About My Ambivalence Towards a Centralized Metaverse

The more I contemplate the metaverse, the more excited I get. The more I contemplate the metaverse, the more worried I get.

Before Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, ‘A metaverse company’ the technology excited me. The possibilities this technology could bring to people through all walks of life. As the Tech gets smaller and cheaper as always happens with technology, we can bring education to those who couldn’t access it, Stanford have already introduced VR classes, and we can expect this kind of tech to work its way down to those who actually need it as it gets cheaper. We can improve the quality of life for disabled people. Hell, it can improve the quality of life for the average person. Physical activity has dropped, not just due to the pandemic, but due to the rise in Television, online gaming and sitting in front of your smartphone scrolling through social media. Watch Ready Player One, everyone is in the metaverse but they’re not lounging on a sofa, they’re running around on multi directional treadmill devices. Similar devices exist now that we can actually buy. Let’s face it we’re going to get fitter.

Mark Zuckerberg brought me back down to reality. A true metaverse would be built by the people, run by the people it would truly be decentralized. But the truth is even in Ready Player One the metaverse was run by one corporation, Gregarious Simulation Systems, although we never see it or how it was run, it wasn’t the decentralized entity that we’re all hoping the Metaverse will be. Now let’s consider IOI the company from Ready Player One looking to take over Gregarious Simulation Systems, in one scene the movie directs us to how much advertising space can be taken up in a players vision before inducing seizures. That’s a fine example of why one organization can’t be allowed to control the metaverse. Facebooks cavalier attitude to privacy and data gathering is another, and that ones a reality, not science fiction.

Speaking of reality we can most likely expect there to be a number of decentralized metaverse platforms which hopefully, will bring interoperability between them. The danger is one organization, Meta, has which already has a very large user base ready and waiting to be sucked into their metaverse. And we can be pretty confident that the company formally known as Facebook has been working on metaverse tech behind the scenes for a considerable amount of time. Take the Oculus VR tech which is actually made by what is now Metaquest. Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014 so we can see how long this has been on the books for them. The questions we have to ask is will Meta take a decentralized approach? I think we can look at Facebooks attempts at entering the cryptocurrency market with Diem. Formally known as Libra, Diem runs on a permissioned network of centralized companies, and it’s been hinted at that Meta is considering integrating NFT’s into the Diem compatible wallet, Novi.

Considering the above It’s safe to say Meta will be based around a permissioned Diem network.

This centralization creates a closed ecosystem fully controlled by Meta and we can see what Facebook can do with this control. This centralized approach will be incompatible with true decentralized metaverse with which we are likely to find interactions difficult. Decentralized is permissionless blockchain architecture meaning anyone can come and build metaverse applications and acquire metaverse real estate and assets. A big benefit of this decentralized architecture is its open and barrier-free allowing interoperability between the open metaverse platforms meaning assets such as NFT’s and cryptocurrencies can be transferrable. Given what is likely to be Meta’s centralized metaverse how will they approach this transferability? We’ve already talked about Metas user base, it dwarfs the current blockchain user base massively. So What will Meta do, will they look to creating some form of interoperability with the current decentralized platforms or will they rely on their size in an attempt to dominate?

Don’t get me wrong decentralized metaverse will have its own problems to solve but it is decentralized which means there are a lot of clever people out their ready to solves these problems without having to adhere to the agenda of a large multinational organization.