One of the joys—and the challenges—of a digitized world is coming to grips with the spectrum of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is a flexible concept showing a world like ours but with different permutations and outcomes. Simply put, it’s possible for us to completely digitize our world 1:1, a metaverse comprising our world composed of bits instead of atoms.
There is an obvious limitation to this approach.
For one, if we’re taking the time, resources, computing power, and server space to make an entire virtual world, we can afford to have a little extra imagination. We can finally dream in normative terms instead of positive ones. At last, we can control, model, and build a world from the ground up the way we want it.
In most digital experiments or online engineering projects, it’s possible to tinker, consent, revise, destroy, and recode as needed. Websites can be redesigned; users can be added or deleted; an iterative process can iterate again, and new instantiations can take the place of old instances no longer viable to a collective protocol. We can soft or hard fork and make something new on the bare bones of the old, and we don’t suffer a loss of space or place in the process. We’ve been lucky in this way, keeping the digital world at a distance and leaving the physical world with its rules intact.
The vision of a metaverse, or Meta in Facebook’s new branding, is something of a departure from our old rules. The metaverse isn’t just virtual reality—it’s a massive, world-connected makerspace of real estate, user and consumer interactions, business designs and plans, economies, possible war, and digitally realized third spaces. We can put on a headset or glasses and be transported to a plane of existence fabricated yet simulated to be real enough that our minds don’t know the difference. We’ve added a platform layer to our world, less Tron and more Simulacron-3.
There is a catch, of course. A true digital world, despite what many people think, is not the kind of thing we can create and then destroy at leisure like an experiment gone wrong. If something doesn’t work online, we can’t wipe away the works of days or years because it doesn’t suit our desires. We can’t do this in the physical world, and if we’re truly designing a 1:1 world based on a seamless simulacrum of existence, we must hew to certain rules. If we want users to come back and renew their existence digitally, we need to offer them the security of knowing the world they cherish is going to be there when they come back, a spatial permanence that we take for granted in our own world.
Similarly, a massive, socially connected digital metaverse space filled with billions of users isn’t designed simply for interactions that can be done in person or over existing social networks. The real prize for developers (in particular Facebook) is a new type of monetized transaction in a fabricated world. We’d be naïve now to consider a genuine human element, instead of profit, as the prime motivator. Consider it: if a company could create the whole physical world from scratch, the first thing they’d do is sell real estate for advertising space. One company would control naming, mineral, law, and space rights for everything attached to the world. Despite the oligopoly of our present situation, we genuinely can’t fathom the monopoly of an entire world belonging to a single company. It would be in our very best interests to understand the benefits and drawbacks of a world made new.
A common rejoinder to ideas of the metaverse is one that has cropped up with every new technology: why isn’t what we have already enough? Why do we need something new or different? It isn’t only Luddites who express this attitude. Technologically, most people don’t know what the world wants or needs far in advance of the arrival of a new creation. Cars didn’t need to replace horses, guns didn’t need to replace swords and arrows, electricity didn’t need to replace fire, and so on.
It would be an overly precautionary attitude to suggest technology has gone far enough and to cap it. Many sensible non-Unabomber types have expressed a reluctance to go forward with a new world based on designs that can’t be easily grasped, but they still buy the latest phone, use the internet, embrace cars with new features. In short, the metaverse concept doesn’t go too far because we simply don’t know enough about it yet—we can’t anticipate the effects entirely because genuine technological changes aren’t the kind of things we can reliably predict. Consider the old dictum: most predictions are too optimistic in the short term, and not optimistic enough in the long term.
Virtual reality has come a long way since its radical propositions in the early 1990s. It’s becoming seamless, immersive, affordable, and in many cases, preferable to our real world. One doesn’t need to be among the millions who play massive online games (EVE Online, World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.) to see the attraction to a world where we have more control of the rules and, conversely, more perceived control of the outcomes. Fun, connection, communication, enhanced playful dreaming. Same values, new technology.
A social network, especially Facebook’s, which pioneered the social graph, is already a virtual space. We exchange communications, designs, ads, money, everything human with one another across the simulated network of human connection. Our profiles are our avatars, going where we can’t. This is why it’s so natural for Facebook to dive into the metaverse space: they’ve been there all along. The difference is that Facebook controls the best virtual reality technology (Oculus) making their virtual world much more possible than the attempts by others over the years.
In Facebook’s conception, we can have a massive, connected makerspace that is a 1:1 simulated digital world. Every current technology powerhouse—Salesforce, LinkedIn, Zoom, Twitter, WeChat, Amazon, etc.—can be realized under the ownership of Meta. Networked business connections can be made as avatars in the connected digital realm; ecommerce can now be like a physical store you visit, but with the long-tail preserved; meetings formerly done over Zoom can be achieved in a virtual space with avatars; advertisements can be placed absolutely anywhere; virtual coins (Diem, formerly Libra) can be used to seamlessly pay for products, ad spaces, interactions, positional goods, NFTs, exchanged for other tokens, and anything else you can imagine.
Control of the metaverse is control of the digital human destiny. The prize of the next era, Web 3.0 (stylized as Web3), is an undiscovered country absolutely filled with riches that can dwarf Web 2.0 (our current iteration). The web has shown a resiliency to decentralization and a tendency toward emergent centralization. The dream of planes of commons have been subsumed for commerce, DRM, walled gardens, and siloed data locked in servers that compete like countries against one another for profit dominance.
For those who argue we can simply pull the plug on the whole concept of the metaverse, I have bad news: it doesn’t work that way. Facebook is the most famous group pursuing the metaverse under its new flagship company Meta, but it is far from alone. We have a land race between centralized control of Web 3.0 and a decentralization of Web3 that belongs to everyone and no one. Decentraland, for instance, is a decentralized application with its own currency (MANA) that could be used for commerce in its digital real estate space. There are several others of varying complexity and scales of ownership. Can human destiny be monetized, and should it?
For those of us in the digital space, the metaverse is something that has been coming for quite some time. It is, from my vantage point, all but inevitable. From Web 2.0’s miraculous, exponential growth through the rise of the Internet of Things and a connected world of addressed and hyperlinked objects and appliances, computing is becoming ubiquitous. The old saying of the best interface is no interface at all has been transformed into a world of computing of ambient intelligence that disappears into our spaces and our backgrounds. Smart fabrics, self-driving cars, fridges that text us when we’re low on food, digital books, QR codes, and thermostats that can be set from afar are the earliest iterations of our coming hyperworld.
The metaverse and its edge ideas hinges on territory, land, and space. A digital environment is a space that can be created, owned, maintained, sold, and tarnished or conquered. Corporations that control vast domains of data, digital real estate, and behavioral interactions in bits themselves have carved up the internet for their own uses. Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Tencent, and Amazon control territory in wide swaths the way nations control land and territories. Firm boundaries of walled gardens are set; digital borders are strict, the antithesis of the independence of cyberspace prophesized and sought in the 1990s.
Virtual reality, when done correctly (and it very much is there now), is practically indistinguishable from our physical reality. Manuel Castells has described the world and the internet as a network of networks: our brains are complex networks of circuits and synapses between neurons; these are connected by physical connections such as fiber optic cables and WIFI, handheld devices, etc., forming the internet from a social web. We connect because we are connected. It’s highly likely the evolution of the metaverse will one day make it a vast alternative to our existing world, or one that is a planetary platform of computation.
The nomos of the state has been digitized into the nomos of the digital corporations of Web 2.0, to paraphrase Benjamin Bratton. Digital law belongs to user agreements that are signed by all of us, blindly; Facebook owns social networking and can buy, destroy, sell, and create its competitors and its friends and its citizens. If code is the true law, then functional and overlapping jurisdictions of digital law control our online lives with fierce structure. To break the law is to be de-platformed or cast out from a nation as an exile. Lex cybertoria, if we can be so bold, is a law not bound by geographical borders but by online ones.
Let’s look to history here. What has always fascinated me about Christopher Columbus is not that he set out on a new voyage to the West Indies, or that he braved death, uncertainty, mutiny, illness, and social ruin to do so. The real crux is that he went out like a capitalist: he and his heirs were to be given land, titles, and own 10% of what was discovered, traded, or found. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea, had the kingdom of Spain actually held up its end of the bargain, would’ve owned 10% of the North and South American continents and its contents. New territory and its acquisition would’ve made a private party and his descendants rich beyond the imaginations of empires past. It’s no surprise we can speak of data colonialism and data decolonization, so similar are the expeditions to claim new sovereignties for a larger empire.
We know how the rest went: plunder, genocide, conquest, exploration, new countries, and a new hemisphere of control, influence, power, and markets. We know the name Columbus because he connected continents, brought social control, and made a few people very rich and powerful. He didn’t mean to find the Americas, they happened to be sitting in the way of a deal he wanted to make with China—a world founded on accident.
As humans, we often don’t realize how our geography and our borders influence our world and our opinions. We don’t imagine discovery beyond what we know or control. The metaverse has the potential to transform commerce and the understanding of life and territory for the 21st century. Those who brush it off are those who do not understand it. Ask China now about their strict digital sovereignty and the control of their online borders. Ask Belarus. Ask Russia, or Iran, or Myanmar. Code is digital law extended over physical territory.
With Facebook, we face the same dilemma of Europe in 1492: we know there is territory and an idea sitting there of possible great reward (one estimate has put the value of the metaverse at $30 trillion over the next 30 years). The question is whether we desire new kingdoms, fiefdoms, and corporate ownership over empires that eclipse most nations. Facebook already has the ability to change election outcomes, change user attitudes about given topics, and generally realize the Taylorist vision of behavioral control and modification—the age of surveillance capitalism.
Do we cede control of the New World (Newer World?) to a private entity, and let single individuals dictate its outcome? For those of us in the decentralization camp, centralized control over the digital destiny is anathema to the entire founding of the web. Autocratic control over digitized empires of the mind and space are a radical extension of existing territory based on code and clicks that could upend our society in ways we can’t yet fathom, that old precautionary principle back to haunt us. If the metaverse is inevitable—and I believe it is—defining its territorial sovereignty and digital borders will become of increasing urgency and importance. Alternatives, radical, simple, complex, new, what have you, are imperatives to our understanding of our new structure. Crypto-states might well compete with corporate empires in the metaverse.
Blockchain has given us a glimpse of a world formed in a (mostly but not fully) trustless architecture, with distributed ledgers and a consensus protocol powering connected interactions. Meta alternatives include Decentraland and Kong Land, based on decentralized protocols between federated servers (the Fediverse has returned, if it ever left). The decentralized metaverses are built by the users, controlled by them, and run by consensus the way blockchain is. Despite some hiccups we’ve seen in famous blockchain applications like Bitcoin, over the years the consensus and trust applications of the system have been shown to be resilient and widely applicable.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are unique in that they are money not tied to geographies or nations—they belong entirely to the people using them, unconstrained by borders. So does the law and the land of the massive digital corporations appear both bounded and boundless simultaneously, empires not restricted by geography (though they can be limited by it, such as China’s nationalistic ban on Facebook, Google, cryptocurrencies, and Winnie the Pooh references). Their nomos extends as far as their bits can go, their territory being what they say it is, carried by users and valued by their networks. Corporate digital platforms are polystates or anthro-nations, extending to every facet of life and connecting law and code to infrastructure and emergent states of order (Denmark, for instance, has an appointed tech ambassador for this very reason).
Peer ownership and federated user territory is a radical alternative to centralized corporate control of this new digital world. There are concerns, of course. The internet of the 1990s was also supposed to be distributed, decentralized, and opposed to walled gardens. But silos are financially attractive. Google swore it wouldn’t use ads—until it did, becoming one of the largest companies in the world based entirely on helping people find things. Facebook was supposed to connect the world benevolently, and it certainly did—but then it radically divided them by offering a platform for ideas and a rich marketplace for polarized disunion. It’s fully possible emergent centralization of decentralized resources is the natural order of any space, and that peer ownership is smoke and mirrors, sehnsucht for what could be rather than what is.
I’ll explore possible market and governance structures of the metaverse in my next article, as it’s a complicated topic that requires its own space to breathe, so vast are the possibilities for it. But organized user governance of the metaverse, particularly alternative structures to centralized governance, are going to prove an urgent formulation if we are to counter the naturally emergent centralization that has inhabited the internet for over two decades.
In the meantime, considerations of space and place are imperative to our understanding of where digital borders will provide both lock-in and lock-out. Maps, geographies, and bounds will all be taken into account in the new metaverse. If code is indeed law, then that law will be tested on locations and ideas by the metaverse. The map may not be the territory, but we need to define both before we can confidently say where one ends and the other begins.