Ever since Facebook recently changed their name to Meta, everyone has kind of been wondering what exactly is up with that. What is a Metaverse? Why do I want it? How can I give it all of my money? I will attempt to answer these questions and more in this course, which is worth absolutely no credits.
Caveat: This is a humble stream-of-consciousness blog post, not a piece of hard journalism or a Wikipedia article, so I'm not going to the effort of citing my sources. I could be wrong about some things but I think the broad strokes are accurate. Corrections welcome.
Prerequisites
When Mark Zuckerberg refers to "The Metaverse," he's referring to a specific idea from a specific science fiction book: Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson. It's a great book, action-packed, with fluid prose. Reading it feels like you are watching a movie.
In Snow Crash, the Metaverse was a general-purpose networked virtual reality system. Locations in the Metaverse were allocated much like IP addresses, and people or organizations could create virtual spaces on their virtual estate. Users could go to a location with their Avatar and see others there, just as you would now in any massively multiplayer online (MMO) game.
Stephenson didn't invent this idea, though. It was basically derived from the idea of "cyberspace," from William Gibson's book Neuromancer (1984). Gibson's version was a direct neural link, whereas Stephenson's involved headsets and gloves. Gibson also referred to his version as "the matrix," and The Matrix (1999) movie unsurprisingly hews very closely to that concept.
All of these works fall into the sub-genre of "cyberpunk," a severely dystopian view of the near future against the backdrop of late-stage capitalism. It's a bit of a wonder that we are chasing these visions of the future that were clearly meant to show us how bad things would be if it turned out like that...
"Cyberspace" became a popular term in the late nineties, as the Internet rose in prominence. It always felt like an inapt moniker, as the immersive cyberspace described in Gibson looked nothing like the rudimentary beginnings of the Information Superhighway. So, we collectively jumped the gun on slapping that terminology on something. I blame the Tech Media.
Zuckerberg possibly preferred Stephenson's "Metaverse" term because it's more in line with the technology we actually have now: VR goggles and funny little controllers. At the time of Snow Crash, though, it was still very futuristic.
Syllabus
The question still remains, though, "What is the Metaverse, and how does it work?" Since it doesn't really exist yet, everyone has different ideas, and honestly they are all equally valid. I'm going to set out some criteria for evaluating these different ideas, and then you may agree with me between 0% and 100%.
Virtual
Conversely, it's not the Metaverse if it's in the real world, like an actual park or something. That's just the cruddy regular Universe we already have.
That said, I don't think it has to be a high-fidelity simulation. If it looks like a Dire Straits video, that is acceptable. It'll get better over time.
Decentralized
One thing common to most depictions of the Metaverse is that it is a distributed endeavor. A notable exception is The Oasis in Ready Player One (2011) by Ernest Cline. In most other cases, the virtual space is partitioned into property, similar to the real world, and people have control over how things look and feel on their property.
Most actual attempts at creating a Metaverse have been particularly centralized. Including the Meta experience being touted by Zuckerberg, but also going back to possibly the most faithful reproduction of the Metaverse so far, Second Life. In all these cases, there was a single company that controlled the entire experience, up to and including the money that could be used by the users.
I will admit that John Carmack has thought about this a lot more than me, and rather than it being my hot take, I mainly just think that he's right that it is unlikely for one entity to ever get enough critical mass to actually achieve the global buy-in that The Oasis did in Ready Player One. All unilateral attempts at a Metaverse will be hamstrung by all the greedy things the creators will try to do to control it. Historically, we've seen in technology that open platforms achieve dominance emergently. Proprietary platforms have much bigger barriers to dominance, and often remain niche. See VHS vs Betamax, or the expandable, cloneable IBM PC vs any other computing platform. When an inventor reaches for a technology, they don't reach for the best one, they reach for something easy and cheap, or free.
Shared
All depictions of the Metaverse or Cyberspace have primarily centered around a shared social space. The metaphor is very much like going to the park or a bar, where people might gather and interact. It is unclear whether this is a sufficient demand to sustain what will require a lot of upfront and ongoing engineering and compute effort. But, if there's anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has shown is that we are largely social creatures, and many Humans will start to operate poorly without regular interaction. Virtual interaction is definitely not perfect, but it's a lot better than isolation.
Tangible
The Metaverse is depicted as physically representing things that are really just data. A program could be represented by any object. In the other direction, if you want an object to be interactive, it will have to be backed by code.
It might be just another form of the icons on a "desktop" on the computer you use today. Or, it could be a much stronger metaphor of Items as Programs.
Interchangeable
Despite being decentralized, the Metaverse is interoperable. You make or buy your Avatar, and take it with you wherever you go, even though you might be moving between systems run by different entities. Similarly, users are depicted as being able to transfer tangible items (programs and/or data) by handing them between Avatars, and use objects they carry with them in different locations.
The trick here is going to be security, of course. The cyberspace of cyberpunk is eminently hackable, with often the ability to hack human brains through the network being portrayed. It's almost part of the definition, but I'm going to guess we would like to make a best effort to avoid downloading computer viruses into users' neurons.
Relevant
In most of the works that represent a metaverse, it's a way to get things done. Not just to play games, but to do real work and accomplish real things — much the way the Internet is right now. For this to occur, it would have to be the best way to do that work, because no one is going to futz around with all the equipment and bother if it's not beneficial. At the very least, it has to be a good way for many people to do many kinds of work.
Corollary: Not About Currency
I claim that the problem of currency is nearly completely orthogonal to the Metaverse. "Nearly," because in order to be Relevant, transactions must be possible. But, fundamentally, and I hate to break this to you enthusiasts, we don't need a new currency to have Cyberspace — we can use the ones we have.
Requiring people to exchange what they've got for MetaBux (or FadCoin) is going to be a largely insurmountable barrier to entry. We can already buy things on the Internet: I used genuine American Dollars to order some jelly beans through Amazon just the other day! The Metaverse doesn't need to tackle cryptocurrency as well, at least not as part of the Minimum Viable Product.
One thing I've learned repeatedly in software engineering is that you don't tie efforts together unless you have to. Otherwise, a delay or failure in one induces a delay or failure in the other. I think both cryptocurrency and the Metaverse are projects that could be easily derailed by a wide variety of issues, so let's let them play out separately.
Next Time
In the next article, I'll briefly look at some near-Metaverses throughout history, compare them against this rubric, and make a case for why they aren't the Metaverse yet.