MICROPAYMENTS AND DISTRIBUTED TRUST WITH THE BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION
One key technology that may provide a viable solution for micropayments and the anonymous exchange of payments is the “Blockchain,” which is the underlying trust mechanism in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Don Tapscott & Alex Tapscott just released a book on May 10th about The Blockchain Revolution, which talks about some of the implications of the blockchain including, “Keeping the user’s information anonymous, the blockchain validates and keeps a permanent public record of all transactions. That means that your personal information is private and secure, while all activity is transparent and incorruptible–reconciled by mass collaboration and stored in code on a digital ledger.”
I believe that there are a lot of decentralization implications of the blockchain that could impact our political, economic, and legal systems, and that the blockchain is a technology that has the potential to change the larger context towards enabling the full potential of The Experience Age.
Will companies and the government still try to track and surveil us? Of course. Just because our attention is moving towards the Experience Age doesn’t mean that the Information Age is over. We are still a long ways away from completely transcending the limitations of our current obsession with Big Data and the Information Age business models based upon the pervasive surveillance of our digital lives. We’re still just at the very beginning of this transition, but the overall political and economic context may shift more towards privacy and liberty given the decentralization of power that the blockchain enables. Perhaps after that point, privacy will have become an absolute requirement for any viable implementation of the Metaverse.
THE METAVERSE IN TRANSITION FROM INFORMATION AGE TO EXPERIENTIAL AGE
There are a number of different companies and technologies that would love to be the foundation and primary enablers of the Metaverse, and this battle is unfolding as we are still shifting from the Information Age to the Experiential Age. There are two major approaches to building the foundations of the Metaverse, and it comes down to a walled garden versus open web approach. There are walled garden, hosted virtual world solutions like Linden Lab, AltSpace & Facebook, and then there are more open source or self-hosted solutions such as High Fidelity, VR Chat, JanusVR, self-hosted Unity Builds, or WebVR.
Each of these approaches have different tradeoffs between control and freedom, identity and anonymity, and whether or not there will be different sales or property taxes that are collected within these virtual worlds. It’s also an open question with the walled garden solutions whether or not you’ll be able to export and reclaim ownership over the content that build within these worlds. The walled garden tools will no doubt have some of the most user-friendly content creation tools and communities form around them, but there may be some free speech and behavioral restrictions with these tools and networks. It’s also most likely that the walled garden approaches will have the strongest networks of people and vibrant social interaction.
The Information Age has also had a very punitive mindset when it comes to policing trolling behavior, which could get your IP banned for life. This may have been tolerable for authenticated websites within the Information Age, but getting banned from a virtual world could have implications that are much more serious and long-term. If the Metaverse becomes the primary source of income or social interaction for some people, then banning them could have a much bigger impact on their life. Having the ability to restrict access is one of the potential risks of consolidating power to a private company with no official appeals process.
There will need to be tools to deal with legitimate trolling behavior, but what types of recourse or due process will be available for those who have been unfairly and permanently banned from a virtual world that may be as enriching than the real world? Will could be new truth and reconciliation mechanisms in the Experiential Age where a more restorative justice system evolves that balances accountability with the chance to change and grow?
The walled garden versus open web is a debate has played out on the World Wide Web since the early days of AOL and CompuServe when the balance of power was concentrated within a handful of walled gardens sites. Then the ugly HTML pages become more interconnected, and it was this linking between documents that ultimately provided more value according to Metcalf’s Law. This was a victory for the decentralized open web, but now there seems to be a reconsolidating of power into a small handful of social media, technology, and entertainment websites. Will VR experiences and the evolution of the interconnected Metaverse experience a similar trajectory of Closed, Open, and then Closed again?
CULTIVATING TRUST AND PRIVACY IN THE EXPERIENTIAL AGE
After talking with Ebbe, I realized that a lot of these privacy issues may go beyond what Linden Lab are reasonably able to design for at this point. There is not a lot of direct evidence for how big of a concern these evolving privacy issues are going to be within the context of this New Experiential Age. And there’s not a market demand that can be articulated down to a specific feature request, and so it boils down to whether or not the consumer can trust a company like Linden Lab or Facebook with their data.
Ebbe said that there are some websites that he would not trust with his data, but that he does happen to trust Facebook with the limited amount of engagement he has with the site. But a lot of other people are not so trusting, and they were very vocal with their skepticism when Facebook bought Oculus. Ultimately, in the short-term, there’s no doubt that the Facebook acquisition legitimized VR in a powerful way, and therefore overall helped VR on it’s path towards going mainstream. But yet, the long-term privacy implications for VR are still very much open up for debate.
The Information Age has cultivated a culture where in order to use a website, then we have to sign a Terms of Service where we consent to having all of our actions and behaviors tracked on their site while we’re an authenticated user. Most people barely read the terms of service before checking the box because there have been no real severe consequences. But these same seemingly innocuous Terms of Service may have much broader impact within the Experiential Age.
UploadVR’s Will Mason wrote an article about some of the potential privacy concerns with Facebook and the Oculus Rift’s ‘always on’ process that’s detailed within their Terms of Service. This article got a lot of social media buzz, and it even caught the attention of Senator Al Franken who sent a letter to Oculus asking six specific questions about privacy. The Oculus Terms of Service has a clause that says that “We use the information we collect to send you promotional messages and content and otherwise market to you on and off our Services. We also use this information to measure how users respond to our marketing efforts.”
Oculus responded by saying that they’re not even using that data yet for anything, and that they’re not yet even currently sharing any information with Facebook, but they may do so in the future. Given what the Terms of Service allows, then there’s absolutely nothing stopping them from using that data they’ve collected and sharing it with Facebook at any moment.
Facebook has traditionally taken a slow and steady approach of eroding default privacy controls over many years. Matt McKeon made a visualization of the default privacy settings (shown as blue in the graph below) at Facebook from 2005 to 2010, and the pattern is clearly moving towards making more and more information public by default.
In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation traced the evolution of Facebook’s privacy policies since 2005 to see a very clear story evolve. The EFF concluded the following:
Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.
So while Facebook may be taking a conservative approach to what data they are collecting and sharing with the Oculus Rift, then the clear trajectory is that privacy will continue to erode in order to benefit their advertising and business partners. There seems to be a certain level of autonomy and independence that Oculus is emphasizing to give the impression that they’re still independently operating from Facebook, but this will not last forever. Given Facebook’s history, then it’s almost inevitable that their Information Age business model will continue to push towards gathering and analyzing as much data as possible for the sake of selling more ads.
CONCLUSION
There are a lot of open questions as to whether the future of the Metaverse will be dominated by a handful of walled garden sites or a larger set of openly connected virtual worlds.
Here’s a number of open questions that can only be answered over time by the virtual reality community, and eventually everyone as we transition into the Experiential Age.
- Will any of these companies building the Metaverse be willing to take a strong stand on privacy?
- Do VR consumers even care? Or will it even matter?
- As users of VR, will be we willing to support a culture of micropayments or pay-per-events?
- Or do we want an ad-supported immersive future where we’re willing to be share whatever data on us can be gathered and used to get better targeted advertising?
- Will the winning business models of the future be based upon an Information Age paradigm or some sort of emerging Experiential Age paradigm?
- Will it be a matter of the best technology winning? Or will market demand for strong values around privacy be a differentiating factor?
These are all big open questions, and you can bet that some users will be keeping a close eye on these terms of service as we continue to move into the Experiential Age. Ebbe was right that many of these questions go beyond what individual businesses may have the capability to reasonably address, especially with the lack of consumer demand for specific features.
But if we really are in the midst of moving from the Information Age to the Experiential Age, then perhaps we’ll start to see a larger shift in the political, economic, and legal context. Then perhaps this will enable us to fully live up to the ultimate potential of virtual reality that accurately reflects the full complexity and beauty of the human experience. And ultimately any tracking and data that’s collected will be primarily focused on enriching our experiences within VR rather than enriching a small handful of companies at the cost of our privacy and freedom.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
