When most think of the metaverse, they envision a 3D representation of the internet. In this metaverse, you interact with others as if you are next to each other. This is a digital multiverse where we’re the product and advertisers are the customers. The virtual reality that spawns from this is a game that can only work with a large enough network effect, like in the book Ready Player One.

Ready Player One’s universe missed the revolution of tokenized incentives through blockchain technology. Instead, its developers added incentives for their players to compete for a special prize to overcome corporate greed and save the world. This change in incentives, driving players to work together and create a culture around finding the best outcomes, is when virtual reality becomes the metaverse.

It was meta in the 80s and 90s to envision ways humans could play together while physically distant, but we’ve invented many ways to do precisely that. Many companies will make technologies that claim to be metaverses that let us communicate with each other better, but they’re only making communication harder through platform restrictions.

Besides, an alternate reality of virtual worlds detracts from our reality rather than augmenting it. Nothing you do in this digital multiverse affects the world around you without at least some auxiliary engineering. Instead, you need to leave space around your physical body, so you don’t hit anything. So, video games are not metaverses, but when players work together to find the best outcomes and create a culture, they create a metaverse for themselves.

In a game, knowing the meta means understanding what moves your opponent will make next by referring to the available moves in the game’s rules. Metagaming means picking the strategy that leads to optimal play. The strategy for optimal play uses the abstract information available in the layers of interactions between a game’s players and its rules.

Let’s look at a game called Rocket League. It’s a video game where you play indoor soccer as a rocket-powered car released in 2015, with a very active esports scene. The game’s physics engine feels realistic, and it’s the closest we have gotten to simulating a real sport with a standard computer. I’ve been actively watching the esports scene for over two years now, and it’s provided me with some insights into how the metagame evolves.

Rocket League has 5-minute games, and the goal is to hit more shots into the net than your opponent. Each game starts with a kickoff as both teams face each other across the pitch and race to the ball for possession. In the North American region, the meta that evolved for kickoffs is that the left-most person on each team races for the ball while the rest sets up for the next play. Here’s a player who shared some thoughts on the optimal moves to make on kick-off:

https://twitter.com/dionginge/status/1253287339788578819?s=20&t=BeKe6lU_vND7iuVS44WrsQ

Since the kickoff is the only set piece in the game, knowing this information will set up for a good start and allow players to advance on the pitch with confidence. The game has many other meta plays for various positions on the field. As players try out new tactics, they find new optimal offensive moves. Defence tries to counter offence, creating a new meta. Again, players find a counter to the defensive tactic, and players start using the new meta. If you find yourself playing a game with this group without knowing the current meta, you’re likely to lose position from the start.

Poker has many metagaming tricks that the pro players use to their advantage. The metagame includes reading the cards in your hands, the cards on the board, player reactions, body language, and the number of players in the round. The best players have to take all these into account and keep track of the probabilities of all possible outcomes. No wonder it’s such a popular game.

In the money game, where you set the outcomes, the metagame is to understand your sources of income and expenses in order to optimize for your desired outcome. We can employ many tactics in the money game, and all of them require hard work, but the meta changes fast, and technologies change how we play the game. To catch on to the next meta as it develops, we have to invest in and learn about the culture around our chosen topic of interest.

We don’t have the resources required to keep up with the meta for every topic that captures our attention in the information age. So, can a metaverse augment our communications to help in our journey through the games that we choose to play? Can the metaverse bridge the knowledge gap in society and provide information about the game’s current meta? Playing the meta requires learning about the most effective tactics so that we can augment our metaphysical lives in our areas of interest.

The community around a game comes to a consensus on available tactics, and by choosing the most effective one, creates the meta. The tactics that most people use in their winning outcomes become the meta. The meta will also vary by position and skill. The more the tactics get communicated, the quicker people learn the meta and advance through the levels.

Extending the analogy to systems in our world, we can see how access to meta-information - information traded between active participants - creates asymmetrical systems. Players inside the culture use tactics that might be best for them but are not the most effective tactic available to society. Information access allows those with the data to front-run their competition and stay ahead.

It’s easy to see how asymmetrical systems - access to nuclear powers, natural resources, political influence, terms of service - rule our world and remove the governed’s consent. Let’s examine how terms of service created asymmetrical systems and changed the meta for digital products by removing the consent of the governed.

When we buy software, we don’t know anything about it other than through reviews from other customers. We have to sign terms of service contracts that say we can’t do anything with the products we buy other than their intended use. Most times, we do not have access to review the code of said software.

Signing terms of service for product usage creates an asymmetrical system of ownership, and we stand extorted by the products we own while developers make exponential profits. We don’t own the music we buy - we can’t even transfer the data out for use on a different application. When we bought CDs, we could listen to music using any system that supports CDs. But an iOS song has to be listened to on an iOS device. And iOS devices haven’t supported CD players since 2016.

So instead of buying individual songs, the new meta is to buy a subscription to the service’s recommendation engine for songs personalized to our taste through our meta-data. Subscription services might be the current meta, but we are still disadvantaged because internet companies have a lot of data about us in their centralized servers. And they freely use it to front-run their competition with better products and services.

The new meta change is public ownership of data through blockchains and distributed ledger technologies. Bitcoin emerged from people’s desire to use more effective tactics to track value exchanged. The meta is changing from trusting the incumbent financial system to a trustless mathematical system. And to create more tactics of value capture and distribution, various blockchains emerged, enabling data ownership through token mechanisms.

The metaverse is where we share the techniques we learn with the rest of our community. It’s where culture and the relationship between players develop. It represents the game of interactions between people and augments our communications. It’s where diverse communities connect and trade ideas with a shared digital currency.

There are many options to choose from when deciding which blockchain you will want to work and play in. Most blockchains now choose to support either composability or scalability. Over time, these networks will even out and support composition at scale, bringing a variety of use cases for reality augmentation. Because blockchains keep data in the hands of the public, each network uses cryptography, game design, and social engineering mechanisms to create an economy that supports itself.

Bitcoin introduced a new meta for data transfer by making data servers available to everyone with access to the internet. Ethereum evolved the meta by adding a computer to the database so it can mathematically transform data and keep its state through tokens. Cosmos is trying to further evolve the meta by creating an internet of blockchains that can run any other blockchain on top of it.

Blockchains provide network agents with passive income to incentivize information verification and keep the network running. The popular blockchains have a flywheel network effect; as people use the network, they become active participants in keeping the network running themselves. Participants earn cryptocurrency they can use to trade and create value elsewhere within the network.

The new meta for infrastructure maintenance rewards the public for being active participants in the network. There are many tactics for growing a network, but the new meta is pictured below, and you can read more about it here.

There’s a saying popularized with the rise of finance: let your money make money. Compound interest is a powerful force that exponentially grows your savings over time. Decentralized finance (deFi) uses the principles of compounding and trading to bring the power of the banks to each individual.

The new meta for finance is that we can take the tokens earned from participating in, or buying into, the network and compose various deFi recipes. Blockchains allow retail investors to leverage against the dollar, stake into a protocol, or farm yield by providing liquidity and earning passive income exponentially more significant than a bank. Here’s a thread of conversations about the current deFi meta in the Ethereum blockchain.

https://twitter.com/Cov_duk/status/1514055935089516544?s=20&t=v77rcG7LEq7ujFlR6iOD5A

And here’s an argument for one of the meta tactics used.

https://twitter.com/Jasper_ETH/status/1514708562244784131?s=20&t=lUbJKtKw7U9dPnXE85tl6A

Tokens have been used as a symbol to represent commodities since the origin of maths and accounting. “Tokens represent the first stage in the 9000-year continuous Near Eastern tradition of data processing. They led to writing.” (From the article, Tokens: their Significance for the Origin of Counting and Writing, 3/2/14)

https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/tokens/

Blockchains use tokens to represent data in a contract and define digital asset value. Once a user purchases a token, the contract adds the owners’ metadata to the asset and shares the token's value with the network. Since everyone has access to the blockchain and its data, blockchains differentiate unique assets through fungibility.

The new meta represents unique assets in shared public data as Non-Fungible Tokens. Culture shapes data into art and creates a dialogue in a community of like-minded individuals who find shared value in the culture. With NFTs, we can prove skin-in-the-game and add more weight to anonymous conversations.

DAOs are the companies that run blockchain protocols as decentralized autonomous organizations. People with governance tokens in the DAO issue proposals for company activities for which all governance token holders can cast their vote. The companies run autonomously with code. Decentralization ensures governance security and creates trust in the governance protocol.

DAOs are changing the meta by allowing retail investors to become owners in the protocol and become active participants in the company’s future. Here is a picture of some of the DAOs grouped into the various services offered.

We’re all already living in the metaverse. Since the first version of the internet, we’ve been discussing real-world issues globally. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have already digitized our thoughts and ideas and sold them to advertisers. There is a growing number of artificial intelligence algorithms run by corporations and trained on private data sourced through the terms of service agreements.

Asymmetrical systems are bound to pop up in society. And black swan events - events that break previous intuitions on rules of the game - hurt those caught unaware while elevating those informed and acquainted with the system. As the system breaks down, those relying on the system for security cannot engineer the best outcomes for themselves.

Web3 changes the meta through symmetrical data access and data availability, meaning that everyone can read or write data to the public ledger and prove that the data is correct. Web3 is the front-end that connects artificial intelligence and the blockchain through semantics for access to our decentralized private identity.

The problem with web3 is not that the line goes “up only,” but it is a “win more” technology. If you’re winning the money metagame already, you can enter web3 and use decentralized finance’s myriad of tactics to win more. If you’re a famous artist, you can mobilize your fans to connect with you through the blockchain and purchase your NFTs. But the metaverse should be a “win-win” technology, where everyone gets access to knowledge about the meta in any game they want to play.

The problem with web3 is not that it’s a “multi-level marketing scheme,” but new entrants must pay more for access to popular culture. If you’re a famous influencer, you can connect with the builders in the community and “pump and dump,” which means to popularize a token to make the price go up and then dump the token on newcomers for a profit. The metaverse should not rely on entrance into a gated virtual realm that you can only access by paying. It’s a realm of ideas where anyone willing to learn can enter and gain key insights about the culture.

The problem isn’t centralization because, with leaders, we can push the bounds of what we are capable of doing. But due to asymmetrical terms of service, tech giants own all our data and do all the work. Decentralization incentivizes us to host servers and lead ourselves to accomplish our goals.

The problem also is that we shouldn’t pay gas fees to communicate and create culture. Currently, venture capital is subsidizing the cost required to grow blockchain networks, hoping that the meta will evolve again as more people try to create a solution while profiting from the growth of new networks. Ethereum is taking steps toward solving the problem with complex engineering solutions that will likely take three more years to incorporate.

Joey Politano succinctly described the meme of blockchains technologies in a recent Q&A video:

Digital scarcity doesn’t promote productive investment[…]All property rights are constructs. The social construct of property rights in the commodity space is designed to get you to produce more commodities. When prices go up, people are incentivized to produce more copper.

He also says that digital property cannot be scarce because anyone can pirate the data. His point, and the current meme in society, is that blockchains don’t incentivize better art. As society memes the dangers of blockchains, we better understand failure points in the technology. In the metaverse, property rights should not be scarce but give access to everyone while creating value for active participants.

History is full of meta changes. We went from believing that the earth is at the center of the universe to believing in becoming a multi-planetary species. Presupposing that a was a meta change from a parochial understanding of our world to the scientific methods created during the enlightenment era.

The books How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley and The Begining of Infinity by David Deutch examine our world history through the lens of meta changes. In How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley explores the history of technology, starting from the agricultural revolution. He describes the struggles humans faced at the advent of each new game-changing technology and describes how inventors get bogged down trying to change the meta.

He talks about how governments, NGOs, and activists fought scientific data with fraudulent research during agricultural changes, such as the rise of fertilizers that sped up crop growth and created richer soil, harvesting previously unpotable areas. Even the steam engine, telephones, and flight inventors fought battles against the government and incumbent corporations.

In The Begining of Infinity, David Deutch explores our universe’s evolution from the beginning of history and makes a case for how memes have the power to change society’s meta. He talks about how societies with static memes are sure to die out and provides examples throughout history of how humans have evolved to understand the meta. He proposes that creative humans in static societies evolve the meta without changing it, and slowly through generations of evolutions, memes become dynamic, changing the meta.

His ultimate point is that humans are universal explainers who evolve as we get closer to understanding truth by solving problems. His view, and now mine, is that we will always be at the beginning of infinity; as we solve problems, other problems arise to take their place. The meta will forever evolve, and so will the memes that drive the changes in society.

Meta changes take time. Society has to try the new tactic for itself and decide whether it’s the most effective tactic for the game. Blockchain technologies and ideologies have been around since 2008/2009, and people have been experimenting with various tactics that could change the meta.

The technology evolves every day, and the web3 space is trying to solve problems including, but not limited to, the financial banking systems that control the flow of money, AI ethics and governance of technologies running on AI, and property rights.

Can the metaverse create intangible value for users of the internet? Metaphysical discussions about mind, body, soul, culture, art, and technologies happen throughout the web. Every day we discuss how to better the system or beat the system. While we create and consume knowledge, the metaverse becomes the library with semantic information about the content.

My experiment in trying to create a metaverse is a digital cookbook, which you can read more about here. Humans evolved around campfires and built communities around their chefs to secure cooked and digestible food. We shared knowledge about the best ways to cook locally sourced food within our communities.

Can we further evolve recipes to be about a journey towards a goal? In the metaverse, we should be able to share the steps needed, helpful tips and tricks, memes, and anything else that might be useful to players looking to augment their reality.

I was having a conversation with my family about how Radio is dying. We decide who we’re going to spend most of our time with based on our taste in music. People used to call in to a radio station, connect with their communities, and talk about their problems. Can the metaverse connect people with communities through music again?

Thanks for taking the time and reading my thoughts on this matter. This was only supposed to be a short article about the metaverse, but this is the longest one I’ve written yet. Please connect with me on Twitter and let me know your thoughts about what I wrote or anything related to the meta. I’ll leave you with this cool jokes experiment from David Phelps (@divine_economy on Twitter), the app themetagame.xyz, created by @BrennerSpear on Twitter, and an open metaverse experiment by @punk6529 called OM. They’re all building their own metaverses that interoperate with each other through various DAOs that build the culture around their ideas.

https://twitter.com/divine_economy/status/1514740549583998977?s=20&t=ABoyGGkkhuYDAZLExdIQOg

https://twitter.com/BrennerSpear/status/1494046052625698816

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1514718020849000461?s=20&t=SVMeryymKcfkGXZkAbEi_A