizations to collectively argue for their needs and their wants, as well as their societies and their laws. In our scenario, we are examining alternatives to conventional autocratic capitalism and managerial governance.
In our world today, we’ve begun experimenting with the idea of data cooperatives as an alternative to data collection and third-party data selling through the siloed mega corporations. For example, health data is a valuable resource often going to the highest bidder. The data is cleaned, anonymized, and sold in batches to many different companies or platforms that use it as they see fit for medical or other research, pharmaceutical ads, and numerous other valuable ends. In a data cooperative, the owners of the data are also the providers of the data. They can collectively offer, sell, and use their data as they see fit. They offer terms of service, they offer the product that they make.
The metaverse will likely have a tremendous wealth of data, ranging from attention to biometrics to user interactions to votes and everything in between. The metaverse might prove a fertile space for data cooperatives in different industries or types. Recorded biometric data anonymized and sold collectively can function like a health data cooperative today. From a manufacturing point of view, collective blueprints and their spimes can form purchasable collectives offered on the metaverse marketplace to others.
Work in the metaverse, especially for networked avatars for workplaces, might use a form of holacracy, or an autonomous group of collectives voting or working on their own. Ownership across companies might be like the Japanese keiretsu, or a business network made up of different companies. While keiretsu can run afoul of integration and monopoly or competition laws in the United States, we might find the adjacent possible of the metaverse allows us to realize this structure on a much larger, workable scale. We might find the metaversal keiretsu shows us how to clear up supply chain and transactional issues in a simulated environment, which we can then apply to the real world. Such digital case studies can also be bundled for cooperatives or sold as tokens and bartered.
We might go the collective route in the metaverse, such as Michael Albert’s concept of the parecon, or participatory economy. Digital products, tokens, or other valuables might be preset by a facilitation board, or a group of individuals utilizing community needs to set levels of manufacture, distribution, and price—decentered centralized planning. The parecon is a market abolition system, meaning prices are no longer set by any sort of free market, nor is one used at all. A single server or a collection of servers (federated servers) might form the facilitation board setting prices and products for their users; perhaps the board will be composed of avatars in an in-world environment. I could see a participatory economy over tokens and digital products, with an emphasis on market abolition entirely, gaining popular ground in the metaverse.
Non-playing characters (NPCs) in online games can be used by the game creators to artificially set market prices: they autonomously buy at a certain price for every type of item, sell for every type, and provide a general way for users to use a simple market to keep earning points/tokens/gold/currencies to stay in the game. This is more fun in the game world, but in the metaverse, where actual industries and the bottom lines might conglomerate, the issue of NPCs can artificially inflate or deflate prices, destroy currencies and markets, and provide a general anarchy for the system, especially if NPCs are used like a Sybil attack on a market or a currency (think click fraud in the online programmatic ad space, for example).
In this case, with a market or geography possibly flooded by untrustworthy actors and NPCs, a system without a market might help remove such problems and provide peace of mind for users. In the decentralized metaverse, cooperation and commons might evolve to facilitation boards that enable a participatory economy to successfully flourish where it might be stifling and impractical in the physical world. The boards will allocate space, resources, land, time or user rights, blogject and spime tokens, manufacturing rights, and any other valuable commodities in the metaverse.
Of course, there is another distinct possibility: private governance and anarchy. It could be that individuals seek personal ownership for personal goals. Products, attention, tokens, manufacturing, and any other goods or services in the metaverse are sold between individuals who can operate alone or form corporations of anarcho-capital collections. Smart contracts would form the spine of user agreements across servers and geographies, with rational self-interest the guiding economic force. Systems of law, order, and governance would all be private, subject to user or platform discretion.
If a manufacturing hub does truly emerge from the metaverse, anarcho-syndicalism might carry over from the metaverse into the real world, much as the printed objects do. Unions formed of designers, artists, and digital fabricators might join forces to own their code and their designs cooperatively in the metaverse and then bargain to sell them to the purchasers or distributors in the physical world. They might also vote for metaverse changes as collective unions rather than individuals, utilizing a labor approach to advocate for their wants, such as in the Mondragon workers collectives.
In a metaverse system of federated servers, genuine socialism might prove the desired method for governance. Individuals might get wealthy or form corporations that get wealthy. Server owners might choose to tax such metaverse company owners in either tokens or currencies and then distribute those tokens and currencies to users within the game or use the currencies to purchase other things from different servers or user groups. Maybe the metaverse companies getting rich will choose to split their profits with their workers or let them own the companies and deal with other companies in a mutualist system.
Whether users choose democracy or a consensus protocol based on the code and iterations itself will also remain to be seen. Computer and internet engineers are notoriously as against democracy as they are against autocracy and authoritarianism. The work should speak for itself; the world should vote for its own interests based on its needs. Perhaps different market sectors will use a liquid democracy and send highly educated voters in place of the masses, who care far less. Maybe deliberative democracy will finally take root and flourish in the digital realm, allowing people to be much more educated not only in the metaverse but in the physical world as well.
The west has had a growing problem of democratic backsliding in recent years, from election interference from the Russians to tampering in Belarus and gradual anti-judicial takeover in Poland. Democracies have been rare things in human history for thousands of years. Kingdoms, fiefdoms, empires, and feudalism are much more prevalent in the pages of history. Facebook, for example, has no interest in user democracy. It is a kingdom, largely benevolent but also highly resistant to user pushes for changes.
Based on the feudal nature of tech companies, individuals have proposed a Dark Enlightenment, or a return to pre-Enlightenment values such as monarchy and secular absolutism, filtered through the modern fascism of Julius Evola. This would encourage Facebook’s Meta to control the metaverse, and to accept their complete autocratic rule as the rational emergent order of humankind.
With democratic backsliding and faith in elections at all-time lows, it wouldn’t surprise me at all (though it would greatly sadden me) if the federated metaverse was to prove a failure, unworkable in its chosen democracy and open societal system. Centralized, strict control of empires might flatten the map and control nascent data collectives for their own untransparent ends. The metaverse might be owned, siloed, and lockout competitors the way the tech corporations of today do the same. It seems highly unlikely to me that the metaverse will remain a commons, unowned by anyone or anything; anything besides some form of ownership constitutes wishful thinking.
Of course, users of the metaverse will have choices to make as the system is brought into existence. We have the potential for an entirely new world, one with the adjacent possible of different systems of management, governance, and commerce. We would do well to consider every issue inherent in that, and to leave no stone unturned in our pursuit of the perfect system we’ve so long sought. This might be our last chance to make the world we want.