The social side of the dataverse

Firstly, in order to estate my position, we have to reckon that there is a hype. I know for sure that we all have in mind the very well-known hype cycle artifact from Gartner analysts: there are a lot of buzzwords populating the maturity/market adoption curve: Web3, Layer 2, NFT, DeFi DAOs, Smart Contracts, Cryptocurrencies, Oracles, Consensus Mechanisms, Metaverse, etc. They include technologies, concepts, platforms, etc.

We can imagine people discussing about these trendy topics in any meeting/board room while there is still an elephant in the room, silently staring at them… until the elephant, suddenly, start roaring at the board members making them to turn their heads back to focus on the rising dataverse beyond the hype, beyond meta. It’s not an easy task to make the elephant in the room roar loud enough for getting the attention from the boardroom: there is pretty much noise surrounding them.

On the other hand, it’s important to notice that behind the most popular initiatives associated with the buzzwords in the hype cycle there is a consistent effort for decentralizing  many elements at different levels; but at the same time it’s worth noticing that from an economic point of view such efforts have been supported mainly by a small group of venture capitalists and tech giants, ending up in a situation where the components of a nascent metaverse are getting more centralized in terms of decision power.

Putting together the metaverse (as a potentially viable realization of some kind of virtuality continuum) and the digital twins technologies we can envision some dystopian scenarios with a fabulous planning machine in place allowing us to simulate stress conditions on our cities’ subsystems… What is the difference between such dystopian vision (a lá Cybersyn) and the reality our citizens require from a really smart city?

The individuals… that’s the difference. The individuals taking ownership of their data, with the technologies and tools in place enabling them to share, filter, exchange and/or monetize their data for different purposes leveraging some kind of self-sovereign identity. That’s what the elephant in the boardroom is taking the attention from board members back on.

In the end, quoting Fernando Sáez Vacas, any single technology innovation you can think about should be a social innovation; if not, all we have is a useless, and even dangerous, machinery.