“TECHNOLOGY FREQUENTLY PRODUCES SURPRISES that no one predicts. But the biggest and most fantastical developments are often anticipated decades in advance.” These words opened this book, and in the pages since, hopefully you’ve come to agree with this observation—and understand its limitations, too. Vannevar Bush had an uncanny ability to predict the devices of the future and much of what they might do, as well as the crucial role of government in making them useful and for the collective benefit. At the same time, his Memex was desk-sized and electromechanical—physically storing and connecting all the content a user might request. Today’s pocket-sized, software-operated computers resemble the Memex in spirit alone. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick imagined a future in which humankind had colonized space and sentient AI had emerged, but iPad-like displays were used for little more than watching TV while eating breakfast and telephones were still dumb and required cords. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has inspired decades of R&D projects and now guides many of the most powerful companies on earth. Yet Stephenson believed the Metaverse would emerge from the TV industry, not gaming, and was surprised that “instead of people going to bars on the Street in Snow Crash, what we have now is Warcraft guilds” which go on in-game raids.
I am certain about much of the future. It will be increasingly centered around real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds. Network bandwidth, latency, and reliability will all improve. The amount of computing power will increase, thus enabling higher concurrency, greater persistency, more sophisticated simulations, and altogether new experiences (and yet, the supply of compute will still fall far short of demand for it). Younger generations will be the first to adopt “the Metaverse,” and will do so to a greater degree than their parents. Regulators will partly unbundle operating systems, but the companies that own these OSs will still thrive because their unbundled offerings are still market-leading and the emergence of the Metaverse will grow most of these markets. The overall structure of the Metaverse is likely to be similar to those we see today—a handful of horizontally and vertically integrated companies will control a substantial share of the digital economy, with their influence even greater. Regulators will place more scrutiny on them, but will probably still fall short. Some of the major category leaders in the Metaverse will be different from those we know today, while some of today’s leaders will be displaced but still survive or even grow. Others will perish. We will continue to use many of the digital and mobile products from the pre-Metaverse era; real-time 3D rendering is not the best way to perform many tasks or experience all forms of content.
Interoperability will be achieved slowly, imperfectly, and never exhaustively or without cost. While the market will eventually solidify around a subset of standards, they won’t convert perfectly into one another and each will have drawbacks. And before then, scores of options will be proposed, adopted, deprecated, and forked. Various virtual worlds and integrated virtual world platforms will slowly open up, as was the case with the world economy, while also taking different approaches to the exchange of data and users. For example, many will strike bespoke deals with independent developers, just as the United States has different policies with Canada, Indonesia, Egypt, Honduras, and the European Union (itself a collection of agreements spanning a finite set of “worlds”). There will be taxes, duties, and other fees, as well as the need for multiple identity systems, wallets, and virtual storage lockers. And all policies will be subject to change. The role of blockchain is the least clear aspect of our Metaverse future. To many, it is either critical to the success of the Metaverse or structurally required for it to exist in the first place. Others consider it an interesting technology that will contribute to the Metaverse, but that would exist regardless and in largely the same form. Many consider it an outright scam. Through 2021 and early 2022, blockchains continued to soar, attracting mainstream developers, talented founders, tens of billions in venture capital, even more in institutional investment in cryptocurrencies. And yet, blockchains still have a fairly limited track record of success as of this writing, and the technical, cultural, and legal impediments involved are significant.
By the end of the decade, we’ll agree the Metaverse has arrived* and it will be worth many trillions. The question of exactly when it started and how much revenue it generates will remain uncertain. Before getting to that point, we will exit the current phase of hype and probably enter and then exit another one, too. The hype cycle will be caused by at least three factors: the reality that many companies will over-promise what sort of Metaverse experiences will be possible and when; the difficulty of overcoming key technical barriers; and the fact that, even when those barriers are overcome, it will take time to figure out exactly what companies should build “in the Metaverse.”
Think back to your first iPhone (or perhaps, your first six). From 2007 to 2013, Apple’s operating system was highly skeuomorphic—its iBooks application showed digital versions of books on a digital bookshelf, its notes app was designed to look like a physical yellow pad of paper, its calendar had simulated stitching, and its games center was intended to resemble a felt table. With iOS 7, Apple ditched these legacy design principles for those native to the mobile era. It was during Apple’s skeuomorphic era that many of today’s leading consumer digital companies were founded. Companies such as Instagram, Snap, and Slack reimagined what digital communications would be—not using IP to call a landline (Skype) nor text (BlackBerry Messenger), but to reinvent how we communicate, why, and what about. Spotify didn’t try to rebroadcast the radio over the internet (Broadcast.com), nor produce internet-only radio (Pandora), but instead changed how we accessed and discovered music. For the foreseeable future, “Metaverse apps” will be stuck in the early stage of development—a videoconference, but in 3D and situated in a simulated corporate boardroom; Netflix, but inside a virtual theater. Slowly, however, we will reinvent everything we do. It is when this process begins, not before, that the Metaverse will feel significant; less like a fantastical vision and more like a practical reality. All of the technologies required to build Facebook were available years before Mark Zuckerberg created the social network. Tinder wasn’t invented until five years after the iPhone, at which point 70% of 18-to-34-year-olds had a touchscreen smartphone. Technology is a constraint on the Metaverse, but so is what we imagine and when.
The fits and bursts of Metaverse development will lead to critiques as well as bouts of disappointment and disillusionment. In 1995, Clifford Stoll, an American astronomer and a former systems administer at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wrote the now-infamous book, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. In an editorial for Newsweek around the book’s publication, he stated that “After two decades online, I’m perplexed . . . uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense . . . what the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness.”1 Today this reads like a Metaverse criticism that has yet to be published. In December 2000, the Daily Mail published a news piece headlined “Internet ‘May Just Be a Passing Fad as Millions Give Up on It,’ ” backed by research that supposedly estimated Britain was set to lose two million of its 15 million internet users.2 The critique came after the dotcom crash had begun, at which point the NASDAQ had fallen nearly 40%, but would go on to halve what was left. It took 12 years for the NASDAQ to return to its dotcom-era high. At the time this book went to print, the NASDAQ was more than three times higher than that onetime high.
The future is hard to predict, even for pioneers. We are now on the cusp of the Metaverse, but consider, one last time, the last two eras of computing and networking. Even the most ardent believers in the internet struggled to imagine a future in which there might be billions of web pages across millions of web servers, 300 billion emails per day, with billions of daily users, and a single network, Facebook, counting over three billion monthly users and two billion per day. When he announced the first iPhone in January 2007, Steve Jobs described it as a revolutionary product. He was right, of course. But this first iPhone lacked both an App Store and there were no plans to allow third-party developers to make them. Why? Jobs told developers that “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone . . . And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone.”3 But in October 2007, ten months after the iPhone had been unveiled and four months after it went on sale, Jobs changed his mind. An SDK was announced for March 2008, with the App Store released in July of that year. Within a month, the million or so iPhone owners had downloaded 30% as many apps as the more than 40 million iTunes users had downloaded songs. Jobs then told the Wall Street Journal: “I would not trust any of our predictions because reality has so far exceeded them by such a great degree that we’ve been reduced to spectators just like you, watching this amazing phenomenon.”4
The trajectory of the Metaverse will be broadly similar. Whenever a technological breakthrough occurs, consumers, developers, and entrepreneurs respond. Eventually, a thing that seems trivial—a mobile phone, a touchscreen, a video game—becomes essential, and ends up changing the world in ways both predicted and never even considered.
* We may ultimately use a different term for this future due to the extent that the term “Metaverse” is misused, and its potentially negative associations with dystopic science fiction, big tech, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, etc. Recall that in May 2021, Tencent chose to brand its Metaverse efforts “hyper-digital reality,” before switching to “Metaverse” as the latter became popular. A reversal of some sort may yet occur.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book exists thanks to the many family members, advocates, teachers, friends, entrepreneurs, dreamers, writers, and creators who have inspired and taught me over the past four decades. Here is just a small selection of these individuals. Jo-Anne Boluk, Ted Ball, Poppo, Brenda and Al Harrow, Anshul Ruparell, Michael Zawalsky, Will Meneray, Abhinav Saksena, Jason Hirschhorn, Chris Meledandri, Tal Shachar, Jack Davis, Julie Young, Gady Epstein, Jacob Navok, Chris Cataldi, Jayson Chi, Sophia Feng, Anna Sweet, Imran Sarwar, Jonathan Glick, Peter Rojas, Peter Kafka, Matthew Henick, Sharon Tal Yguado, Kuni Takahashi, Tony Driscoll, Mark Noseworthy, Amanda Moon, Thomas LeBien, Daniel Gerstle, Pilar Queen, Charlotte Perman, Paul Rehrig, and Gregory McDonald.