Multiply this kind of channel x1000: Mario, Transformers, Marvel’s superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon — all of these and countless more will exist as reality channels that you can turn on, transforming your daily routine into something a bit more magical, intriguing, exciting — and most of all, a little more fun. Importantly, all of these experiences will be shared by countless other people, so that the adventure is a catalyst for spending time together and deepening social relationships.
But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience.
When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?"
The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it.
The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.
Thank you for this. It's basically a better-articulated version of the gut response I had to that recent Zuckerberg interview about his thoughts on the metaverse.
Excellent take. Corporate "control"/influence creeping into more and more aspects shoupd have all of us worried. The good news is that we right now collectively have a chance to shape our future digital interpersonal relationships and make sure this doesn't happen to an extent that would impact real life more than things like Instagram and Snapchat already have.
More money will allow them to develop vastly superior UI and user experience, better graphics, etc., and it will suck so many users from anything else that the other things will become tiny niche environments or die.
Just like what happened with everything else including most of the open web.
If niche stuff is most interesting to you, then you interests are niche, by definition. The stuff that is interesting to many people naturally tends to become mainstream.
Actually, I think a lot of niche stuff is objectively good, but never gets mainstream attention because it doesn't have a large enough marketing budget. (or never goes "viral")
You do you realize that everything that is mainstream was once a niche that eventually got the attention of millions of people? Computers, for instance.
Don't use whatsapp, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, facebook, etc. and you are missing out on a lot of social life when interacting with younger generations. Which can be your peers.
Same effect can happen for this platform as well. Eventually in order to have a social life you'll have to connect to some future network using brain implants so that they can ensure your thoughts are "safe" and "genuine".
You can't 'choose' your way out of this system (e.g. IP laws), that seems like a somewhat naive take.
Technology and science (or culture in this metaverse case) being commoditized means the working class live with a plundered commons. A commons stripped of meaningful alternatives, and even if alternatives are possible they are quickly turned into a rent-seeking commodity, and the sharing of it criminalized.
In my eyes, you making this suggestion means you're likely not feeling the same level of alienation and you're able to live comfortably? In other words, you can live without it due to your position as labor aristocrat.
The metaverse will be just like Facebook free basics: digital colonialism. [1], [2], [3]
I would be very interested in seeing how a multi-million user AR equivalent to VRChat would play out. Layers of it could be extremely compelling or extremely ugly, like different rooms in VRChat are. Gibson, Vinge, and Stross have all given their takes on what this would look like too, but I expect the reality will be stranger than the fiction.
We could talk about why this doesn't make sense on a technical level, or how Ethereum doesn't really have that much to do with AR or VR conceptually. Those are separate conversations. What really jumps out at me as odd though is the suggestion that NFTs would give consumers more agency over the IPs they interact with.
If I'm remembering the last NFT cycle correctly, what actually happened was that a lot of existing content got linked to tokens that transferred no rights over that content and that were basically completely pointless. Noticing this, some of the real content owners then looked into taking their content down so that the tokens would seem more valuable to any rich buyers that wanted to claim that they owned memes. It's very difficult for me to see how that result is pro-culture.
I think that a lot of the hype around NFTs is nonsensical and that the tokens are going to be mostly meaningless in the long run, but even in a world where NFTs do work, they're just as bad if not worse than any existing IP system that exists today. The goal of NFTs is to provide a mechanism that allows people to permenently own a non-tangible piece of shared culture in perpetuity for as long as they want until they decide to sell it to another buyer.
That's the complete opposite of what I was asking for above. Nobody is looking at the dystopian potential of the metaverse and saying, "the problem with existing copyright systems is that the ownership eventually expires."
You own an NFT of a Disney character, but that character is restricted to forbid performing the Vulcan salute, because that's from a different IP-verse. NFTs cannot be a fix for that. That's what's meant by not having agency.
Comments
But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience.
When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?"
The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it.
The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.
Thank you for this. It's basically a better-articulated version of the gut response I had to that recent Zuckerberg interview about his thoughts on the metaverse.
Excellent take. Corporate "control"/influence creeping into more and more aspects shoupd have all of us worried. The good news is that we right now collectively have a chance to shape our future digital interpersonal relationships and make sure this doesn't happen to an extent that would impact real life more than things like Instagram and Snapchat already have.
My worry is that it’ll be impossible to stop this from happening.
Don't use it then?
More money will allow them to develop vastly superior UI and user experience, better graphics, etc., and it will suck so many users from anything else that the other things will become tiny niche environments or die.
Just like what happened with everything else including most of the open web.
Yeah but, all the interesting stuff happens in the niche corners of the internet.
Let the mainstream play Fortnite, we'll enjoy better games that nobody knows about.
If niche stuff is most interesting to you, then you interests are niche, by definition. The stuff that is interesting to many people naturally tends to become mainstream.
Actually, I think a lot of niche stuff is objectively good, but never gets mainstream attention because it doesn't have a large enough marketing budget. (or never goes "viral")
You do you realize that everything that is mainstream was once a niche that eventually got the attention of millions of people? Computers, for instance.
Don't use whatsapp, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, facebook, etc. and you are missing out on a lot of social life when interacting with younger generations. Which can be your peers.
Same effect can happen for this platform as well. Eventually in order to have a social life you'll have to connect to some future network using brain implants so that they can ensure your thoughts are "safe" and "genuine".
You can't 'choose' your way out of this system (e.g. IP laws), that seems like a somewhat naive take.
Technology and science (or culture in this metaverse case) being commoditized means the working class live with a plundered commons. A commons stripped of meaningful alternatives, and even if alternatives are possible they are quickly turned into a rent-seeking commodity, and the sharing of it criminalized.
In my eyes, you making this suggestion means you're likely not feeling the same level of alienation and you're able to live comfortably? In other words, you can live without it due to your position as labor aristocrat.
The metaverse will be just like Facebook free basics: digital colonialism. [1], [2], [3]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2016/02/10/marc-andr...
[2] https://theconversation.com/facebook-is-no-charity-and-the-f...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-...
Was about to reply, but this basically sums up everything I was gonna say. Well played, my friend.
This is a really good take.
I would be very interested in seeing how a multi-million user AR equivalent to VRChat would play out. Layers of it could be extremely compelling or extremely ugly, like different rooms in VRChat are. Gibson, Vinge, and Stross have all given their takes on what this would look like too, but I expect the reality will be stranger than the fiction.
Very good take.
But they can with NFTs. This metaverse is currently being built on Ethereum.
We could talk about why this doesn't make sense on a technical level, or how Ethereum doesn't really have that much to do with AR or VR conceptually. Those are separate conversations. What really jumps out at me as odd though is the suggestion that NFTs would give consumers more agency over the IPs they interact with.
If I'm remembering the last NFT cycle correctly, what actually happened was that a lot of existing content got linked to tokens that transferred no rights over that content and that were basically completely pointless. Noticing this, some of the real content owners then looked into taking their content down so that the tokens would seem more valuable to any rich buyers that wanted to claim that they owned memes. It's very difficult for me to see how that result is pro-culture.
I think that a lot of the hype around NFTs is nonsensical and that the tokens are going to be mostly meaningless in the long run, but even in a world where NFTs do work, they're just as bad if not worse than any existing IP system that exists today. The goal of NFTs is to provide a mechanism that allows people to permenently own a non-tangible piece of shared culture in perpetuity for as long as they want until they decide to sell it to another buyer.
That's the complete opposite of what I was asking for above. Nobody is looking at the dystopian potential of the metaverse and saying, "the problem with existing copyright systems is that the ownership eventually expires."
You own an NFT of a Disney character, but that character is restricted to forbid performing the Vulcan salute, because that's from a different IP-verse. NFTs cannot be a fix for that. That's what's meant by not having agency.
The backlash from them trying to keep people from using a symbol that predates the IP it's often associated with would be interesting to watch.