Chapter 15
THE DIGITAL ERA HAS IMPROVED MANY ASPECTS of our lives. There has never been greater access to information, nor a time when so much of the information available to us was free. Many marginalized groups and individuals now have large and unstoppable digital megaphones in their hands. Those who are physically far apart can feel closer to each other. Art has never been so easy to find, nor so many artists paid for their work.
Yet decades after the Internet Protocol Suite was established, we as a society still contend with numerous challenges in our online lives: misinformation, manipulation, and radicalization; harassment and abuse; limited data rights; poor data security; the arguably constraining and inflaming role of algorithms and personalization; general unhappiness as a result of online engagement; immense platform power amid toothless regulation; among many others. These problems have mostly grown with time.
Though they are delivered, facilitated, or exacerbated by technology, the challenges we face in the mobile era are human and societal problems at their core. As more people, time, and spending go online, more of our problems go online, too. Facebook has tens of thousands of content moderators; if hiring more moderators would solve for harassment, misinformation, and other ills on the platform, no one would be more motivated to do so than Mark Zuckerberg. And yet the tech world, including hundreds of millions if not billions of everyday users—think of all the individual creators in Roblox, for example—are pressing on to the “next internet.”
The very idea of the Metaverse means that more of our lives, labor, leisure, time, spending, wealth, happiness, and relationships will go online. Actually, they will exist online, rather than just be put online like a Facebook post or Instagram upload, or aided by digital devices and software, as a Google Search or iMessage might. Many of the benefits of the internet will grow as a result, but this fact will also exacerbate our great and unsolved socio-technological challenges. These will also permutate, making it difficult to simply reapply the lessons learned from the past 15 years of the social and mobile internet.
In the mid-2010s, the militant Sunni group the Islamic State, commonly referred to as ISIS, used social media to radicalize foreign nationals who would then visit Syria for training. This led to many “red flags” for those with travel records that included time in Syria, among other Middle Eastern nations, as various countries grappled with the threat of their citizens becoming combatants. Rich real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds will assuredly make radicalization easierand offer better training to those who never leave their native country (and for some of the same reasons that remote education will improve). At the same time, the Metaverse may make learning about and tracking people through their digital activity even easier, with perhaps many more people ending up on government lists or under government surveillance.
Misinformation and election tampering will likely increase, making our current-day complications of out-of-context sound bites, trolling tweets, and faulty scientific claims feel quaint. Decentralization, often seen as the solution to many of the problems created by the tech giants, will also make moderation more difficult, malcontents harder to stop, and illicit fundraising far less difficult. Even when limited primarily to text, photos, and videos, harassment has been a seemingly unstoppable blight in the digital world—one that has already ruined many lives and harmed many more. There are several hypothesized strategies to minimize “Metaverse abuse.” For example, users may need to give other users explicit levels of permission to interact in given spaces (e.g., for motion capture, the ability to interact via haptics, etc.), and platforms will also automatically block certain capabilities (“no-touch zones”). However, novel forms of harassment will doubtlessly emerge. We are right to be terrified by what “revenge porn” might look like in the Metaverse, powered by high-fidelity avatars, deepfakes, synthetic voice construction, motion capture, and other emergent virtual and physical technologies.
The question of data rights and usage is more abstract, but just as fraught. There is not only the issue of private corporations and governments accessing personal data but also more fundamental issues, such as whether users understand what they’re sharing. Are they valuing it appropriately? What obligations does a platform have to give data back to that user? Should a free service have to offer users the option to “buy out” data collection, and if so, how would this be valued? We do not have perfect answers to these questions right now, nor ways to find them. But the Metaverse will mean placing more data and more important information online. It will also mean sharing this data with countless third parties, while also enabling these parties to modify the data. How is this new process managed securely? Who manages it? What is the recourse for mistakes, failures, losses, and breaches? For that matter, who should own virtual data? Should a business that spends millions developing inside Roblox have a right to what they built? A right to take it elsewhere? Does a user who bought land or goods inside of Roblox hold that right? Should they?
The Metaverse will further redefine the nature of work and labor markets. Right now, the majority of offshored jobs are menial and audio-only, such as technical support and bill collection. The gig economy, meanwhile, often takes place in person, but is not altogether dissimilar: ridesharing, housecleaning, dog walking. This will change as virtual worlds, volumetric displays, live-motion capture, and haptic sensors improve. A blackjack dealer need not live anywhere near Las Vegas, or even in the United States, to work at a casino’s virtual twin. The world’s best tutors (and sex workers) will program and then participate in hourly experiences. A retail store employee might “call in” from thousands of miles away—and be better off for it. Rather than wander the store waiting for a customer, they’ll come when a customer consultation is needed and, through tracking and projection cameras, they will be able to counsel on where, say, alternative sizes or tailoring might help.
But what does the Metaverse mean for hiring rights and minimum-wage laws? Can a Mirror instructor live in Lima? Can a blackjack dealer be in Bangalore? And if they can, how does that affect the supply of in-person labor (and the prices paid for in-person labor)? These are not altogether new questions, but they will become more significant if the Metaverse becomes a multi-trillion-dollar part of the world economy (or, as Jensen Huang expects, more than half of it). Among the darkest visions of the future is one in which the Metaverse is a virtual playground where the impossible is possible, but it is powered by toiling “third-world” laborers for the sake of “first-world” joys.
There is also the question of identity in the virtual world. While modern society grapples with questions of cultural appropriation and the ethics of clothing and hairstyles, we’re confronting the tension between using avatars to reveal a different, and potentially truer, version of ourselves, and the need to reproduce it faithfully. It is acceptable for a white man’s avatar to be that of an Aboriginal woman? Does the realism of the avatar matter in answering that question? Or for that matter, whether it’s made of (virtual) organic material or metal?
Questions of identity online have been raised recently around the Cryptopunks NFT collection, for example. Recall that there are 10,000 of these algorithmically generated, 24 × 24–pixel, 2D avatar “cryptopunks,” all of which are minted to the Ethereum blockchain and are typically used as profile pictures on various social networks. On any given day, it’s likely that the cheapest Cryptopunks listed for sale are those with dark pigmentations. Some believe this price dynamic is an obvious manifestation of racism. Others argue that it reflects the belief that it isn’t appropriate for white members of the cryptocurrency community to use these Cryptopunks. Those who hold this view also assert that it’s not even appropriate for white people to own them. If so, the price discount reflects the fact that the number of white Cryptopunks are disproportionately low compared to the composition of the United States, where most Cryptopunks are bought and sold, and the Cryptocommunity overall. Thus it’s not that the prices for the “non-white” Cryptopunks are low, but that “white” Cryptopunks are too scarce. One position is that perhaps the “discount” on the former is positive—it makes these would-be avatars and supposed membership cards more affordable to those who have less wealth in general.
Other concerns include the “digital divide” and “virtual isolation,” though these appear easier to address. A decade ago, some worried that the adoption of superpowered mobile devices—most of which cost hundreds of dollars more than a “dumbphone”—would exacerbate inequality. The most frequently used example was that of iPads in education. What would happen if some students couldn’t afford the device and had to rely on “analog,” out-of-date, and unpersonalized textbooks, while their wealthy peers (whether they sat beside them or in exclusive private schools miles away) took advantage of digital and dynamically updated textbooks? Such worries have been assuaged by the rapidly declining cost of these devices, as well as their ever-expanding utility. In 2022, a new iPad can be purchased for less than $250—making it cheaper than most PCs, even though it’s considerably more capable. The most expensive iPhone costs three times as much as the 2007 original, but the most affordable iPhone sold by Apple is 20% cheaper (40% cheaper after adjusting for inflation) and offers more than a hundred times the computing power. And none of these devices need to be bought for the classroom; most students already own one. This is the arc of most consumer electronics: they begin as a toy for the wealthy, but early sales enable more investment, which leads to cost improvements, which drive greater sales, which facilitate greater production efficiency, leading to lower prices, and so on. VR and AR headsets will be no different.
It is natural to worry about a future in which no one goes outside and spends their existence strapped to a VR headset. Yet such fears tend to lack context. In the United States, for example, nearly 300 million people watch an average of five and a half hours of video per day (or 1.5 billion hours in total). We also tend to watch video alone, on the couch or in bed, and none of it is social. As those in Hollywood often boast, this content is passively consumed (in industry jargon, it is “lean-back entertainment”). Shifting any of this time to social, interactive, and more engaged entertainment is likely a positive outcome, not a negative one, even if we’re all still indoors. This is particularly true for the elderly. The average senior in the United States spends seven and a half hours per day watching TV. Few among us dreamed of retirement and long life in order to spend half of each of our remaining days watching TV. The Metaverse may offer no substitute for actually sailing in the Caribbean, but manning a virtual sailboat alongside old friends is likely to come pretty close and offer all sorts of digital-only perks—and beat watching midday Fox News or MSNBC.
Governing the Metaverse
For the same reasons the Metaverse is so disruptive—it’s unpredictable, recursive, and still vague—it is impossible to know what problems will emerge, how best to solve those which already exist, and how best to steer it. But as voters, users, developers, and consumers, we have agency. Not just over our virtual avatars as they navigate virtual space, but over the broader issues surrounding who builds the Metaverse, how, and upon which philosophies.
As a Canadian, I probably believe in a larger governmental role in the Metaverse than many others—even though I’ve spent a good portion of my life thinking and writing and talking about what some consider a free-market capitalist’s dream. What is clear, however, is that one of the larger challenges facing the Metaverse is that it lacks governing bodies beyond virtual world platform operators and service providers. By now you should be convinced that these groups aren’t enough to create a healthy Metaverse.
Recall the importance of the Internet Engineering Task Force. This body was originally established by the US federal government to steer voluntary internet standards, especially of TCP/IP. Without the IETF, and other nonprofit bodies, some of which were created by the Department of Defense, we would not have the internet as we know it. Instead, it would likely be a smaller, more controlled, and less vibrant internet—or perhaps one of several different “nets.”
The IETF is largely unknown to younger generations, even though its work continues to this day. But the organization’s mostly behind-the-scenes contributions are one of the reasons why many believe Western nations are incapable of effective tech regulation or oversight. I’m not referring to antitrust, although that is a pressing issue. Rather, I mean the idea of a role for government in the development of technology. In truth, the apparent divide between government and technology is a relatively recent problem. Throughout the 20th century, governments proved more than capable of steering new technologies, from telecommunications to railroads, oil, and financial services—and, obviously, the internet. It’s only in the last 15 years or so that they have fallen short. The Metaverse presents an opportunity not just for users, developers, and platforms, but for new rules, standards, and governing bodies, as well as new expectations for those governing bodies.
What should these policies look like? Let me start with a transparent confession. As these questions encompass ethics, human rights, and annals of case law, I am deliberately cautious and modest. There are clear social justice issues that go beyond many of those detailed throughout this book, such as the devices used to access the Metaverse (and their cost), the quality of the experience these devices provide, and the platform fees collected. I am aware of these, and aware of others’ authority to speak to them with greater clarity. Rather, I will provide a framework that reflects my own areas of expertise and elaborates on issues raised in the book’s previous chapters.
In 2022, many governments, including those of the United States, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, and India, are focused on whether Apple and Google should have unilateral control over in-app billing policies and the right to block competing payment services or disintermediate other payment rails (for example, ACH and wire). Dismantling the hegemony of Apple and Google would be a good start and quickly increase developer margins and/or reduce consumer prices, enable new businesses and business models to thrive, and eliminate the inconsistent commissions which encourage developers to focus on physical goods or advertising rather than virtual experiences and consumer spending. But, as we’ve seen, payments are just one of many levers that platforms use to assert control over developers, users, and potential competitors. Apple’s and Google’s goal is to maximize their respective shares of online revenues. Accordingly, regulators should force platforms to unbundle identity, software distribution, APIs, and entitlements from their hardware and operating systems. For the Metaverse and the digital economy to thrive, users must be able to “own” their online identity and the software they purchase. Users must also be able to choose how they install and pay for this software, while developers need to be free to decide how their software is distributed on a given platform. Ultimately, these two groups should be able to determine which standards and emerging technologies are best, irrespective of the preferences of the company whose operating system runs the resulting code. Unbundling would force OS-centric companies to compete more clearly on the merits of their individual offerings.
We also need greater protections for the developers who build on independent game engines, integrated virtual worlds, and app stores. Sweeney’s approach to Unreal’s license to developers is the right one—handing control over the termination of that license to court processes, rather than internal corporate ones. However, for-profit corporations should not be the only groups who decide where their de facto laws end and legislative/judicial processes begin. We cannot count on their altruism, even if, as in the case of Epic, that “altruism” is linked to better business practices. Critically, unless new laws are written specifically for virtual assets, virtual tenancy, and virtual communities, it’s likely that those designed for the era of physical goods, physical malls, and physical infrastructure will end up misapplied and exploited. If the economy of the Metaverse will one day rival that of the physical world, then governments need to take the jobs, business transactions, and consumer rights inside of it just as seriously.
A good place to start would be enacting policies regarding how and to what extent IVWPs should be required to support developers who want to export the environments, assets, and experiences they’ve created. This is a relatively new problem for regulators. On the current internet, nearly every online “unit of content,” from a photo to text, audio file, or video, can be transferred between social platforms, databases, cloud providers, content management systems, web domains, hosting companies, and more. Code is mostly transferrable, too. Despite this, it’s obvious that content-focused online platforms aren’t struggling to build a multi-billion-dollar (or trillion-dollar) business. These companies don’t need to “own” a user’s content in order to produce a flywheel based around its consumption. YouTube is the perfect example. It’s easy for a YouTuber to decamp for another online video service—and take their entire library with them—but they stay because YouTube offers content creators greater reach and, typically, higher incomes.
It is the very fact that a YouTuber can so easily leave for Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, or Amazon has led many other platforms to try to poach YouTube’s content creators. This, in turn, pushes YouTube to innovate, work harder to satisfy its content creators, and be a more responsible platform overall. Similarly, the fact that a Snapchat creator can just as easily publish their content to all social services, from Instagram to TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, means that they can expand their audience without multiplying their production budgets. If a platform, like YouTube, wants a given creator to be exclusive, the platform has to pay for this exclusivity, rather than rely on the fact that it’s too difficult and costly for a creator to operate on multiple platforms. There is a reason why every social network has shifted over time to original programming, revenue guarantees, and creator funds.
Unfortunately, the dynamics that apply to “2D” content networks don’t easily carry over to IVWP. Most of the content made on YouTube or Snapchat isn’t produced using those platforms’ tools. Instead, it’s produced with independent applications, such as Apple’s Camera app, or Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Even when content is made on a social platform, such as a Snapchat Story, which uses Snap’s filters, the content is typically easy to export (and to use again on Instagram) because it is just a photo. Conversely, the content made for an IVWP is mostly made in that IVWP. It cannot be easily exported, or repurposed—and there are no available “hacks” similar to using an iPhone’s “screenshot” function to grab a Snapchat Story. As such, content made on Roblox is essentially Roblox-only. And unlike a YouTube video or Snapchat Story, Roblox content is not ephemeral (like a live stream), nor is it ever intended to be catalogued (as is the case with a YouTuber’s vlogs). Instead, it is intended to be continuously updated.
The consequences of these differences are profound. If a developer wants to operate across multiple IVWPs, they must rebuild nearly every part of their experiences—an investment that produces no value to users and wastes time and money. In many cases, a developer won’t even bother, thereby limiting their reach and concentrating their reliance on a single platform. The more a developer invests in a given IVWP, the harder it becomes for them to ever leave—not only will they need to reacquire their customers, they’ll have to rebuild from scratch. Thus, developers will be less likely to support new IVWPs that might offer superior functionality, economics, or growth potential—and existing IVWPs will face less pressure to improve. Over time, dominant IVWPs might even “rent-seek.” Over the past decade, most of the major platforms have been criticized for such behaviors. For example, many brands argue that changes made to Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm effectively forced them to buy ads in order to reach the very Facebook users who had voluntarily “liked” their Facebook pages. In 2020, Apple revised its App Store policy such that, with a few exceptions, any iOS app that used third-party identity systems (for instance, log-in using your Facebook or Gmail account) would also need to support the Apple account system.
Some IVWPs do support selective exports. Roblox enables users to take models produced in Roblox and bring them into Blender using the OBJ file format. But as we’ve seen throughout this book, taking data out of a system doesn’t mean it will then be usable data. Even if it is usable, the process to make it so isn’t necessarily easy (just try downloading your Facebook data and importing it to Snapchat) and it is up to the discretion of the platform (recall Instagram shutting down the API used to share posts on Twitter). In this sense, governments have both an obligation to regulate as well as an opportunity to shape the standards of the Metaverse. By setting the export conventions, file types, and data structures for IVWPs, regulators would also be informing the import conventions, file types, and data structures of any platform that wants to access this data. Ultimately, we should want it to be as easy as possible to take a virtual immersive educational environment or AR playground from one platform to another—as easy as it is to move a blog or a newsletter. Granted, this goal isn’t fully attainable—3D worlds and logic aren’t as simple as HTML or spreadsheets. But it should be our target and matters far more than the establishment of standardized charging ports.
It may seem unfair that the companies that helped build the mobile era (such as Apple and Android), as well as those helping to found the era of the Metaverse (namely but not exclusively Roblox and Minecraft), should be forced to relinquish control over their ecosystems and let competitors profit from their success. After all, it is the rich integration between these platforms’ many services and technologies that made them so successful. Such regulations, however, would be best thought of as a reflection of and response to this success—and of what’s needed to maintain a market that is collectively prosperous and able to produce new leaders. When Apple revised its cloud gaming policies in September 2020, The Verge wrote that “Arguing over whether Apple’s guidelines did or didn’t include a thing is kind of pointless, though, because Apple has ultimate authority. The company can interpret the guidelines however it chooses, enforce them when it wants, and change them at will.”1 This is not a reliable foundation for the digital economy, let alone the Metaverse.
Beyond regulating the major platforms, we can identify other obvious laws and policy changes that will help produce a healthy Metaverse. Smart contracts and DAOs should be legally recognized. Even if these conventions, and blockchains overall, do not endure, legal status will inspire more entrepreneurship, protect many from exploitation, and lead to wider usage and participation. Economies flourish when this occurs. Another clear opportunity is the expansion of so-called KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations for cryptocurrency investments, wallets, content, and transactions. These regulations would require platforms such as OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and other major blockchain-based games to validate the identity and legal status of customers, while also providing requisite filings to governments, tax bodies, and securities agencies. The nature of blockchains is such that KYC requirements cannot reach everything “crypto”—not unlike the fact that neither the IRS nor police can monitor all cash transactions. But if nearly all mainstream services, marketplaces, and contract platforms mandate this information, then most transactions will occur under such requirements and those which don’t will be discounted due to the perceived risk of a scam (just as most would rather use eBay and buy from verified sellers than purchase through an unbranded marketplace and from an anonymous account).
One final proposal is that government should take a far more serious approach to data collection, usage, rights, and penalties. The amount of information that Metaverse-focused platforms will actively and passively generate, collect, and process will be extraordinary. The data will span the dimensions of your bedroom, the detail of your retinas, the facial expressions of your newborn, your job performance and compensation, where you’ve been, for how long, and probably why. Nearly everything you say and do will be captured by one camera or microphone or another, then sometimes placed in a virtual twin owned by a private company that shares it with many more. Today, what’s permissible is often up to the developer or the operating system that runs the developer’s application—and only lightly understood by the user. Regulators would do well to lead with, and then occasionally expand, what’s allowed, rather than merely respond to unforeseen consequences. Including under “what’s allowed” should be the user’s right to request the deletion of data, or to download it and easily upload it elsewhere. This is yet another area where governments can, and should, dictate the standards of the Metaverse.
Equally important is how corporations demonstrate their ability to secure privileged information, and how they are punished when they fail to do so. The US Federal Reserve routinely “stress tests” banks to ensure they can withstand economic shocks, market crashes, and mass withdrawals, while also holding executives individually liable for corporate negligence or financial misstatements. Primitive versions of such oversight mechanisms exist today for user data, but they’re mostly informal inquiries, rather than formalized processes—and big tech is unlikely to volunteer for audits. Fines for data breaches and losses are particularly toothless. In 2017, American consumer credit reporting agency Equifax revealed that foreign hackers had been illegally accessing its systems for more than four months, and had stolen the full names, social security numbers, birthdates, addresses, and driver’s-license numbers of nearly 150 million Americans and 15 million residents of the United Kingdom. Two years later, Equifax agreed to a settlement of $650 million—a sum less than the company’s annual cash flow and which provided victims only a few dollars each.
Multiple National Metaverses
For some 15 years, what we consider “the internet” has become increasingly regionalized. Every country uses the Internet Protocol Suite but the platforms, services, technologies, and conventions in each market have diverged, partly due to the growth in non-American technology giants. Whether it’s Europe, Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, China, or Africa, there are more and more successful local start-ups and software leaders than ever before, satisfying everything from payments to groceries and video. If the Metaverse will play an ever-greater role in human culture and labor, then it’s also likely its emergence leads to more and stronger regional players.
The most significant cause of fragmentation in the modern internet is nation-specific regulations across the world. The Chinese, European, and Middle Eastern “internets” are increasingly different from those accessed in the United States, Japan, or Brazil due to greater restrictions on data-collection rights, permitted content, and technical standards. As governments around the world contend with the need to regulate the Metaverse—and at the same time, as they try to reduce the power accumulated by the leaders Web 2.0—the world will doubtlessly end up with enormously different outcomes and, dare I say it, “Metaverses.”
At the start of this book, I mentioned the South Korean Metaverse Alliance, which was established by the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT in mid-2021 and includes more than 450 domestic companies. The organization’s specific mandate is not yet clear, but it’s likely to be focused on building a stronger Metaverse economy in South Korea, and a larger South Korean presence in the Metaverse globally. To this end, the government will probably drive interoperation and standards that will occasionally disadvantage a given member of the alliance but increase their collective strength, and most importantly benefit South Korea.
Following the trends visible in the Chinese internet today, it’s a good bet that China’s “Metaverse” will be even more different from (and centrally controlled compared to) that of Western nations. It may arrive much earlier and be more interoperable/standardized, too. Consider Tencent, whose games reach more players, generate more revenue, span more intellectual property, and employ more developers than any other publisher in the world. In China, Tencent releases the titles of companies such as Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, and Square Enix, and develops local editions of hit games such as PUBG (which cannot otherwise operate in the country). Tencent’s studios are also responsible for the global versions of Call of Duty Mobile, Apex Legends Mobile, and PUBG Mobile. Tencent also owns roughly 40% of Epic Games, 20% of Sea Limited (makers of Free Fire), and 15% of Krafton (PUBG), and both wholly owns and operates WeChat and QQ, the two most popular messaging apps in China (which also serve as de facto app stores). WeChat is also the second-largest digital payments company/network in China and Tencent already uses facial-recognition software to validate the identity of its players using China’s national ID system. No other company is better positioned to facilitate the interoperation of user data, virtual worlds, identity, and payments, nor influence Metaverse standards.
The Metaverse may be a “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds,” but, as we’ve seen, it will be realized through physical hardware, computer processors, and networks. Whether those are governed by corporations alone, governments alone, or decentralized groups of tech-savvy coders and developers, the Metaverse is dependent on them. The existence of a virtual tree and its fall may forever be in question, but physics is immutable.