美国《时代》周刊封面文章：元宇宙将改变一切（附原文）
第3603期文化产业评论
近日，美国《时代》杂志发布了最新一期封面文章：《元宇宙将重塑我们的生活，让我们确保元宇宙变得更好》。这篇文章的作者Matthew Ball是早期风险基金 Epyllion 的管理合伙人，Makers Fund 的风险合伙人。在《时代》杂志发文后，推特上不断有人转发。纷纷有人表示，“令人激动的时刻！”“感谢Matthew Ball的认同”等。特斯拉CEO埃隆·马斯克近日表示，他已经将自己的大脑上传到云端，并已经与自己的虚拟版本交谈过。而这虚拟版本，也可看作未来元宇宙的雏型之一。
美国证券交易委员会报告指出，2022 年上半年，元宇宙这个词出现在监管文件中的次数超过 1100 次。而一年前这个数字还仅仅是 260 次，进一步回顾，过去整整 20 年，这个词总共只出现了不到十次。元宇宙概念炙手可热，却没人能一语中的，说清元宇宙是何方神圣。即便是言必提元宇宙的企业高管们，看似在这个问题上众说纷纭，其中就包括 VR 头盔、区块链以及加密货币相关的争论，以及元宇宙究竟会在何时到来。
当然，这些（争论）并没有妨碍资本涌入这个火热的新基建。关于 Facebook 改名为 ‘Meta’以及它现在每年在元宇宙计划上损失超过 100 亿美元的故事，相信大家已经耳熟能详。但世界上另外六家最大的上市公司——亚马逊、苹果、谷歌、微软、英伟达、腾讯——实际上也在忙着为元宇宙做准备。他们正在进行内部重组，改写他们的工作描述，重构产品，并准备推出规模高达数十亿美元的大作。今年 1 月，微软宣布了大科技史上最大规模收购，750 亿美元买下游戏巨头动视暴雪 ，这将‘为元宇宙方向的探索铺平道路’。据麦肯锡公司估计，在今年前五个月中，企业、私募股权公司和风险资本家共进行了总额高达 1200 亿美元的元宇宙相关投资。
迄今为止，几乎所有的上述工作对普通人来说都是看不见的。这就像‘星际’本身一样。我们并没有真正可以购买到的元宇宙产品，也没有在收益表上找到‘元宇宙收入’。事实上，就其存在的程度而言，它悄悄的走了，正如它悄悄的来。加密货币市场已经崩溃了。Facebook 的市值也是如此，当该公司改名为 Meta 时，其市值高达 9000 亿美元，但现在几近腰斩。今年，电子游戏的销售额下降了近 10%，部分原因是新冠疫情的结束迫使许多人迈出了房门。
在许多人看来，元宇宙概念的发展遭受重创似乎是件好事。这些科技巨头们已经对我们的生活以及现代经济的技术和商业模式产生了巨大的影响力。而今天的互联网有很多问题，那么为什么不在进入马克·扎克伯格所说的‘下一代互联网’之前解决这些问题呢？
实际上谜底就在谜面上。元宇宙，这个貌似存在了 30 年但实际上已经在人类的脑海中存在了一个世纪的概念，正在我们身边逐渐成形。每隔几十年，就会发生一次平台性的变革——比如从大型计算机到 PC 和互联网的转变，或者随后向移动互联网和云计算的演变。一旦新时代展露峥嵘，就很难确定谁来领导它以及如何领导。但换代之际，掌门人通常会易主。如果我们希望建立一个更好的未来，那么我们必须像那些投资建设它的人一样积极地去塑造它。
那么，这个未来是什么呢？把元宇宙想象成一个平行的虚拟存在平面，它跨越了所有的数字技术，甚至会控制大部分的物理世界。这种结构有助于解释另一种常见的描述，即把元宇宙描述为一个 3D 互联网，以及为什么建立它是如此困难，但仍然是值得的。
众所周知，互联网几乎跨越了每一个国家、4 万个网络、数百万个应用程序、超过一亿台服务器、近 20 亿个网站和数百亿个设备。这些技术中的每一个都能互联互通，人们可以在‘网上’找到彼此，分享在线账户系统和文件（一个 JPEG、一个 MP4、一段文字），以及相互链接跳转（想想一个新闻出版商如何链接另一个媒体的报道）。近 20% 的世界经济被认为是数字经济，而其余 80% 的经济中的大部分也都运行在互联网的基础之上。
尽管互联网是有弹性、广泛且强大的，但大众的沉浸式互动体验而建立的——特别是在涉及三维成像时。相反，互联网的设计主要是为了使一个静态文件（如电子邮件或电子表格）能够被复制并从一个设备发送到另一个设备，这样它就可以被独立和异步地审查或修改。这就是为什么即使在‘流媒体战争’和大型科技公司体量已经达到数万亿美元的时代，简单的两人视频通话也是如此不可靠的部分原因。（此外，对于三维信息的文件格式或惯例没有达成共识，没有标准的系统来交换虚拟世界的数据。我们也缺乏计算能力来完成我们想象中的元宇宙。我们将需要许多新的设备来实现它——不仅仅是 VR 眼镜，还有像全息显示器、超声力场发生器，以及听起来很诡异的能捕捉穿过肌肉的电信号的设备。
我们无法事先确切知道 3D 互联网对我们的全球经济可能有多重要，就像我们不知道互联网的价值一样。但我们可以有所管窥。随着互联网连接和CPU升级，内容形式从文字转变为网页和博客，然后是个人空间（如 Facebook 页面）和基于视频的社交网络、表情符号和信息流。我们在网上产生的内容量已经从每周的几个留言板帖子、电子邮件或博客更新，发展到囊括了我们生活细节的多媒体内容。这一趋势的下一个演变似乎可能是一个持久的、‘活生生的’虚拟世界，它不是我们生活的简单记录（如 Instagram），也不是我们交流的工具（如 Gmail），而是我们也存在于其中，而且是以 3D 的形式存在（因此，人们关注沉浸式 VR 头盔和化身）。
目前，每天已经有近一亿人登录 Roblox、Minecraft 和 Fortnite Creative，这些平台运营着数千万个相互连接的世界，支持一致的虚拟身份、虚拟商品、通信套件，并可从大多数设备上访问。在这些平台上的大部分时间是用于休闲——玩游戏、参加音乐会——但我们开始看到人们开始做了更多的尝试和探索。
教育是我们长期以来期望被数字时代改造的一个经典使用场景，但迄今为止却一直没有太多实质性的进展。自 1983 年以来，高等教育的成本增长了超过 1200%；同期美国成本增长排名第二的医疗护理和服务，增长幅度只有教育的一半。我们需要面对的挑战是真实的东西需要的资源并不比几十年前少，当转移到一个远程电脑屏幕中时，我们会丢掉人与人之间的交流以及亲身参与实验的体验，而这些绝对不是 Youtube 视频能够取代的。
在元宇宙中，神奇课堂成为可能。几十年来，学生们通过观看他们的老师扔下一根羽毛和一把锤子，然后看到阿波罗 15 号指挥官大卫 - 斯科特在月球上做同样动作的录像来了解重力。这样的演示不需要消失，但可以通过创建精心设计的虚拟 Rube Goldberg 机器来替代，然后学生可以在类似地球的重力下，在火星上，甚至在金星高层大气的硫磺雨中进行测试。与其解剖一只青蛙，我们可以在青蛙的循环系统中旅行，这与我们在马里奥卡丁车中驾驶在蘑菇王国中的方式不同。而所有这些都是随时随地可以获得的，不受地理位置或当地学校资源的限制。
2021 年，约翰霍普金斯大学的神经外科医生使用增强现实头盔进行了该医院有史以来第一次远程手术，为外科医生提供了病人内部解剖结构的互动显示。实施手术的蒂莫西 - 威瑟姆博士同时也是该医院脊柱融合实验室的负责人，他将此比作拥有 GPS。这种参考框架很重要。我们经常认为元宇宙取代了我们今天所做的事情——比如戴上 VR 头盔代替使用智能手机或看电视——但我们不是用 GPS 代替汽车，而是用 GPS 驾驶汽车。
2021 年早些时候，谷歌发布了其 Project Starline 设备，该设备使用机器学习、计算机视觉、十几个深度传感器和摄像头以及基于织物的多层光场显示，以创建 3D 全息视频，而无需使用混合现实的专用眼镜。与传统的 2D 视频通话相比，谷歌表示其 Starline 技术导致眼球接触增加 15%，非语言形式的交流（手势、点头、眉毛动作）增加 25-50%，对谈话的记忆提高了 30%。我们中很少有人喜欢 Zoom；也许我们的一些不快可以通过增加另一个维度而得到缓解。
基础设施是另一个很好的例子。香港国际机场现在运营着一个实时的数字引导设施，允许机场运营商使用实时的三维模拟来确定乘客和飞机应该被引导到哪里。价值数十亿美元、历时数十年的城市项目正在使用这些技术来确定某个建筑可能如何影响交通流量和应急响应时间，或者其设计将如何影响当地公园在特定日期的温度和阳光。这些大多是不相干的模拟。下一步是把它们带到网上——就像从离线的微软 Word 文档转变为基于云的协作文档——并把世界变成一个大型数字开发平台。
然而，对于整个社会来说，元宇宙究竟意味着什么缺乏精准的解释正是一些质疑声音出现的源头。人们看到数十亿的资金被投入到了一个看起来像游戏的地方，（这很难被接受）。不过，实际上我们可以把元宇宙看作是计算和网络的第四个时代——前三个时代分别是 1950 年代至 1970 年代的大型计算机；1980 年代至 2000 年代中期的个人电脑和互联网；以及我们今天经历的移动互联网和云时代。每个时代都改变了访问计算和网络资源的人、时间、地点、原因和方式。这些变化的影响是深远的，但它们也很难具体预测。
即使是移动互联网的最大信奉者，也曾努力预测‘更多的人，更频繁的上网，更多的原因’之外的东西。对数字网络有深刻的技术了解并不能照亮未来，部署数十亿的研发资金也不能。诸如 Facebook、Netflix 或亚马逊的 AWS 云计算平台等服务在事后看来是显而易见的，但在初期它们的商业模式、技术、设计原则等方面都是难以‘接受’的。在这方面，我们应该认识到，混乱、混淆和不确定性是颠覆发生的先决条件。
此外，还是有一些具体的问题是可以被澄清的。元宇宙经常被错误地描述为沉浸式虚拟现实头盔，如 Meta Quest（Oculus VR），或增强现实眼镜，迄今为止最著名的例子是谷歌的智能眼镜。VR 和 AR 设备可能会成为访问元宇宙的首选方式，但它们并不是元宇宙本身。考虑到智能手机与移动互联网不是一回事。元气宇宙也不是 Roblox、Minecraft、Fortnite 或任何其他游戏；这些都是虚拟世界或平台，很可能是元气宇宙的一部分，就像 Facebook 和谷歌是互联网的一部分一样。出于类似的原因，把混沌世界看成是单数，就像我们说‘The Internet’而不是‘an Internet’一样。另一个经常混淆的问题是，元宇宙与 Web3、加密货币和区块链之间。这三者可能会成为实现元宇宙潜力的重要部分，但它们仅仅是原理和技术。事实上，许多元宇宙的领导者仍在怀疑加密货币是否有未来。
元宇宙不应该被认为是对互联网的大补丁，也不应该被认为是会取代所有移动模式、设备或软件的东西。它将产生新的技术和行为。但这并不意味着我们要把自己喜欢的东西抛诸脑后。我仍然在 PC 上写作，这可能仍然是写长篇文字的最佳方式。今天，大部分的互联网流量都是在移动设备上产生和终止的，但几乎所有的流量都是通过固定线路电缆和使用 1980 年代设计的互联网协议套件传输的。
元宇宙还没有到来（即使一些高管会声称它已经到来，或者至少即将到来）。同时，转型并没有经历‘开关翻转’。我们今天处于移动互联网时代，但第一个支持蜂窝网络的手机是在 1973 年出现的，第一个支持 WiFi 的手机是在 1991 年出现的，智能手机则是在 1992 年，以此类推直到 2007 年的 iPhone。虽然不可能说元宇宙的发展是从什么时候开始的，但它显然正在进行。2021 年中期，在 Facebook 公布其元宇宙意图的前几周，《堡垒之夜》制造商 Epic Games 的首席执行官兼创始人 Tim Sweeney 在推特上发布了该公司 1998 年游戏《虚幻》的预发布代码，并补充说，玩家‘可以进入门户，在[不同的世界]之间旅行．．．没有战斗，[会站在]一个圈子里聊天’。这些体验在当时并没有掀起波澜，原因有很多——当时在线的人太少，创造世界的工具太难使用，能够支持它们的设备太昂贵和沉重，等等。‘我们对元宇宙的渴望已经有很长一段时间了…… ’几分钟后，他补充说，‘但直到最近几年，才开始有足够数量的工作部件迅速聚集起来。’
此外关于元宇宙还有一个常见的误解，那就是元宇宙并不一定是‘歇斯底里’的。因为 Metaverse 这个词来自一部反乌托邦小说，即 Neal Stephenson 的《雪崩》。《雪崩》的前辈们，比如 William Gibson 的《神经舞者》（1984 年）和 Philip K． Dick 的《泡沫的烦恼》（1953 年），也同样给读者留下了元宇宙使现实世界恶化的感觉。戏剧是大多数小说的根源，乌托邦很少成为流行故事的背景。但自 20 世纪 70 年代以来，出现了许多元宇宙原型，它们不是以征服或暴利为中心，而是以合作和创造为中心。每隔十年，这些世界的现实主义就会得到改善，其功能、价值和文化影响也会得到改善。
今天的互联网的基础是通过政府研究实验室、大学和独立的技术专家和机构的工作在几十年间建立起来的。其中大多数非营利性的集体通常专注于建立开放标准，以帮助他们从一个服务器到另一个服务器共享信息，并在这样做的过程中使未来的技术、项目和想法更容易合作。这种方法的好处是非常广泛的，任何人都可以从任何设备、任何网络上以低价或免费的方式访问或建立互联网。
这些都没有阻止企业在互联网上获利或通过付费墙或专有技术建立封闭的体验。相反，互联网的‘开放性’使更多的公司得以建立，接触到更多的用户，实现更大的利润，同时也防止了互联网前的巨头（关键是电信公司）控制互联网。开放性也是为什么互联网被认为实现了信息的民主化，以及为什么当今世界上大多数最有价值的上市公司都是在互联网时代成立（或重生）的。
不难想象，如果互联网是由跨国媒体集团创建的，以便销售小插件、提供广告或收集用户数据以获取利润，那么互联网将是多么不同。
然而，‘企业互联网’只是目前对元宇宙的期望。当互联网诞生时，政府实验室和大学实际上是唯一拥有计算人才、资源和建立‘网络中的网络’的雄心壮志的机构，营利部门很少有人想象到其商业潜力。当涉及到元宇宙时，这些都不是真的。相反，它是由私人企业开创和建立的。
2016 年，早在世界范围内的企业高管认真考虑元宇宙之前，Epic Games 的 Sweeney 告诉 VentureBeat，‘如果一家中央企业获得对[元宇宙]的控制权，他们将变得比任何政府都强大，成为地球上的神’。很容易发现这种说法是夸张的。但根据花旗银行和毕马威会计师事务所的数据，到 2030 年，元宇宙每年可以产生多达 13 万亿美元的收入。摩根士丹利估计美国和中国都有 8 万亿美元，与高盛全球预测的 2.5 至 12.5 万亿美元相似；麦肯锡预测全球有 5 万亿美元。Nvidia 的创始人兼首席执行官 Jensen Huang 认为，元宇宙的 GDP 最终将超过物理世界。
正是在这里，对乌托邦的担心似乎是公平的，而不是危言耸听。元宇宙的概念意味着我们越来越多的生活、劳动、休闲、时间、财富、幸福和关系将在虚拟世界中度过，而不仅仅是通过数字设备的帮助。它将是一个平行的存在平面，位于我们的数字和实体经济之上，并将两者结合起来。因此，控制这些虚拟世界及其虚拟原子的公司将比那些在今天的数字经济中领先的公司更具主导地位。
因此，元宇宙将使当今数字生存的许多困难问题变得更加尖锐，例如数据权利、数据安全、错误信息和激进化、平台权力和用户幸福。因此，在元宇宙时代处于领先地位的公司的理念、文化和优先事项，将有助于决定未来是比我们目前的时刻更好还是更坏，而不仅仅是更虚拟或更有利可图。
随着世界上最大的公司和最雄心勃勃的初创公司对元宇宙的追求，我们——用户、开发者、消费者和选民——必须明白，我们仍然有能力控制我们的未来，并有能力重塑现状，但前提是我们现在就采取行动。是的，元宇宙似乎令人望而生畏，甚至是彻头彻尾的恐惧，但这一变革时刻是我们的机会，让人们团结起来，改变那些抵制颠覆的行业，并建立一个更加平等的全球经济体系。
关于未来的很多事情都是不确定的，就像互联网在 20 世纪 90 年代和 21 世纪初一样。但是，我们可以理解元宇宙可能如何运作以及为什么；哪些经验可能在什么时候、为什么、对谁可用；什么可能出错，什么必须正确。正如那些互联网企业的高管们经常提醒我们的那样，这关系到数万亿美元的利益，更重要的是，关系到全人类的未来。
原文标题：《The Metaverse Will Reshape Our Lives． Let‘s Make Sure It’s for the Better》
作者：Matthew Ball，Epyllion 管理合伙人，Makers 基金合伙人
编译：Amber 翻译优化在转载自金色财经的译文基础上完成。
Matthew Ball 是早期风险基金 Epyllion 的管理合伙人，也是创客基金的风险合伙人，同时也是《Metaverse》的作者。
附：原文
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reports that in the first six months of 2022, the word metaverse appeared in regulatory filings more than 1,100 times. The previous year saw 260 mentions. The preceding two decades? Fewer than a dozen in total. It increasingly feels as though every corporate executive feels the need to mention the metaverse—and of course, how it naturally fits the capabilities of their company better than those of their competitors. Few seem to explain what it is or exactly what they’ll build. The executive class also appears to disagree over fundamental aspects of this new platform, including the criticality of virtual reality headsets, blockchains and crypto, as well as whether it’s here now, might be soon, or is decades in the future.
None of which has constrained investment. Much has been written of Facebook’s name change to “Meta” and the more than $10 billion it now loses each year on its metaverse initiatives. But another six of the largest public companies in the world—Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tencent—have also been busy preparing for the metaverse. They are reorganizing internally, rewriting their job descriptions, reconstructing their product offerings, and prepping multi-billion-dollar product launches. In January, Microsoft announced the largest acquisition in Big Tech history, paying $75 billion for gaming giant Activision Blizzard, which would “provide building blocks for the metaverse.” In total, McKinsey & Company estimates that corporations, private equity companies, and venture capitalists made $120 billion in metaverse-related investments during the first five months of this year.
Nearly all of the aforementioned work has, thus far, remained invisible to the average person. Rather like the metaverse itself. There isn’t really a metaverse product we can go buy, nor “metaverse revenue” be found on an income statement. In fact, it might seem as though the metaverse, to the extent it ever existed, has already come and gone. Crypto has crashed. So too has Facebook’s market capitalization, which topped $900 billion when the company changed its name to Meta, but now sits around $445 billion. This year, the video gaming sales have fallen by nearly 10%, due in part to the end of the pandemic that forced many people inside.
To many, it’s a good thing that the metaverse seems to be sputtering. The largest tech platforms have already established enormous influence over our lives, as well as the technologies and business models of the modern economy. It’s also clear that there are many problems with today’s internet; why not solve them before moving onto what Mark Zuckerberg calls “the successor” to it?
The answer is embedded in that very question. The metaverse, a 30-year-old term but nearly century-old idea, is forming around us. Every few decades, a platform shift occurs—such as that from mainframes to PCs and the internet, or the subsequent evolution to mobile and cloud computing. Once a new era has taken shape, it’s incredibly difficult to alter who leads it and how. But between eras, those very things usually do change. If we hope to build a better future, then we must be as aggressive about shaping it as are those who are investing to build it.
So what is this future? Think of the metaverse as a parallel virtual plane of existence that spans all digital technologies and will even come to control much of the physical world. This construct helps explain another common description of the metaverse as a 3D internet—and why establishing it is so hard, but also likely to be worthwhile.
The internet as we know it today spans nearly every country, 40,000 networks, millions of applications, over a hundred million servers, almost 2 billion websites, and tens of billions of devices. Each of these technologies can coherently, consistently exchange information, find one another “on the net,” share online account systems and files (a JPEG, an MP4, a paragraph of text), and even interconnect (think of how a news publisher links to another outlet’s report). Nearly 20% of the world economy is considered “digital,” with much of the remaining 80% running on it.
Though the Internet is resilient, wide-ranging, and powerful, it wasn’t built for live and interactive experiences involving a large number of participants—especially when it comes to 3-D imaging. Rather, the internet was designed primarily so that one static file (such as an email or spreadsheet) could be copied and sent from one device to another, such that it might be independently and asynchronously reviewed or modified. This is partly why, even in the age of the “Streaming Wars” and multi-trillion dollar big tech companies, simple two-person video calls can be so unreliable. (It’s a marvel that online multiplayer games work at all.) Furthermore, there’s no consensus on file formats or conventions for 3D information, no standard systems to exchange data in virtual worlds. We also lack the computing power to pull off the metaverse as we imagine it. And we will want many new devices to realize it—not just VR goggles, but things like holographic displays, ultra-sonic force-field generators, and, spooky as it sounds, devices to capture electrical signals sent across muscles.
We cannot know in advance exactly how important a 3D internet might be to our global economy, just as we didn’t know the value of the internet. But we do have some view to the answer. As internet connectivity and computer processors have improved, we’ve shifted from colorless text to primitive webpages and web blogs, then online profiles (like a Facebook page) and video-based social networks, emojis, and filters. The volume of content we produce online has grown from a few message board posts, emails, or blog updates a week to a constant stream of multimedia content encapsulating our lives. The next evolution to this trend seems likely to be a persistent and “living” virtual world that is not a window into our life (such as Instagram) nor a place where we communicate it (such as Gmail) but one in which we also exist—and in 3D (hence the focus on immersive VR headsets and avatars).
Already, nearly a hundred million people a day log onto Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite Creative, platforms that operate tens of millions of interconnected worlds, which support a consistent virtual identity, virtual goods, communications suites, and can be accessed from most devices.
Education is a category we have long expected to be transformed by the digital era, but has thus far resisted it. Since 1983, the cost of higher education has grown over 1,200%; medical care and services, which ranks second for cost increases in the U.S. over that period, is up half as much. The challenge is the real thing requires no fewer resources than it did decades ago, and what is lost when shifting to a remote computer screen. Eye contact. Peers. Hands-on experimentation. Equipment. Zoomschool, YouTube videos, and digital multiple choice are no substitute for the real thing.
In the metaverse, the Magic School Bus becomes possible. For decades, students learned about gravity by watching their teacher drop a feather and a hammer, and then seeing a tape of Apollo 15 commander David Scott doing the same on the moon. (Spoiler: They fall at the same speed.) Such demonstrations need not go away, but they can be supplemented by the creation of elaborate virtual Rube Goldberg machines, which students can then test under Earth-like gravity, on Mars, and even under sulfuric rainfalls of the Venusian upper atmospheres. Instead of dissecting a frog, we can travel its circulatory systems not unlike the way we drive the Mushroom Kingdom in Mario Kart. And all of this is available irrespective of geographic location or resources of the local school board.
In 2021, neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins performed the hospital’s first-ever live patient surgery using an augmented-reality headset, thereby providing the surgeon with an interactive display of the patient’s internal anatomy. Dr. Timothy Witham, who performed the surgery and also directs the hospital’s Spinal Fusion Laboratory, likened it to having GPS. This frame of reference is important. We often think of the metaverse replacing something we do today—such as wearing a VR headset instead of using a smartphone or watching TV—but we don’t drive GPS instead of a car; we drive a car with GPS.
Earlier in 2021, Google unveiled its Project Starline device, which uses machine learning, computer vision, a dozen depth sensors and cameras and fabric-based multi-layered light field displays to create 3D “holographic video” without requiring the use of mixed reality goggles. In comparison to traditional “2D” video calling, Google says its Starline technology leads to 15% increases in eye-contact, 25-50% increases in non-verbal forms of communication (hand gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) and 30% better memory recall of the conversation. Few of us enjoy Zoom; perhaps some of our displeasure can be alleviated by adding another dimension.
Infrastructure is another good example. The Hong Kong International Airport now operates a live “digital twin” of the facility, allowing airport operators to use a live 3D simulation to determine where passengers and planes should be directed. Multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade city projects are using these technologies to determine how a given building might affect traffic flows and emergency response times, or how its design will affect the temperature and sunlight of a local park on a specific day. These are mostly disconnected simulations. The next step is to bring them online—like shifting from offline Microsoft Word documents to cloud-based, collaborative ones—and turning the world into a digital development platform.
For society, however, exactly what the metaverse means is unclear. This gives understandable pause to some, who see billions invested in what feels like a game. But think of the metaverse as a fourth era of computing and networking—succeeding mainframes, which ran from the 1950s to 1970s; personal computers and the Internet of the 1980s to mid-2000s; and the mobile and cloud era we experience today. Each era changed who accessed computing and networking resources, when, where, why, and how. The results of these changes were profound. But they were also hard to specifically predict.
Even the biggest believers in the mobile internet once struggled to predict more than “more people, online more often, for more reasons.” Having a detailed technical understanding of digital networking didn’t illuminate the future, nor did deploying billions in R&D. Services such as Facebook, Netflix, or Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform are obvious in hindsight, but nothing about them—their business models, technology, design principles—was at the time. In this regard, we should recognize that confusion, conflation, and uncertainty are prerequisites for disruption.
Still, there are specific issues that can be cleared up. The metaverse is often misdescribed as immersive virtual reality headsets, such as the Meta Quest (née Oculus VR), or augmented reality glasses, the most famous example of which to date is Google’s infamous Glass. VR and AR devices may become a preferred way to access the metaverse, but they are not it. Consider that smartphones are not the same thing as the mobile internet.The metaverse is also not Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, or any other game; these are virtual worlds or platforms that are likely to be part of the metaverse, just as Facebook and Google are part of the internet. For similar reasons, think of the metaverse as singular, just as we say “the internet” not “an internet.” (To the extent we identify different internets today, this largely reflects regional regulatory differences.) Another frequent conflation is that between the metaverse and Web3, crypto, and blockchains. This trio may become an important part of realizing the metaverse’s potential, but they are merely principles and technologies. In fact, many metaverse leaders doubt there is any future for crypto.
The metaverse should not be thought of as an overhaul to the Internet, nor something that will replace all mobile models, devices, or software. It will produce new technologies, and behaviors. But that doesn’t mean we leave what we prefer behind. I still write on a PC, and that’s likely to remain the best way to write long-form text. The majority of internet traffic today both originates and terminates on a mobile device, yet nearly all of it is transmitted on fixed-line cables and using the Internet Protocol Suite as it was designed in the 1980s.
The metaverse is not yet here (even if some executives will claim it is, or at least imminent). At the same time, transformations don’t experience “switch flips.” We are in the mobile era today, but the first cellular network call was in 1973, the first wireless data network was in 1991, smartphone in 1992, and so on until the iPhone in 2007. While it’s impossible to say when the development of the metaverse began, it’s clearly underway. In mid 2021, only weeks before Facebook unveiled its metaverse intentions, Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Fortnite maker Epic Games, tweeted prerelease code from the company’s 1998 game Unreal, adding that players “could go into portals and travel among [different worlds]…with no combat and [would stand] in a circle chatting.” These experiences didn’t take off at the time for a number of reasons—there were too few people online, tools for world-creation were too difficult to use, the devices that could support them were too costly and heavy, etc. “We’ve had metaverse aspirations for a very, very long time…” he added a few minutes later, “but only in recent years have a critical mass of working pieces started coming together rapidly.”
The metaverse is also not inherently dystopic. This a common misconception as the word “Metaverse” comes from a dystopic novel, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Snow Crash’s forebears, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Philip K. Dick’s The Trouble With Bubbles (1953), similarly leave readers with the sense that the metaverse worsened the real world. Drama is at the root of most fiction; utopias are rarely the setting for popular stories. But since the 1970s, numerous “proto-metaverses” have emerged that have not been centered on subjugation or profiteering, but on collaboration and creativity. Each decade, the realism of these worlds improves, as does their functionality, value, and cultural impact.
The foundation of today’s internet was built over several decades through the work of government research labs, universities, and independent technologists and institutions. These mostly not-for-profit collectives typically focused on establishing open standards that would help them share information from one server to another, and in doing so make it easier to collaborate on future technologies, projects, and ideas. The benefits of this approach were far-ranging. Anyone could access or build on the internet, from any device, on any network, at low to no cost.
None of this prevented businesses from making a profit on the internet or building closed experiences through paywalls or proprietary tech. Rather, the “openness” of the internet enabled more companies to be built, reaching more users, and achieving greater profits, while also preventing pre-internet giants (and, crucially, telecom companies) from controlling it. Openness is also why the internet is considered to have democratized information, and why the majority of the most valuable public companies in the world today were founded (or were reborn) in the internet era.
It’s not difficult to imagine how different the internet would be if it had been created by multinational media conglomerates in order to sell widgets, serve ads or harvest user data for profits.
However, a “corporate internet” is the current expectation for the metaverse. When the internet was born, government labs and universities were effectively the only institutions with the computational talent, resources, and ambitions to build a “network of networks,” and few in the for-profit sector imagined its commercial potential. None of this is true when it comes to the metaverse. Instead, it is being pioneered and built by private businesses.
In 2016, long before the metaverse was seriously contemplated by the corporate executives worldwide, Epic Games’ Sweeney told VentureBeat that “If one central company gains control of [the metaverse], they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.” It’s easy to find such a claim hyperbolic. But according to Citi and KPMG, the metaverse could generate as much as $13 trillion in revenue per year by 2030. Morgan Stanley has estimated $8 trillion in both the U.S. and China, similar to Goldman Sachs global projection of between $2.5 and $12.5 trillion; McKinsey forecasts $5 trillion worldwide. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, which ranked as one of the ten largest public companies in the world for most of the year, believes the GDP of the metaverse will eventually exceed that of “the physical world.”
It is here that fears of a dystopia seem fair, rather than alarmist. The idea of the metaverse means an ever-growing share of our lives, labor, leisure, time, wealth, happiness, and relationships will be spent inside virtual worlds, rather than just aided through digital devices. It will be a parallel plane of existence that sits atop our digital and physical economies, and unites both. As a result, the companies that control these virtual worlds and their virtual atoms will be more dominant than those who lead in today’s digital economy.
The metaverse will thus render more acute many of the hard problems of digital existence today, such as data rights, data security, misinformation and radicalization, platform power, and user happiness. The philosophies, culture, and priorities of the companies that lead in the metaverse era, therefore, will help determine whether the future is better or worse than our current moment, rather than just more virtual or remunerative.
As the world’s largest corporations and most ambitious start-ups pursue the metaverse, it’s essential that we—users, developers, consumers, and voters—understand we still have agency over our future and the ability to reset the status quo, but only if we act now. Yes, the metaverse can seem daunting, if not outright scary, but this moment of change is our chance to bring people together, to transform industries that have resisted disruption, and to build a more equal global economy.
Much about the future is uncertain, just as the internet was in the 1990s and 2000s. But we can understand how the metaverse is likely to work and why; which experiences might be available when, why, and to whom; what might go wrong and what must go right. There are trillions of dollars at stake, as executives are wont to remind us—and, more importantly, our lives.
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