The Metaverse: Human Empowerment or Dystopian Matrix?
What the 'Metaverse', the internet in Virtual Reality user interface, could become
The ‘Metaverse’ is broadly marketed as something in between Facebook’s new business model (but also a re-branding to avoid accusations of monopoly and intentionally questionable business practices in the same manner that British Petroleum became Beyond Petroleum but then destroyed the entire food chain in the Gulf of Mexico) and Bored Apes Yacht Club Ethereum NFTs, which happen to already share a logo with Hitler’s Waffen SS, with more Californian design preferences.
Given how obviously suspect all this already looks, clearly it is necessary to unpack lest we all become slaves to the consumption of and entertainment provided by all this media and gas-lighting, that we’ve come to expect whenever media is involved. According to Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good, so let’s all do our best to buck the economic trends. Surely if Mark Zuckerberg and BAYC’s Neo-Nazi dog whistle tokens are the best we can do then both the Metaverse and Web 3.0 are doomed, and probably so are we.
The following article will split up potential visions for the ‘Metaverse’ based upon varying preferences of those building them and those consuming what each vision is likely to provide. You are Neo in the Matrix and I aim to be the pharmacist independently advising you on the various options, according to my best understanding.
The Blue Pill Metaverse
Centralized Architecture with Procedural AI
In ‘Who Owns the Future’, Jaron Lanier argues that Web 2.0 has become fundamentally toxic. In the beginning of the first Dot-Com Bubble with there was decentralized infrastructure, web startups would run their own web servers and many competing ideas about how web services could be offered following the invention of Javascript, which allowed for Turing Complete applications to run in the browser.
Following the Dot-Com Bubble collapse, web server infrastructure started to become much more centralized and website hosting became offered as a low margin service. Metcalfe’s Law meant that those sites that could best capture the network effects within their own platforms succeeded best and hoovered up the rest of the market . This residual effect of both technology and economics gave rise to what we commonly term the ‘Big Tech Platforms’ of today: Meta (Facebook), Twitter, Google, Amazon, while Microsoft and Apple adapted their businesses models to accommodate their own native ‘Cloud Services’ and ‘App Stores’.
The limited mechanics of Web 2.0 could not and cannot price individual process channels meant, and still means, that those sites offering services do so for ‘free’ or, like Amazon, at very low cost and efficiency. The result of this is threefold:
Malicious botnets and shills are cheap to create and maintain, up to and including physical DDOS attacks, and the meta-violence of battles between these ‘Psywar’ and cyber-security operatives drowns out the signals from well meaning and conscientious contributors. Ryan X. Charles attempted to solve this problem using Bitcoin at Reddit, but was predictably shouted down.
Platforms that rely upon a business model that is ‘free at point of use’ no longer view the users as customers. Those who harness data from the users, for ends that may or may not fuel further ‘Psywar’ and cyber-security concerns, that may or may not subvert democracy, cause mental illness in young people, enable crime or any other set of nefarious and largely unregulated ends, are the customers. Meta and Google pitch this as ‘Targeted Advertising’, but in terms of the regulatory and economic reality it could be targeted anything.
Censorship becomes motivated by profit, not by facts: both the profit of the Web 2.0 platform itself and the profit of the platform’s customers, who aren’t the platform’s users.
In addition to the already very inherently violent and misleading dynamics that Web 2.0 has become prone to, artificial intelligence has made incredible advances in recent years. This radically lowers the cost of creating false online identities and false information.
Open AI’s DALL-E 2 can procedurally generate realistic and aesthetically pleasing art entirely from text and voice commands.
Thus Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse coould well become an entirely distractionary endless form of escapism, not only hacking the brain stems of users as described by Tristan Harris, but their dreams and expectations as well, divorcing users from reality even further, accelerating the decline in mental and emotional health.
The potential horrors of this technology are limited only by the imaginations of those selling it. The Siren Server attention economy currently profits from suicidal ideation in teenagers, from body dis-morphia, from amplifying anxieties and insecurities of all kinds. While Meta sell a seemingly fun vision, below is a procedurally generated 4K 3D video from the dark side of the psych.
In addition to this, artificial intelligence start up Pantheon Lab currently sell technology that can create entirely artificial people with artificial voices and plant them in any background. The potential for misuse of this technology, when politics and media are currently inextricably linked, and when Psywar is becoming a Hyper-normalized aspect of conflict, is vast.
In my own opinion, as a Process Safety Engineer and former member of the UK Institute of Chemical Engineers, is that Web 2.0 platforms are already inherently unsafe and unsustainable. They are currently operating in ‘incident mitigation’ mode because their incident prevention systems have failed catastrophically: as highlighted by CoVid-19, as highlighted by January 6th in Washington DC, the ‘Trucker Protests’ in Canada and the mass censorship that led to the creation of alternative platforms like Substack. The ‘Blue Pill Metaverse’ model being sold by Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg is being used as a protection and emergency response measure to protect their own business model and their customers in the event of numerous catastrophic failures highlighted by the aforementioned events, which were created by the fundamental principles of the Attention Economy and of Siren Servers highlighted by Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier.
Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, no matter the safety measures that they put in place and no matter how many politicians they can convince of their efficacy, cannot change the fundamental principles upon which their business model is built, neither can they change the profit incentives of the capitalists system in which they operate: where their duty is to their shareholders, not to the safety of their users.
Enough lives have been lost already and enough livelihoods ruined by the pernicious and inherently unsafe nature of the Web 2.0 Siren Server mode of operation, however many of the systems of modern power have become so inherently dependent upon them that we cannot expect them to change. The effects of demoralization and Hypernormalization have created a situation not unlike The Matrix, and it’s now incumbent upon us to exercise our own free will and choose to escape, if we want to.
The Red Pill Metaverse
Decentralized with AI-enabled Engineering Design and Simulation
Despite rumors and speculations to the contrary Web 3.0, the decentralized web, is not not dead, it’s only getting started. As engaged, self-responsible and creative human beings willing to take the ‘Red Pill’ it is important to look at Web 3.0 as an engineer or a designer rather than as an investor or as a consumer.
From a designer’s and an engineer’s perspective BitcoinSV alone is enough to prove that a genuinely decentralized Web 3.0, where users own and control their own data, is eminently achievable:
Bitcoin Script on BitcoinSV operates as a 2 Stack Push Down Automaton and is therefore Turing Complete. As shown here, here, here and here.
Teranode will allow BitcoinSV to scale to VISA/Mastercard level transaction volume and beyond. 50 000 transactions per second using Bitcoin will be possible in the near future. Thus there is no need to move ‘beyond Bitcoin’, Bitcoin,as described in the Satoshi Nakamoto Whitepaper, already achieves this.
At this transaction rate, using Simplified Payment Verification, it is possible to begin to replace the Web 2.0 Transmission Control Protocol with Bitcoin Payment Channels at scale as Ryan X Charles began to explore at Reddit.
BitcoinSV carries with it a long history of entrepreneurs and start ups who have viewed Bitcoin from the beginning as an Operating System for Spaceship Earth and the best examples of this exist on the pseudonymous _unwriter’s blog. Bitcom’s work is most interesting in my opinion. They were experimenting with using Bitcoin as a basic Linux shell with name-spacing, directory storage, and basic commands for decentralized applications. The basic file storage service Bico uses Bitcom’s BCAT protocol to upload files directly to the BitcoinSV blockchain. You can learn all about this legacy of work at BSV Academy.
Project Babbage encapsulates all of the principles of of this legacy of Bitcoin ‘as global computer’ in addition to sCrypt. Project Babbage’s Action Protocol framework and its long term system vision in addition to the flexibility of sCrypt for distributed applications form a very solid foundation upon which Web 3.0 can be achieved.
The first and most fundamental problem that Web 3.0 can solve is the fundamental asymmetry that exists as a result of Graphics Process Unit and its associated technology. NVidia’s business model currently takes maximum advantage of this asymmetry in the following ways:
Consumer VR and 3D user interface technology currently focus on gaming and exist within a Siren Server Web 2.0 platform model. NVidia sells GPUs to gamers who are largely then unable to capitalize upon their power.
NVidia’s Artificial Intelligence and Robotics cloud model and open source tools were, according to my understanding, initially taken from John Sokol following the expiry of an NDA between NVidia and John Sokol. These tools are used by NVidia to profit from B2B AI and Robotics services, while Open Source roboticists are unable to break into existing ‘walled garden’ markets.
NVidia sells its Holodeck engineering design VR tele-presence software as a B2B service. This tool massively accelerates the engineering design processes of global engineering businesses, increasing their profits, while NVidia’s general consumer base are left out.
Within 3D and VR technology itself there are both corporate game engines and open source game engines, supported by communities of developers out of pure passion. Godot Game Engine is the best of these in my opinion. Godot uses a powerful dynamic scripting language called GDScript and comes fully featured without the strings of using corporate solutions like Unity or Unreal Engines. Using BitconSV as a substrate, Godot can create its own asset marketplace, currently only the prerogative of corporate solutions, and ultimately start to unleash the power of game engine technology as 3D simulation, like NVidia already do for B2B customers.
In this way Web 3.0 can allow not only Godot developers to own and capitalize upon what they create, but also allow for those playing games to own and capitalize upon their creations. Such a transformation could turn gaming into a highly paid profession.
Of course in order to pay wages above minimum, we need to trust those we’re hiring and working with. Web 3.0 allows people to turn their transaction record into a CV, corroborated by their peers. With Web 3.0 and tools such as Git, developed by Linus Torvalds to manage updates to the Linux Kernel, which runs on billions of devices globally. Git is used regularly by >100 million developers globally to manage projects collaboratively, using Merkle Trees to manage the data integrity of updates in the same way that Bitcoin uses Merkle Trees to manage the integrity of transaction records and implement Simplified Payment Verification. Rather than think of our transaction record as a bank account, Web 3.0 allows us to turn our transaction record into a valuable and trusted reputation.
In terms of already corroborated, the Open Source Robotic Operating System (ROS) has already become widely used in industry via Shawn Edwards. Shawn was fed up with using proprietary software in his robotics projects, with all the legal work required to build and commission new projects. Shawn therefore worked to develop a set of core ROS libraries that met the rigor of commercial deployment. This project is called ROS Industrial.
Shawn’s company, Plus One Robotics, has since gained investment from BMW iVentures and as well as working with BMW, Plus One Robotics also work for Amazon to develop warehouse robots. ROS Industrial’s current members list include not only the former but also Boeing, Johnson and Johnson, Microsoft, Amazon, Fraunhofer, Panasonic, NRC-CNRC and NIST. And while these organisations contribute to the ROS Industrial code-base and pay membership fees, individual contributors to ROS and ROS Industrial receive no remuneration for their contributions. Meanwhile UT Austin, Texas, is using ROS to develop robots for the US Military in partnership with the United States Army Futures Command, taking advantage of the United States’ Department of Defense $800 billion annual budget.
This is something of a far cry from the original vision of Open Source technology, the original ethos of which was to take technology out of the hands of Power Capital Oligarchs and put it in the hands of ordinary people. The Linux kernel, Godot Game Engine and ROS Industrial prove that Open Source technology can stand on its own two feet next to corporate and government technology, so much so that corporations and government are now sequestering this technology in the absence of their own ability to innovate internally, beyond horizontal mimetic growth and demand stimulation, now often fed by Web 2.0 Siren Servers.
My good friend James Jones explains in this Ted Talk how and why the desires and demands of the modern global economy are fundamentally unsustainable, but rather than use this as an excuse to print himself and his friends $130 trillion , like Mark Carney did, he presents a viable technological solution called ‘Cubespawn’. Cubespawn is a modular manufacturing solution that lowers the cost of autonomous manufacturing by >90% and the concept has been corroborated by the same people who helped Shawn Edwards develop ROS Industrial and the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
With Cubespawn operating on top of a viable Web 3.0 platform, users can own and share engineering and manufacturing data, while project managing and coordinating organically in order to build higher order goods. This takes every advantage of automated robotics, Metcalfe effects and the autonomy of people to manage themselves, elevating and empowering ordinary people in a way that rewards them for their own autonomy and discernment in a genuinely circular economy, where Power Capital hierarchy is minimized. We can not only recycle our own waste materials, but take more advantage of local natural resources as well.
RChain is an interesting Proof of Stake DAG solution, ostensibly capable of similar transaction volume to BitcoinSV, which a scripting language called Rholang which is specifically designed to work in asynchronous distributed systems. Rholang allows for very complex smart contracts with object capabilities and has as history, prior to becoming a block chain technology, as a biotechnology start up called Plectix BioSystems. I may write about it more in future, but I encourage readers to do their own research.
The Green Pill Metaverse
The Red Pill Metaverse with IoT Devices and Augmented Reality for Ecological and Sustainability Management
Human beings rely upon our infrastructure. BitcoinSV is proving that Web 3.0 can form a foundational infrastructure layer upon which the internet can work reliably, freed from Siren Servers and the structural asymmetries of Power Capital, which leaves human beings free to perform their primary existential functions as an intelligent species in harmony with Mother Earth:
Care for and nurture our environment, our natural infrastructure, and our youth, irrespective of race, gender or creed
Build and maintain engineering infrastructure that improves life and quality of life for all, in harmony with our natural infrastructure and with a long term view that benefits future generations
Resolve Material Facts between ourselves within a sound moral framework
Between my Buddhist and Christian moral framework, and between all human beings on planet Earth who value our precious biosphere and all its rich diversity of flora and fauna, and Professional Engineering Law, which underpins all the wonderful conveniences of our infrastructure that provides our water, our electricity, our ability to communicate over long distances, we have a strong basis of potential consensus to use Web 3.0 reward, and not censor, human beings for behaving responsibly and with high integrity.
Before I learned about BitcoinSV late last year, in 2021 Vinay Gupta and I had similar ideas about implementation. Since I started messaging about BitcoinSV on Twitter he’s stopped responding, but Mattereum is and always has been a brilliant project with a fundamentally sound vision. Opensea does it no justice whatsoever.
I arranged with Vinay to work with the Royal Academy of Engineers, upon the request of Paul Taylor FREng and Brian Collins FREng to somewhat agree with what the NSPE, ASCE, ASME and NAIC in the United States already agree upon, which is that Daniel Robles has good ideas about how Bitcoin could empower engineers, expand the market for engineering and create more engineers with more knowledge. But maybe they don’t actually want that, because they flaked.
Can we entrust our infrastructure with flakes? In my opinion it’s flakes and low integrity, low character leaders that cause most of humanity’s problems. I’m very much of the Mack Story school of leadership. Engineering should first and foremost be a profession that rewards those who are prepared to stand behind their own commitments and not stand behind excuses.
The world contains millions of good engineers and billions of people with a good heart intention to make the world better if they were given the opportunity to do so. These people are the real leaders and the people who are really going to lead positive change.
The Black Pill Metaverse
The Blue Pill Metaverse with IoT Devices and Augmented Reality for Ecological and Sustainability Management (You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy)
Klaus Schwab is a good example of a man standing behind many excuses these days. He can’t explain where his money comes from, and has serious trouble explaining his background and actions without raising very serious suspicion. There are people who’ve done much more research than I have on this man and his associates, cursory internet searches should reveal all sorts of things.
If we leave the management of our infrastructure, our environment and our future up to people like Klaus Schwab, who can’t explain the provenance of their authority, much less their wealth, and do not get involved in challenging prevailing systems and building the future we want to see, the future is likely to be built for us by them, and will likely look a lot like this:
The ‘Black Pill’ meme on the internet is typically associated with and fringe dark existential beliefs. But there is one dark existential belief that we cannot escape: that the world exists as it is made by people. This is no different to what Steve Jobs said.
The Iron Pill Metaverse
The current ongoing psychological, spiritual and technological battle deciding our personal and collective fates
Below is a list of of collated videos that explain a lot about the current reality. This material will likely become the subject of future articles, but until then just treat this content as me appreciating you, and appreciating that we’re all in the same boat in a lot of ways: trying to extract the complex from the confusing, the legend from the myth, and all the while running in the hamster wheel of late-capitalist precarity.
Until next time…