Opinion: A "better metaverse" will be decentralized

Dec 07, 2022

Author: @0xMavWisdom

On November 3, the Arweave team tweeted to announce that Instagram, a product of metaverse company Meta, will use Arweave to store its creators’ digital collections. After Arweave officially announced the partnership, AR was up over 50% at one point. While this doesn’t stop the decline yet, it may be a shift in Meta’s metaverse strategy — moving closer to a more decentralized metaverse.

Since Meta’s shift to a metaverse, its stock has continued to plummet, evaporating about $500 billion in market value in the past one year, and its platform Horizon world has fewer than 200,000 active users per month, well below the goal of 500,000 that the company set at the beginning of the year. In the same situation as Meta, Roblox, Unity Software and many other listed companies in the metaverse concept, the outlook for the metaverse seems to be the consensus of all except the industry. In this very worrying prospect, there is no lack of optimistic voices in the market. In June this year, McKinsey published a report, “Value creation in the metaverse”, which concluded that the future value of the metaverse industry will grow exponentially, predicting that it could generate up to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030. In my view, optimism about the metaverse should not stop at drawing a big pie about the growth potential of the industry’s scale, but also include the reconstructing of this parallel world.

Unlike Philip K. Dick’s classic science fiction book “Do Bionic Men Dream of Electronic Sheep” or Alex Proyas’s film “I, Robot”, which visualize the control of artificial intelligence over humans, the control of artificial intelligence over people in the real world is often more subtle and unconscious. Just as traces of individual Internet use in daily life can be exploited to allow individuals to become addicted to or form dependencies on the use of free Internet products, the users at this time are like slaves to AI, and also allow these users to become passive producers of the capital behind the scenes of AI. Today, the individual’s activity in the Internet world, which is exploited every moment, is like living in a huge circular digital prison, where people live in a world similar to that of Shoshana Zubov’s surveillance capitalist society.

Instead, the metaverse should become a world free from the alienating control of technology, free from the pursuit of instrumental rationality, and democratized by information. At present, people only have the right to use information data, and the ownership of personal information data is in the company of the product used. The metaverse should allow people to regain the ownership of digital assets. Even if individuals need to provide personal information data when using digital products, user data cannot be retained in the end. A good example of this is Arweave, a decentralized storage protocol used by Instagram, a product of Meta, which allows individuals to keep their uploaded information and data in perpetuity, so that even if Instagram goes out of business in the future, individuals will still have access to their own user information and data, thus returning the power of personal information and data to the individuals themselves.

The weak identity of the metaverse contributes to the construction of an egalitarian world. In metaverse, individuals create their own virtual image or choose to buy from the NFT market to open “second life”, the real world as to the identity of the individual labels such as class, gender, race, looks weakened and even become not important, because the individual in the universe with free choice to become what kind of person and how to create things. This is a world that everyone can build, which has huge implications for smoothing cultural differences and identity divisions. In a borderless system with consistent technical standards, people can move freely between metaversees, use NFT virtual images to connect with others, and even visit the homes of celebrities such as JJ Lin in Decentraland or attend academic seminars at the Animal Crossing Society as an observer, which they cannot do in reality due to their identity. In reality, it is not possible to do so. The underprivileged or elite groups in reality transcend their roles and prejudices in the metaverse, making a community atmosphere of equality and inclusiveness in the metaverse a necessity.

Democratization is also a key building direction for the metaverse. Personal expression is an important way to participate in democracy, but in the real world personal expression is censored by centralized governments or organizations, so that expression is limited. In the metaverse, the individual’s right to express his or her will is guaranteed, and even if a system is suppressed by a tyranny, the individual can easily exit the system at will. The metaverse allows for a major innovation in social organization — DAO organizations — to be used more often. The system’s affairs are governed by universal participation, purely community-driven, and the Athenian-style democracy of direct citizen participation in governance allows everyone to participate, contribute, and collaborate on the system’s affairs, including voting and proposals. And DAOs can be built not only in the metaverse, but even in real-life issue building against elite oligarchic governance, like ClimateDAO raising money from investors to buy shares in large polluting companies and internally pressuring these companies to provide solutions to climate change to achieve the organizational vision.

The Internet was also originally intended to achieve equality, but eventually lost its way under the monopoly of tech giant. The metaverse proposed twenty years ago painted a beautiful utopian picture for people, but as today’s centralized companies notice and join this track, with large amounts of capital in hand and perfect technology that makes it easier for them to seize the opportunity, the metaverse is in danger of being eroded by instrumental rationality again. Perhaps “don’t let the metaverse become a bad sequel of the modern Internet and a replica of the real world” is the first problem we need to solve in building the metaverse now.

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