Towards a Digital Animism
Why popular conceptions of the Metaverse don't scale
In mainstream thinking about the AR and the Metaverse, there’s a common theme that seems incompatible with reality.
The idea is that, at a global scale, somehow all the world’s augments will manifest in the same space at the same time, or that all virtual things will be visible to all users at the same time. No filtering, pure bedlam.
Fictional depictions of metaversey worlds reinforce the notion, from Snow Crash to Wreck-It Ralph 2 to Ready Player One. In each we’re given images of a vast assemblage of an endless horde of incongruous avatars. Seemingly infinite constructions, infrastructure, and activities are all laid on top of one another all at once in an impossible 3D conurbation.
It makes sense in the context of storytelling that’s intended to convey the shocking scope and prismatic expression of a 3D, immersive internet. It’s fun. It’s a mess. Shit is flying everywhere. Monsters, robots, dragons, neon, etc. — it’s what you’d expect if somebody in the early 90s imagined what the internet would be like in, say, the late 90s.
And the idea is an obvious first approximation when contemplating what it would mean to have many inter-operating immersive virtual experiences.
Unfortunately, I’m getting the impression that “Minecraft and Fortnite and Robolox in the same room at the same time” is as far as some have gotten towards imagining what it might be like to experience a Metaverse as they’ve been described.
That sounds fun I guess but there’s an elephant in the room.
The Map and the Territory Again
The idea of, by default, seeing, and digitally interacting with, every virtual thing within your proximity only holds up if you imagine AR as something made by others, obeying rules made by others, for you to passively consume.
In a system like that, the central organizing authority could maintain order, leasing out real-world real estate (like in Second Life but, uh … Life), and arbitrating the rights of creators to place augments ‘on’ people, trademarks, places, and things.
If you instead imagine that you and everyone else might rather be creators in this new medium, you quickly realize that this notion doesn’t scale. Who gets to decide what goes where? Does it all just pile up? Do we bid for position like AR is one big Facebook ad?
Popular physical places have a limit on how crowded with people and things they can become because electromagnetism says we can’t pass through each other, and because people generally don’t like touching strangers or seeing their things in a heap.
There’s no corresponding limit in AR, which means if there’s a ‘1:1 map’, in which there’s a single digital world overlaid on top of our own, that means either things are going to get really crowded, or we’re bringing landlords1 along with us into our augmented future.
We’d be carrying along the notion of property rights for no reason I can think of except to preserve capital’s role in making sure there are still serfs in a post-scarcity world. That’s assuming we’re intentionally modeling an AR internet in the image of our ideals. We are, aren’t we?
Purely virtual things — and here I should clarify that by ‘purely virtual’ I mean things that have no direct ‘anchor’ relationship to something in the physical world — represent only one facet of the problem, though, and when compared to My Kind of Augments™️ (the anchored sort) they have a different solution set for the kind of visibility permission / filtering problem they present to the end user.
The other, possibly bigger, issue with the ‘everything everywhere all at once’ / 1:1 map conception of an AR Metaverse lies with that latter kind of augment - payloads that are explicitly connected to people, places, and things.
Naturally, there’s no practical limitation on the ‘space’ available for augments, whether of the purely virtual or anchored kind. Any number of them could coexist, whether they’re represented as ‘in’ the same location in physical space or they’re attached to the same idea, trademark, symbol, image, person, place, or thing. Any system that has such a limitation baked-in is deliberately designed with rent-seeking front of mind.
Geo-located augments — virtual things that are intended to be viewed in a specific place — are one of the easiest augment flavors for most people to reason about, so let’s start there.
Imagine a heavily-trafficked location - say, Times Square. Tons of eyeballs means Times Square is a great place to put something you want a lot of people to see — hence all the billboards today.
If you’re making an augment that you want lots of others to stumble across, you might want to ‘leave it’ in Times Square, right? Naturally, you wouldn’t be the only one who had this idea.
But if we had a 1:1 map and the kind of ‘hard mode’ Metaverse where everyone sees every augment in sight at all times, well that would be a mess. You wouldn’t have a clear sight line through the digital detritus with which to see where you were going.
Similarly, you could imagine the astounding amount of cruft that would pile up around famous people or well-known images or products, etc.
For example, if anyone could attach an augment to any thing, how many augments do you think would be anchored to, say, a can of Sprite? Or the Mona Lisa? You’d never see the painting again.
It flat-out doesn’t scale.
Don’t Dream of Bad Futures
The scarcity thinking behind this idea, come by honestly and primed by images in popular culture, plays into a pernicious trap. It’s a construct where space — 3D space, cognitive space, and semantic space — is at a premium, and the gatekeepers — the platform owners and the ecosystem creators — collect rent to access it.
To those with the best of intentions nonetheless modeling their walled-garden systems under the total control of a central authority, it probably sounds like a compromise that trades openness for safety and quality. Less choice, more certainty.
Aside from the bottlenecking of expression down to a single authoritative augment per quanta of anchor, which is Bad, the glaring problem with allowing even the most well-meaning group the power to control augment space is that they’ll still shape it in their image. The products of an endless string of judgement calls required to curate and maintain the rules of an authoritative mapping themselves represent an encoding of the values of the authority.
This is marketed as a feature in the smartphone wars — concerned about privacy? Use an Apple product. They ruthlessly police their app store and are reshaping the internet itself to protect you from tracking. Care more about choice? Android or Windows are more of a free-for-all where customizability and freedom are prioritized over security and privacy defaults.
In AR we may have a dozen viable options, each an expression of a different philosophy on what augment space is for, and to whom it belongs. I’m not sure that itself is necessarily a bad thing unless there exists no space shared across all of them, free to anyone to contribute. A forum.
Babylon
The companies working on these AR platforms - they’re playing for keeps. Given their way, there are few of them that would elect to have any competition at all. That means if somebody wins meaningful primacy and establishes the Metaverse of Record, we’ll be more at their mercy in AR than we are at Google’s when it comes to what rises to the top on the web.
But that sucks.
What could be a greater expression of the American technocrat’s conviction of the objectivity of their viewpoint than thinking we could ever agree on the names of things on our map, much less what virtual thing can go where? Assuming there is a mapping, a Metaverse, is to ignore that there could never be a consensus on the map.
We can’t even have consensus on normal maps today - the ones intended to reflect political boundaries on the real world. On top of that we all speak different languages. Even if we speak the same language, we don’t agree on definitions. We even inhabit different internets. To think the world is mappable is a category error.
American and European readers - be honest - when you think of a future where a sizeable segment of the world is using AR, do you picture the hardware and platforms — however many there are — being made by American companies?
Naturally! Every one of them, right? Whether Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Magic Leap, Snap, Niantic, Epic, or some newcomer, it’ll be an American company that makes your AR contacts and the ecosystem they run in, right?
While it may seem from a Euro-American perspective that American software and hardware companies are the only ones creating, in a meaningful way, the stuff of the internet, and thus it may seem likely that they’ll create whatever we regard as the successor to the internet, that’s just because you don’t live in a segregated internet like China or its OBOR orbit.
Meta (Facebook) seem like a pretty inevitable player in our AR future, whatever it is, doesn’t it? 17,000 employees working on a Metaverse play and a bet-the-farm rebranding from one of the world’s largest companies is likely to result in some not-insignificant foothold in the market. This notwithstanding the … upsetting glimpse of Horizon Worlds released last week.
But Facebook is banned in China. Chinese citizens, by and large, use WeChat instead, they among the 1.26 billion people who use the app worldwide. Google is available in China, but it’s not really Google. It’s Google China, and it’s not good for much. Chinese citizens (582M MAU) use Sina Weibo (they use different microblogging apps there too) or Baidu or instead. It’s like a whole other internet over there (sorry Condi)!
Anyway, when you think of the Metaverse, the big-tent version, with orcs and spaceships and octocats going about, you probably picture some free-as-in-speech NSFW MA-17 stuff happening in there right? Also maybe some exercise-of-free-speech stuff like protests and, just normal free speech, right? That’s not going to fly in a truly unfortunate number of countries around the world.
Of course, I’m making the argument that the internet is already fragmented today, but does that mean we should design a future internet that encodes our American cultural perspectives in such a way as to nearly guarantee its incompatibility with the views of other societies?
Or maybe we could design a system that is fundamentally agnostic about not just what is hosted, but how it’s searched, how it’s filtered, and how it is semantically anchored to the real world, and in the process design for the possibility that we all inhabit the same AR?
I’m here to argue that the things we hate are going to exist whether we sanction them or not, and that we’re very unlikely to agree on what the bad things are. Your favorite thing might be blasphemy in another’s eyes, and vice-versa theirs in yours. In my vision it’s on the business end — in the client or the client’s cloud of last-mile services — that we choose how we personally drink from the firehose.
Yes, I have details. Read on…
A spicy teaser — a cliffhanger, if you will
If you don’t subscribe to Augmented Realist already, now is an excellent time to start (for free!), and not just because now precedes everything that will happen next.
Next post I’m going to lay out a position on what exactly augments are — a framing that has legal and constitutional implications for a hypothetical AR web.
Twill be spicy, and will set the stage for the Big Pitch, where I make some first-approximation napkin-sketch proposals for what a real AR Web could look like.
Smash subscribe below, tell a friend, forward to your boss, chat it up in your Roblox Discord, nail it to the door of your church, etc.
https://decentraland.org/ « it is hard to tell you how much joy I derive from using a footnote as a dig