A Metaverse Manifesto, Part 1: We’re already in the metaverse. ~via @KatieRichman
Katie Richman is one of the smartest marketers and product people I know. I truly value her insights, leadership, and perspective. Her roles at ESPN for 10 years, and now Facebook for 7 years have provided her a view like few others. Here, in a 2-part series, she shares her current take on the Metaverse/metaverse... it's a perspective we all need to read. /Ted
Excited to ‘go into The Metaverse’? This is your lucky day.
Disclaimer: These are MY ideas and I speak only for myself. Opinions and beliefs only, so take that as you will.
Why did Facebook change the company name to Meta? In my opinion, it has everything to do with a Mark Zuckerberg Q&A I attended 7 years ago.
(This is an opinion Mark has shared himself publicly, so I feel fine sharing this little anecdote…)
7 years ago, I grabbed a beer and attended one of my first employee weekly Q&A’s with Zuck and his senior leads in person. It was that end-of-summer Q&A, where all the summer interns dare each other to line up and ask a question (just to say they did). A brave intern stepped up to the mic and asked what sounded like a very vanilla question:
“Mark, what is your vision for Facebook in 10 years?”
Mark thought for a moment and then said something I’ve never forgotten:
“I want to craft a new world where we all look up from our devices.”
In Web 2.0, we are all phone zombies.
A lot has happened between that Q&A and now.
As a Developer Program lead, I had a front seat to the wild swings from open public APIs and data access to a closed and broken developer ecosystem. I’ve never forgotten Mark’s answer, though, and it has steered me personally as the going got tough.
Since then, the world has veered from ‘tech companies can do no wrong’ to ‘tech companies can do no right.’ Social platforms and products have smart, savvy users… often with diametrically-opposed, strongly-held beliefs on how social platforms should behave.
But I stay at Facebook (ahem Meta) for a lot of reasons… but mostly because I believe in Mark’s reply to that intern:
I also want to create a world where people look up from their devices.
I believe this vision can (and will) be realized with Web 3.0 and the metaverse. To me, we don’t GO to The Metaverse…the metaverse brings live tech to US.
How did we get to Web 3.0?
We can’t talk about the metaverse without a quick look back at previous phases of the internet. Cue wavy-fingered flashback sequence…
Web 1.0 was hardwired, and it was not accessible to the public. Those users were the architects — computer programmers, engineers. Even those users had to have access to wildly-expensive hardware via select companies and a few universities. But the bulletin boards of this phase teed us up for Web 2.0 — a consumer-accessible internet.
Web 2.0. The internet as most of us think of it. Storage capabilities skyrocketed. Mobile infra became accessible and suddenly, the World Wide Web was for us all.
Halfway through, the consumer internet + mobile spawned bulletin boards, then new social experiences hosted by platforms like MySpace, then Facebook and Twitter.
We’re at the mature, tail-end of this phase, as kids in much of the world grow up taking internet access and real-time human connection for granted. (I say this acknowledging that connecting the world continues to be a challenge, as internet access is required to live in our world. In this way, Internet access is tied directly to human rights).
Online gaming went from nerdy D&D players only…to mom’s playing games in line at the supermarket.
And some kids were born, taking this tech access for granted.
Web 3.0. The next phase. The early days of Web 3.0 are now upon us with the advent of decentralized services, removing the gatekeepers we know so well.
Things like storing and transferring digital currency or buying a house can be peer-to-peer via smart contracts, DAOs.
Data can be stored in external, decentralized servers, not ‘owned’ by any one product or provider.
Blockchain will enable us to ensure authenticity.
Lots of today’s middlemen roles become duplicative, and eventually obsolete. The key now will be for us to champion a tech-integrated world, with digital integrations seamlessly operating everywhere. As Mark envisioned, I believe we will be able to look up from our phones. Soon.
In 2022, the words are getting in the way.
It’s my strong believe that right now, our words are getting in the way of progress. There are so many examples of this, but off the top of my head, the biggest offenders are: Web 3, The Metaverse (with a capital ‘M’), and NFTs.
As we’re all well-aware now, The Metaverse as a term and concept was coined in science fiction, so we shouldn’t be surprised that people are confused. Users are not stupid, but we’ve failed to talk about blockchain and Web 3.0 in a cohesive and intelligible way. Early definitions and concepts were sketched out by the early adopters, who tended to be gamers, software engineers, and sci-fi fans. Loss of control and growing paranoia about computers has fueled the “computers are taking over the world” doomsday vision.
Similarly, an NFT is simply a non-fungible (interchangable) token. The name was coined to differentiate these tokens from fungible cryptocurrency, which ARE interchangable (think of pennies). After currency, the pop art world of collectibles was the first to latch on, with this Bored Ape Yacht Club-type use case. Now, these pop art digital images have come to define the term “NFT”.
These early definitions are what we (in tech) have to redefine in 2022. In their place, we need to create a syntax that is cohesive, humanized, and represents the collective internet. We need to realize Mark’s vision from 7 years ago, reframing our relationship with technology and putting US at the center. Tech services will come to US, rather than us to THEM.
THAT is the vision of the metaverse (lowercase) that I’m so excited about.
“So this is The Metaverse, huh?”
I believe that our community of early Web 3.0 believers must quickly reframe ‘The Metaverse’ (some place you go in VR) as ‘the metaverse’ (lowercase) — a new human-centric relationship with our technology, that is deep and organic, putting US first. We need to replace the Ready Player One vision (where we ‘jack in’ to a VR world, where humans lose their autonomy and privacy) to one of a world without platform gatekeepers; a world that puts people firmly in control of their data decisions in clear language.
Here’s the interesting part:
If we believe in this reframed vision of the metaverse (an integrated life, imbued with technology), we clearly see that we’re already IN the metaverse — we just need to keep going.
Think about the platforms we speak to every day, that are allowing us NOW to look up from our devices:
I say “Alexa, buy more diapers,” and can quickly purchase and have delivered while I’m giving the baby a bath.
I use Waze to drive from Connecticut to DC for a wedding. Waze uses traffic data to actively re-route me around a huge accident while I’m driving, without me ever stopping to search a map.
Audible reads my new books to me while I do laundry, following me throughout the house, into my car, and on my errands.
Ticketmaster tips me off when John Mayer tickets go on sale, bidding on my behalf within the dollar range I pre-set, purchasing the tickets and sending to me while I’m napping.
And better yet — this definition of the (lowercase) metaverse isn’t opposed to VR immersive experiences — it includes those experiences as one aspect of our lives… but ‘the metaverse’ (lowercase) is way more inclusive than VR. The ‘lowercase-metaverse’ is persistent: always there, always on, universal. It operates seamlessly and invisibly in the background of our lives, connecting our digital actions with our real-world experiences. It can be as invisible as each user allows or desires, and it’s as much a part of reality as the physical world around us.
Roadblocks
Mark Zuckerberg, from the Meta Connect conference in October 2021:
“Interoperability, open standards, privacy, and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one… And with all the novel technologies that are being developed, everyone who’s building for the metaverse should be focused on building responsibly from the beginning.”
As he expressed in late 2021, with the launch of Meta, the vision of ONE holistic metaverse has two major roadblocks today: technical infrastructure and platform interoperability. I’d like to propose a 3rd one: communication.
Technical Infrastructure
As we know from the past, the tech will come with the compounding speed of technical innovation. That’s been proven time and again, and will continue to be the case. I’m putting a pin in that, as I’m not a back-end engineer.
2. Interoperability
Web 2.0 products and platforms are self-enclosed like planets unto themselves.
The metaverse described in this post, relies on platform interoperability — and that is not a given. Quite the opposite. Our Web 2.0 internet of today is an app-based ecosystem, where each product or platform is the center of it’s own little universe. As users, we have to stop to fire up individual applications, entering into them for a time, and then leaving them when we get what we came for. And likewise, these days we each have hundreds (if not thousands!) of these ‘little universes’ to participate in, each with their own user accounts and profiles.
These hundreds of products and services monetize our data and actions in covert (at worst) or unclear (at best) ways. As a Web 2.0 product/business, I must “own” the user and be the one to store their data — it is the model, and it’s crucial to success and monetization.
3. Communication of this Web 3.0 vision
Here’s the one I added. I believe lack of clear communication is a roadblock today between the tech builders and the rest of the world. To realize the vision of ONE connected metaverse, we’re going to have to be clear. To be heard by a divided America, by a world that is not even entirely connected via internet. To a world on the verge of a world war. I believe we need to communicate and work across company boundaries, across industries — much like early open web activists did at the advent of Web 2.0.
Turning “The Metaverse” into the “metaverse.”
If I could make one idea go viral right now, it would be this:
The Metaverse is not a place you go in VR. The metaverse keeps humans at the center and brings tech to US.
Just like “The Internet” became “the internet,” the metaverse is a concept based on universal, organic, cohesive experiences and connections. WE, as users, need to be the central nodes in a Web 3.0, blockchain-based, universal graph.
We, as users, need to regain the sense that WE are the ones driving our experience on the internet. That WE are the ones in control of our lives…not the tech platforms. And we won’t just give our data away willy-nilly. Rather, we will exchange it proactively and purposefully, in return for experiences and services. We may “take” our data with us after concluding each experience — or we may decide to let the product hold on to it by caching it. Either way, that will be OUR choice to make.
The metaverse is real-life, imbued with digital experiences and unlocks the next phases of wild human creativity.
We’re finally in Mark Z’s vision of the future from that Q&A 7 years ago. We can all finally LOOK UP.
This was posted by Katie 3 days before what you just read, and where Katie’s musings started before Part 1 above…
What if “The Metaverse” becomes ‘the metaverse’?
I’m sitting in the lobby of The Driskill hotel for SXSW, coming off many conversations about the metaverse. And nope, I didn’t forget the capitals, spell-check.
I want to lose the capital “M.”
Think back to the early days of the internet (or imagine it, kids) and you’ll recall that we used capitals: The Internet, the World Wide Web. E-mail.?
Over time, we all calmed down about it. The Internet became more and more integrated into our everyday lives…less a place you GO and more a set of resources we hop in and out of, to get things done throughout our days. This isn’t new — the telephone was a novelty, then became a tool. Riding in a car was considered entertainment — now it’s a way to get from here to there. In short, “The Internet” become ‘the internet.’
Likewise, The Metaverse itself right now sounds like a place you go. Buckle up, kids! We’re blasting off for The Metaverse!
When AOL was dominant, a majority of users would click to load and land on their AOL landing page, with widgets for CNN, The Weather Channel, stocks. In that phase, users didn’t even venture OFF AOL, consuming the widget data without clicking away into anything — we were on The Internet! I believe we’re in a similar place as we talk about The Metaverse.
Today, The Metaverse sounds like a place. I actually hate the term, preferring Web 3.0 or just ‘the future of our lives with technology.’ The Metaverse is not a place you go. It’s not VR, or anywhere you go in VR. It’s not a video game and has nothing to do with putting on headsets.
So I’m making a proposal: Can we reframe The Metaverse and start thinking of it as the next phase of the internet? I could argue that the metaverse is the deepening of an organic mix between the reality we walk around in and our digital lives.
I believe we’re going to laugh our asses off someday, thinking about how bifurcated we viewed “real” live and “the internet” in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Someday, we won’t be carrying around little black hardware boxes with us, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to stare at them.
We’ll get to look up. Participate in the world and get the information and data overlays we need and yes — those things will most likely look like AR glasses and VR headsets and wearables like watches. But the beauty will be the fact that we do NOT have to leave our lives for The Metaverse. Our lives will be organically, elegantly, simply infused with digital layers. We will have full control of our realities, choosing to use AR glasses at a cocktail party, so that everyone we meet is overlaid with their name and company, that we confidently walk around a new city with directions overlaid as we go. We will also have full control of turning it all OFF.
What if THAT is The Metaverse? With a lowercase “m”?
