Step into the Metaverse

How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy

Mark van Rijmenam

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119887591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Industria informática

An incisive glimpse into the future of the internet

In Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy, future tech strategist, entrepreneur, and thought leader Dr. Mark van Rijmenam delivers a startlingly insightful discussion about how the world as we know it will fundamentally change as the physical and the digital worlds merge into the metaverse, impacting the everyday experiences of people, companies, and societies. The author maps out the extraordinary opportunities and challenges facing business leaders, consumers, regulators, policymakers, and other metaverse stakeholders trying to navigate the future of the Internet.

In the metaverse, you can be who you want to be, where you want to be, and companies and consumers are only restricted by their own creativity how they can benefit from the immersive internet. With engaging commentary on issues ranging from avatars, identity and digital fashion to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain and the economics of the metaverse, this book also offers:

• Discussions on the importance of an open and interoperable metaverse build on the web 3.0 paradigm if we want to reign in the control of Big Tech over our identity, data and lives.
• Explorations of the enormous—and largely untapped—potential for metaverse entertainment, including gaming, music, media, and sports and how brands can engage with their customers in novel ways and how digital twins will change how we work and innovate.
• Considerations related to the dangers of an always-on, immersive internet, including data breaches, avatar imposters, mental health issues, corporate and state surveillance, and the need for metaverse law.

A fascinating read you won't be able to put down, Step into the Metaverse belongs in the hands of executives, managers, and other business leaders who play a role in digital transformation or execution. It's also an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the future of technology, the internet, and social interaction.

Chapter 1
The Future Is Immersive

From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

To understand how the metaverse will change us, we need to know where we are coming from and know what will drive the immersive internet. This requires us to go back in time, to the 1950s, when the second generation of transistor-based computers arrived on the market.¹³ These big, mainframe computers replaced the vacuum-tube machines and started the development of the Information Age as we know it today. These machines were possible because a few years earlier, three scientists at Bell Labs—William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Houser Brattain—had invented the transistor, for which they received the Nobel Prize in 1956.

Within a few years, the various components required to develop the personal computer, such as the computer chip and microprocessors, were small enough to catapult us into a new age. Over the years, developments in the hardware have continued to deliver ever-smaller solutions to such an extent that we now have machines that can create transistors of 1 nanometer in length.¹⁴ One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or 40 percent the width of a strand of human DNA.¹⁵ In other words, it's very, very small. These developments in hardware are required if we want to be able to access the metaverse using small, comfortable, and cheap devices such as virtual reality (VR) headsets, augmented reality (AR) glasses, or even smart contact lenses in the far future, which means that the mainstream adoption of VR and AR will still take a few years. In addition, the development of sophisticated hardware is only one of the prerequisites of the immersive internet.

The other component is, of course, software, and for the first algorithm, we need to go back to the 19th century. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace created the first algorithm. She was an analyst and mathematician, and she is considered the first computer programmer. In her 1843 article, Lovelace correctly predicted that future machines might be able “to compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”¹⁶ Of course, it took more than 175 years before computer programs could actually do so, but her foresight is remarkable and for that she is recognized as the mother of modern computing.¹⁷

One hundred and twenty years later, we moved from actually programming the ones and zeros to the era of programming languages. In 1964 researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, released BASIC, an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: a family of high-level programming languages emphasizing ease of use and the programming language used in many of the first video games. A few years later, Hewlett-Packard released multiple computers that ran BASIC programs, and in the 1970s, Microsoft created a dialect of the programming language called Microsoft BASIC. This was the starting point of one of the most valuable companies in the world, and since then, Microsoft has come a long way. In 2021, Microsoft announced its entry into the enterprise metaverse and solidified this direction with the announcement of the purchase of the gaming company Activision Blizzard for almost $70 billion in 2022.

With hardware and software in place, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was able to develop the first computer network, called ARPANET. In the 1970s, the ARPANET was extended with a host-to-host protocol and network software, resulting in the first applications for the network, including electronic mail. The original researchers were smart enough to develop an easy coordination mechanism enabling email messages to be sent to different computers regardless of the application used to send or receive the email. This interoperability enabled email to quickly become one of the main applications of the internet.¹⁸

ARPANET would eventually evolve into the public Web when it was split into military and civilian sections. A few years later, Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of the World Wide Web while working at CERN in Switzerland. Berners-Lee wrote the three leading technologies that we currently use on the Web: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Uniform Resource Identifier (URI, also known as URL), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). At the end of 1990, the first web page was put online, and in 1991, Web 1.0 opened up to the public. The rest is history, with millions of websites and billions of web pages nowadays. These standards have proven fundamental for the Web to evolve into what it is today. Similar standards will also be required for the metaverse if we want to create a metaverse that is interoperable and rewards content creation and ownership.

The fact that both ARPANET and the World Wide Web grew out of a closed research environment is important to understand why the internet works as it currently does. Over the years, those involved in developing the internet and the Web created many open standards, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, etc. This creates a permissionless network, where anyone can easily connect to the network and share and receive information. Unfortunately, these standards and protocols have not propagated to all sections of the Web. As a result, the successor of electronic mail, mobile messaging, does not come with interoperability. While this results in strong network effects for Big Tech, it has also created the walled gardens we are now so familiar with for our mobile messaging. Up until 2021, it has not been possible to send a message from WhatsApp and receive it on Signal or vice versa. This lack of interoperability should be avoided at all costs in the metaverse. Fortunately, the European Union is proposing interoperable mobile messaging as part of the Digital Markets Act. In the metaverse, you want to be able to directly send your friend a text message from Fortnite that can be received on Roblox, or you want to be able to continue talking with your friends when switching from one world to another. Of course, platforms such as Discord can help here, but in the end, Discord is also a walled garden.* Nevertheless, those organizations involved in creating the Web and the internet worked with the best intentions and envisioned an open, decentralized Web accessible to all.

Unfortunately, there was another design flaw of the Web. Over the years, those involved in the process forgot to create an identity protocol to use your offline identity online and a reputation protocol to be reputable and accountable online, even when you are anonymous.* They forgot this for a simple reason, but with grave consequences. Early on, when the Web was being designed, only trusted actors had access to the network, and there was no need for an identity or reputation protocol. As a result of this flaw, on the internet, “nobody knows you are a dog.”¹⁹ You can be anyone, while online actions do not have consequences. Moreover, data and identity are not owned and controlled by the person creating it. Consequently, it is currently impossible for users to transfer their data (identity and reputation) and digital assets from one platform to another, further fortifying the walled gardens that resulted in the monopolies of Big Tech.

When we move from the social, or mobile, internet (also referred to as Web 2.0) to the immersive internet, this quest for data will become only more important. It is data that will drive the immersive internet. The more we do online, the more we integrate the internet into our physical lives, and the further we merge the digital and the physical, the more important data will become. Already, data is the most valuable resource in the world, far more valuable than oil. Simply look at the type of companies that make up the top 50 most valuable companies in 2021; 18 are related to data or (digital) tech, and only three are related to oil and gas.²⁰

Of course, this centralization of data and power is a problem for society. Big Tech owns and controls our data, and with that, they own and control us, as the controversy around Cambridge Analytica has clearly shown. They have long recognized the enormous power and money data brings. We have all fallen into their trap of free services and got addicted to it. As a result, Big Tech has become so powerful that governments are failing to break the power of those companies that deliberately and consistently breach consumers' trust, privacy, and freedom. With the advent of the metaverse, data will only increase in importance. Already in 2018, researchers found that a 20-minute VR game collects 2 million data points, including body movements.²¹ It can, therefore, be expected that Meta also collects vast amounts of data when you use their VR headset. This data most likely includes where you look and how long, what emotions are evoked by what you are watching, and also what your hands look like, your room, the products in your room, and the people in your room. Although Zuckerberg said that privacy and security are important in his announcement on October 28, 2021, Facebook will likely continue to harvest human behavior data and put their predictive algorithms to work to sell ever-more personalized advertising and further disrupt our society with their toxic recommendation algorithms.²² This was only confirmed when in February 2022, Meta threatened to shut down Facebook and Instagram in Europe if Europe would prevent the processing of Europeans' data in the United States.²³

Meta is not the only company abusing our data. A famous saying is that if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. As a result, Web 2.0 resulted in an internet composed of walled gardens where it is impossible to move your own content and data from one platform to another simply because the data is too valuable. Nowadays, users are the data, and platforms are closed, preventing the interoperability of assets that are crucial if we want to deliver upon the promises of the metaverse. Even more, time and again, Big Tech has proven that it is difficult to trust them. In 2021, just after Zuckerberg revealed Meta, an Australian artist by the name Thea-Mai Baumann saw her entire identity on Instagram deleted because her Instagram handle is @metaverse. A decade of hard work suddenly vanished, and she had no way to get it back. Initially, Meta claimed that her account was blocked because she pretended to be someone else, and while Thea-Mai tried to reach out to Instagram to get her account verified, she received no response. Only when she involved the New York Times did Meta respond and restore her profile, claiming that the account had been “incorrectly removed for impersonation.”²⁴ This is exactly why we need a decentralized, open metaverse to prevent companies like Meta from simply deleting someone's entire identity.

Fortunately, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We have started decentralizing the Web, slowly taking back the power from Big Tech to the community. Obviously, this process is fiercely resisted by the incumbents, whether it is China banning all crypto trading or Big Tech eating up all the promising startups to avoid any competition. However, as we will see in the coming decade and throughout this book, the power of decentralization cannot be stopped. Just as hackers have not yet been able to hack the Bitcoin blockchain because it runs on millions of computers, Big Tech and authoritarian governments will not be able to resist the decentralization of the Web.

As we have progressed from Web 1.0 (read-only) to Web 2.0 (read and write but don't own), we are now seeing the first contours of Web 3.0 (read, write, and own). When building Web 1.0, the tools were more primitive and the level of knowledge required to publish a website was higher, but at least websites were published on owned servers instead of the cloud aggregators of AWS, Google, or Microsoft. With Web 3.0 we can revert many of the centralized tendencies of Web 2.0 and bring back power, identity, and control to the user, similar to how it used to be in Web 1.0. If we want to create a metaverse that is beneficial to society, and not just to Big Tech and a tiny elite, we need to embrace the decentralized Web 3.0 and limit the control and influence of Big Tech and prevent the likes of Meta from creating a metaverse just for them to harvest and abuse our data. At the heart of Web 3.0 lies the blockchain.

The distributed ledger tec...