People are not assets: towards a new ethos of the Metaverse

I was lucky to attended last Saturday, thanks to the duly reminder of my friend Hadi, the mighty Alex Kipman talk on #Metaverse and #VirtualReality at the newly launched Museum Of The Future.

I enjoyed the lecture grandly and it made me reflect over the Why, beyond perhaps what Alex already brilliantly stimulated us onto.

Almost 20 years ago, I investigated in my Master's graduation thesis the societal structures and the value exchange inside what we now called Metaverse, at the time "online virtual world" or simply "virtual reality". It was really what firms like Linden Labs contributed to evolve in 3D user-generated content platform like SecondLife from the text-based BBS and Usenet networks.

While on the technological side we experienced radical advancements whether on the edge of compute or on the cloud, from Havoc to Unreal engines, from visual to haptic interactions, on the content and experience side, on the contrary, we are still missing the key point. And 20 years is a long time to keep on missing the same point over syndicated realities I'm afraid.

"But what is the point of Reality?", asks a character of the 1935 short story by Stanley Weinbaum "Pygmalion's Spectacles": "All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine."

The point indeed is that every experience and interaction within any (VR/AR/MR) reality should be human-centric, hence relationship focused not utilitaristic nor functional. And this simply because we're not an asset to mould and project, we're rather the projector, the demiurge.

I'm a technology enthusiast but most importantly a humanist, as Kipman advocates himself to be too. But while his presentation was a one-hour PhD course on the physics of the lenses and the open platform that allows us to displace time and space at the benefits of consumers and citizens, he failed to address the focal point of the beneficiaries and their control over the environment they create.

Yes, because We create the Metaverse, not the machine we use as ancillary aid, like a hiking stick to reach a peak. We are in charge, visually, emotionally and politically. Or better, we should be considered in charge.

The issues and opportunities we envision then, have one starting and ending point and one only: the humans that wear their visors or that access forms of projected/augment content in the physical dimension.

Places, Things and People are often seen (see the slide below, courtesy of Alex Kipman/Microsoft) as mere assets, within the Metaverse architecture that for instance Microsoft is proposing, probably in a more structured way than any other company today.

While Places and Things certainly utilitaristically are, People instead are actors or architraves of the Mesh/Metaverse, perspective that will save us from falling into philistine awkward moments like creating identity bubbles around avatars, like Meta proposes.

Those identity bubbles constitute an obvious, ridiculous attempt to objectify People, the authors and creators of that reality, as assets. The machine is harassing the human, in this very case: this is due to the original sin that empowers that machine to mark People as assets, so the can be punctuated within their presence as the machine is pleased, as per the rules of the Metaverse, not the will of the People who are creating it and self-determining themselves in a AR/VR/MR environment.

The consequences of this framework will be nodal for our future: selling our online activities for a profits to customers sounds familiar to you? (again, observe the top portion of the scheme below). This is exactly what today we despise of Social Media and the Internet as a whole; we should avoid at any cost to reintroduce this ethos on the next iteration of any human communication platform.

Again, #Avatars or Augmented version of people are representations of people and people are not assets, rather reality engines and political identities within any tangible or haptical reality.

The benefit for businesses or institutions will be bright, if we channel positively privacy and legal regulations and the economical value chain that Web3 is building with substantial force.

Ad maiora: the future is bright and worth fighting for.