The Metaverse Makes Blockchain Make Sense
I can’t be the only one that’s had this conversation with a family member, skeptical business person, or humanoid:
Me: “Decentralization is cool. Blockchain is a novel technology. Smart Contracts are great.”
Them: “Why do I need Crypto? Why do I need Blockchain? Can’t I just do all of this the way that I am doing it now?”
Going down this rabbit hole can be confusing for those that have not been baptized in the fires of a crypto winter, however it is a fair question to ask because the asthetic of Web 2.0 interfaces and applications often leaves the conversation one dimensional.
The thinking might go: What does it matter if a single company owns every social media network? So what if they know my location data every time I open my phone? Is it really a big deal that my post was banned because it goes against a company’s policy? To the individual, these actions feel opt-in. Even though basically monopolized, there is a sense that we made the independent decision to take the action on the service. In an open world, these decisions are under our control.
We should have no expectation that the next generation of digital environments, now firmly known as The Metaverse, will come with this characteristic. Digital worlds owned by for-profit corporations are not open worlds. Period.
In a framework on community building, the set of human environments can sometimes be broken down into three distinct groups: Our homes (first place), where we work (second place) and places that are important to civic society (third place) (Wikipedia). This third place can include clubs, cafes, parks or city blocks. What is unique about these places is that they are not policed by a single private entity, and, in theory, allow us to interact freely, without censorship and (minimal) overview.
As we move into digital environments, this distinction begins to blur. A social network that allows us to share 240 characters now has a ‘fact-checking commitee’ and virtual messaging boards are monitored for behavior that goes against community guidelines. An opaque system owned by a group, or multiple groups, is beginning to capture the domain that we once thought would become the new third space, albiet a digital one.
In Jon Radoff’s ‘Building The Metaverse’ series, he makes a clear distinction between the different layers required for a proper functioning metaverse to exist. The brilliance of this proposal is that the Metaverse should be inherently decentralized. Businesses can build, own, and operate key components of the Metaverse, but they should not capture the whole of the processing layer.
By capturing the processing layer, businesses will control the entirety of the Metaverse: What can be said, what content is promoted, and how incentiviziation systems are designed. If they want to develop their own ‘corporate physics’ within a subset of the Metaverse they should be allowed to do so, But owning the core infrastructure will only migrate the current issues we face around big tech into the next dimension of digital environments and experiences.
With blockchain and distributed ledger technology, the dinstinction between these two futures comes into focus. With open source building blocks, digital environments can retain an ‘impartiality’ from which multiple actors can trust one another simultanously. There is no concern that the underlying architecture, the blockchain, is in the hands of a third party whose interests may not be in alignment with their own. With blockchain, decentralized applications and experiences can flourish with little concern over centralized censorship or corporate control.
In this light, one could argue that the Metaverse may become one of the most important ‘use cases’ for blockchain. If you can call ‘a free and open digital society’ a use case.
