A brief note on the collective exocortex to come
From a 2019 IEEE paper titled Decentralized Construction of Knowledge Graphs for Deep Recommender Systems Based on Blockchain-Powered Smart Contracts The “collective exocortex” is a term I’m using as a placeholder for an idea that I predict will begin with the benign interlinking of individuals
The potential for collective agenda-setting through iterated ranked-choice voting protocols
From Public Choice — A Primer by Eamonn Butler Voting Paradoxes in Action Indeed, as Condorcet pointed out, some systems could produce almost any result. Rock might lose to Paper, and Paper to Scissors, but Scissors would still be defeated by Rock. The outcome depends on how the election is ...
the reason why real, physical land is scarce is because dominion/control/sovereignty over physical land provides access to the means for food, water, and shelter
the reason why most digital “land” is not scarce is because digital land isn’t even really land
I am contending here that the term "digital SPACE" is a more appropriate phrase than "digital LAND" because physical land is for living on and these digital “lands” are clearly spaces for expression, not living
those scarce resources within digital spaces (where "space" is a superset of "land") are primarily attention and the efforts of creators/builders of digital content (i.e., media) that attract and sustain attention. If attention is the scarcest resource in the ecology of digital space, then the most valuable digital space is that which attracts the most attention
those digital spaces which provide participants a level of affordance for self-expression that don't also conflict with the expression of other participants in the same space (i.e., social scalability) are those spaces which will be the most valuable
the platforms that currently serve as “worlds” will eventually be commoditized unless they can manage intersubjective user state better than other platforms through some combination of network effects and governance protocols
Digital land is not land.
The reason why real, physical land is scarce is because dominion/control/sovereignty over physical land provides access to the means for food, water, and shelter. Within any ecology there exists scarce resources. In the case of a watering hole in the African savanna, control over access to the perimeter of the watering hole is a matter of life and death for animals. Similar dynamics are at play in the physical spaces that modern-day humans compete over. Dominion over oil fields and ocean straits are continuously interrogated as geopolitcal concerns of global importance – these lands are desired because the energy resources they provide access to are scarce. Ownership/rentership of real estate in Manhattan [legitimized through the violence-based recourse mechanisms of the State which ultimately underwrites the land’s value] comes at a steep price because of Manhattan's proximity to social, professional, and cultural resources.
The reason why most digital “land” is not scarce is because digital land isn’t even really land. The land that humans have known and lived on for hundreds of thousands of years is a space of scarcity and competition – material resources are finite and transportation either of material resources to people or of people to material resources is costly [a reality that rising energy costs and rising shipping rates are presently reminding us of]. We live and sustain our living on and through Earth's land. This is not the case with digital “land” – dominion over digital land does not grant control over the means of human survival (shelter, food, water) nor is transportation of things or to other places a costly endeavor for most digital “lands” [exceptions exist but more on this later].
I am contending here that the term "digital SPACE" is a more appropriate phrase than "digital LAND" because physical land is for living on and these digital “lands” are clearly spaces for expression, not living. Discord chatrooms are spaces. Figjam boards are spaces. Reddit's /r/Place is a space. Just because this or that "metaverse" [I believe that the term 'metaworld', originally from a presentation at IEEE VR 2008 titled “Solipsis: A decentralized Architecture for Virtual Environments”, serves as a better descriptor for a particular game world] can be traversed via what skeuomorphically appears to be walking does not make it land but rather a space upon which an artificially imposed constraint has been introduced to comfort users getting acquainted with digital spaces.
This not to say there are no scarce resources in digital “lands”, they are just not those scarce material resources directly required for human survival. Those scarce resources within digital spaces (where "space" is a superset of "land") are primarily attention and the efforts of creators/builders of digital content (i.e., media) that attract and sustain attention. If attention [i.e., attention of consumers and of prospective/existing creators (these two classes will ideally have increasing overlap as the barriers to creation continue to fall)] is the scarcest resource in the ecology of digital space, then the most valuable digital space is that which attracts the most attention [or, rather, the most monetizable attention — the attention of some people is worth more than that of others, in a strictly financial sense]. For now, most of the attention is directed towards spaces (“lands”) that are largely first iterations and proof of concepts – those pools of financial capital (whether they be from corporations looking to promote their brand or newly minted crypto-millionaires enjoying wealth effects) that can afford to buy and commission artists to populate these spaces are doing so. The claim (sometimes implicit, often explicit) undergirding [currently] highly priced parcels/blocks is that they are proximate to other highly priced parcels/blocks (typically near the canonical spawn/origin point of the particular world in question) and that something akin to a comps-based valuation analysis can be performed, echoing the types of comps analyses performed on real properties in the physical world. However, the application of valuation methods from the physical land onto digital “land” does not hold up under scrutiny – simply consider if proximity-based comps would be an appropriate mode of analysis for Manhattan apartments if you could instantly teleport from Manhattan to any part of the World? Or if you could teleport your entire home back and forth from Manhattan to any part of the World? At no cost? [My answer is “No.”]
Physical land is objective, digital “land” is intersubjective.
The most valuable digital spaces will be those spaces that handle intersubjectivity well and which lie along the Pareto frontier determined by some function of social scalability, decentralization, and [affordances for] agency for self-expression. That is, those digital spaces which provide participants a level of affordance for self-expression that don't also conflict with the expression of other participants in the same space (i.e., social scalability) are those spaces which will be the most valuable. Put concretely, a digital space that permits unlimited read/write access for 1,000,000 people online will inevitably devolve into a chaotic mess that repels those participants who would otherwise want to put effort into contributing if not for the ability for anyone else to delete their work. On the other end of the spectrum, a digital space that only allows one person read/write access is more like a diary than a space (though a space nonetheless). A digital space that affords read/write access to one person and read access to others is a gallery. Reddit's /r/Place was a digital space that afforded unlimited read but limited write access to participants, modulated by per-account cooldowns (although even this restriction was bypassed by at least one Reddit admin/moderator, hence the need for decentralization in order for a digital space to have legitimacy).
What current "metaverse worlds" that emphasize crypto-enabled scarcity have going for them is relative decentralization to the extent that cryptographic mechanisms prevent something like the Reddit admin from "breaking the rules" of the space [although, the degree to which current spaces are decentralized is still typically contigent upon centralized cloud providers and dev teams for most projects]. That being said, decentralization is table-stakes – those supposedly "scarce lands" are only artificially scarce for, once other decentralized spaces that scalably afford for more self-expression (i.e., read AND write) emerge, attention [the true scarce resource of digital spaces] will flow to those spaces instead.
Put simply, why would early adopters and settlers of Metaverse lands make Billboard Central their digital homes? Why would they not instead simply fork the underlying code to make a minimally-viable digital space that doesn’t engage in extraction and simply congregate there instead? Imagine two metaworlds:
1. World A: Limited “land” supply. 99% of the “land” is owned by 10 people, thereby structurally limiting the number of people who can express themselves within this World. 30% platform tax on transactions. The cityscape and architecture are designed to maximize surface area for advertisers.
2. World B: Unlimited space. People stake claims on certain plots of “land” where they’ve invested time/energy in building out and designing, but there is no incentive to “own” the plots because the worldspace is effectively infinite. The fees from staking claims and in-world transactions are paid to a DAO solely for the purpose of paying for the metaworld’s operating expenses and reinvesting the residual capital.
Given these two [intentionally contrived (to make a point)] choices, why would anyone choose to spend time in World A over World B? It may be that World A is initially populated with various virtual attractions that those 10 people paid extremely talented artists/designers/programmers to produce, but how sustainable of a moat is a portfolio of virtual attractions in a world where the barriers to digital creation are being lowered by the day? Platforms seeking to catalyze a flywheel effect of user-generated content → attention → more UGC using “Creator Funds” as their catalyst in hopes of recouping their investments in building out their platform will eventually have to contend with more open competitors who do the same thing but better by giving more of the platform’s economics to the creators. Furthermore, virtual assets [e.g., a piece of 3D digital art, a really cool looking weapon design, a well-designed virtual building, an entire city etc.] don’t have any inherent long-term defensibility for the most part because:
If it can be viewed then it can be copied and/or recreated.
There will be a continual stream of new stuff being created as both the barriers to virtual creation are lowered and AI/ML gets better at converting speech/text prompts into virtual objects (e.g., Imagine prompting DALL-E 2 but the output was a voxel-based, 3D object instead of a 2D image).
Most people don’t really care about high effort, high fidelity digital representations after a certain point. That Minecraft is the best-selling video game in the world has little to do with high fidelity graphics and everything to do with the interactivity afforded within the game’s spaces.
The platforms that currently serve as “worlds” will eventually be commoditized unless they can manage intersubjective user state better than other platforms through some combination of network effects and governance protocols. The optimality of any given governance protocol for a shared digital space is a subjective assessment – it may very well be that a protocol that allows only 10 renowned creators Write access in a given space is optimal for the purposes of that space; it may also be that a fully-decentralized, anarchic (i.e., full read/write permissions for anyone) governance protocol is optimal as well; there will be a Pareto curve of control vs agency which the most successful worlds lie along). My prediction is that those worlds which are non-interoperable will ultimately fail to worlds that are more interoperable (see: Facebook's "NFTs" that only work within their [centralized] platform) due to network effects stemming from composability [although this is a path-dependent outcome contingent upon a sufficiently performant open source Metaverse ecosystem that is "good enough" relative to centralized alternatives, thereby resisting accumulation of developer and user mindshare via flywheel effects].
Native internet users will seek out those [sufficiently decentralized] digital spaces which permit [socially scalable] self-expression and these are the spaces where attention [and thus capital] will ultimately congregate. This has been (and continues to be) the case with "hip" neighborhoods around the world. This has been the case with web2 social media [first the "cool kids" were elite college kids on Facebook, then bohemian showoffs on Instagram, and now whatever is going on now on Tiktok (I don't use TikTok)]. And this will be the case with "web3" x "Metaverse" once the barrier to creation is de minimis (queue: "Now everyone is a creator!") and instructions for spinning up [presumably open source] protocol-based instances of these digital spaces are made simple enough.
Scarce "digital lands" will be those spaces that provide people optimal tradeoffs between control and agency [enabled via decentralized mechanisms, presumably including crypto(-graphic, -economic) mechanisms] that afford a socially scalable experience for particular expressive use cases. What we presently consider "metaverse real estate" are merely galleries [salons on a good day] when what we’re really after are real-time collaborative studios, workshops, and ateliers that aren’t bounded by physical constraints. Digital spaces of co-creation over spaces of consumption.
the reason why real, physical land is scarce is because dominion/control/sovereignty over physical land provides access to the means for food, water, and shelter
the reason why most digital “land” is not scarce is because digital land isn’t even really land
I am contending here that the term "digital SPACE" is a more appropriate phrase than "digital LAND" because physical land is for living on and these digital “lands” are clearly spaces for expression, not living
those scarce resources within digital spaces (where "space" is a superset of "land") are primarily attention and the efforts of creators/builders of digital content (i.e., media) that attract and sustain attention. If attention is the scarcest resource in the ecology of digital space, then the most valuable digital space is that which attracts the most attention
those digital spaces which provide participants a level of affordance for self-expression that don't also conflict with the expression of other participants in the same space (i.e., social scalability) are those spaces which will be the most valuable
the platforms that currently serve as “worlds” will eventually be commoditized unless they can manage intersubjective user state better than other platforms through some combination of network effects and governance protocols
Digital land is not land.
The reason why real, physical land is scarce is because dominion/control/sovereignty over physical land provides access to the means for food, water, and shelter. Within any ecology there exists scarce resources. In the case of a watering hole in the African savanna, control over access to the perimeter of the watering hole is a matter of life and death for animals. Similar dynamics are at play in the physical spaces that modern-day humans compete over. Dominion over oil fields and ocean straits are continuously interrogated as geopolitcal concerns of global importance – these lands are desired because the energy resources they provide access to are scarce. Ownership/rentership of real estate in Manhattan [legitimized through the violence-based recourse mechanisms of the State which ultimately underwrites the land’s value] comes at a steep price because of Manhattan's proximity to social, professional, and cultural resources.
The reason why most digital “land” is not scarce is because digital land isn’t even really land. The land that humans have known and lived on for hundreds of thousands of years is a space of scarcity and competition – material resources are finite and transportation either of material resources to people or of people to material resources is costly [a reality that rising energy costs and rising shipping rates are presently reminding us of]. We live and sustain our living on and through Earth's land. This is not the case with digital “land” – dominion over digital land does not grant control over the means of human survival (shelter, food, water) nor is transportation of things or to other places a costly endeavor for most digital “lands” [exceptions exist but more on this later].
I am contending here that the term "digital SPACE" is a more appropriate phrase than "digital LAND" because physical land is for living on and these digital “lands” are clearly spaces for expression, not living. Discord chatrooms are spaces. Figjam boards are spaces. Reddit's /r/Place is a space. Just because this or that "metaverse" [I believe that the term 'metaworld', originally from a presentation at IEEE VR 2008 titled “Solipsis: A decentralized Architecture for Virtual Environments”, serves as a better descriptor for a particular game world] can be traversed via what skeuomorphically appears to be walking does not make it land but rather a space upon which an artificially imposed constraint has been introduced to comfort users getting acquainted with digital spaces.
This not to say there are no scarce resources in digital “lands”, they are just not those scarce material resources directly required for human survival. Those scarce resources within digital spaces (where "space" is a superset of "land") are primarily attention and the efforts of creators/builders of digital content (i.e., media) that attract and sustain attention. If attention [i.e., attention of consumers and of prospective/existing creators (these two classes will ideally have increasing overlap as the barriers to creation continue to fall)] is the scarcest resource in the ecology of digital space, then the most valuable digital space is that which attracts the most attention [or, rather, the most monetizable attention — the attention of some people is worth more than that of others, in a strictly financial sense]. For now, most of the attention is directed towards spaces (“lands”) that are largely first iterations and proof of concepts – those pools of financial capital (whether they be from corporations looking to promote their brand or newly minted crypto-millionaires enjoying wealth effects) that can afford to buy and commission artists to populate these spaces are doing so. The claim (sometimes implicit, often explicit) undergirding [currently] highly priced parcels/blocks is that they are proximate to other highly priced parcels/blocks (typically near the canonical spawn/origin point of the particular world in question) and that something akin to a comps-based valuation analysis can be performed, echoing the types of comps analyses performed on real properties in the physical world. However, the application of valuation methods from the physical land onto digital “land” does not hold up under scrutiny – simply consider if proximity-based comps would be an appropriate mode of analysis for Manhattan apartments if you could instantly teleport from Manhattan to any part of the World? Or if you could teleport your entire home back and forth from Manhattan to any part of the World? At no cost? [My answer is “No.”]
Physical land is objective, digital “land” is intersubjective.
The most valuable digital spaces will be those spaces that handle intersubjectivity well and which lie along the Pareto frontier determined by some function of social scalability, decentralization, and [affordances for] agency for self-expression. That is, those digital spaces which provide participants a level of affordance for self-expression that don't also conflict with the expression of other participants in the same space (i.e., social scalability) are those spaces which will be the most valuable. Put concretely, a digital space that permits unlimited read/write access for 1,000,000 people online will inevitably devolve into a chaotic mess that repels those participants who would otherwise want to put effort into contributing if not for the ability for anyone else to delete their work. On the other end of the spectrum, a digital space that only allows one person read/write access is more like a diary than a space (though a space nonetheless). A digital space that affords read/write access to one person and read access to others is a gallery. Reddit's /r/Place was a digital space that afforded unlimited read but limited write access to participants, modulated by per-account cooldowns (although even this restriction was bypassed by at least one Reddit admin/moderator, hence the need for decentralization in order for a digital space to have legitimacy).
What current "metaverse worlds" that emphasize crypto-enabled scarcity have going for them is relative decentralization to the extent that cryptographic mechanisms prevent something like the Reddit admin from "breaking the rules" of the space [although, the degree to which current spaces are decentralized is still typically contigent upon centralized cloud providers and dev teams for most projects]. That being said, decentralization is table-stakes – those supposedly "scarce lands" are only artificially scarce for, once other decentralized spaces that scalably afford for more self-expression (i.e., read AND write) emerge, attention [the true scarce resource of digital spaces] will flow to those spaces instead.
Put simply, why would early adopters and settlers of Metaverse lands make Billboard Central their digital homes? Why would they not instead simply fork the underlying code to make a minimally-viable digital space that doesn’t engage in extraction and simply congregate there instead? Imagine two metaworlds:
1. World A: Limited “land” supply. 99% of the “land” is owned by 10 people, thereby structurally limiting the number of people who can express themselves within this World. 30% platform tax on transactions. The cityscape and architecture are designed to maximize surface area for advertisers.
2. World B: Unlimited space. People stake claims on certain plots of “land” where they’ve invested time/energy in building out and designing, but there is no incentive to “own” the plots because the worldspace is effectively infinite. The fees from staking claims and in-world transactions are paid to a DAO solely for the purpose of paying for the metaworld’s operating expenses and reinvesting the residual capital.
Given these two [intentionally contrived (to make a point)] choices, why would anyone choose to spend time in World A over World B? It may be that World A is initially populated with various virtual attractions that those 10 people paid extremely talented artists/designers/programmers to produce, but how sustainable of a moat is a portfolio of virtual attractions in a world where the barriers to digital creation are being lowered by the day? Platforms seeking to catalyze a flywheel effect of user-generated content → attention → more UGC using “Creator Funds” as their catalyst in hopes of recouping their investments in building out their platform will eventually have to contend with more open competitors who do the same thing but better by giving more of the platform’s economics to the creators. Furthermore, virtual assets [e.g., a piece of 3D digital art, a really cool looking weapon design, a well-designed virtual building, an entire city etc.] don’t have any inherent long-term defensibility for the most part because:
If it can be viewed then it can be copied and/or recreated.
There will be a continual stream of new stuff being created as both the barriers to virtual creation are lowered and AI/ML gets better at converting speech/text prompts into virtual objects (e.g., Imagine prompting DALL-E 2 but the output was a voxel-based, 3D object instead of a 2D image).
Most people don’t really care about high effort, high fidelity digital representations after a certain point. That Minecraft is the best-selling video game in the world has little to do with high fidelity graphics and everything to do with the interactivity afforded within the game’s spaces.
The platforms that currently serve as “worlds” will eventually be commoditized unless they can manage intersubjective user state better than other platforms through some combination of network effects and governance protocols. The optimality of any given governance protocol for a shared digital space is a subjective assessment – it may very well be that a protocol that allows only 10 renowned creators Write access in a given space is optimal for the purposes of that space; it may also be that a fully-decentralized, anarchic (i.e., full read/write permissions for anyone) governance protocol is optimal as well; there will be a Pareto curve of control vs agency which the most successful worlds lie along). My prediction is that those worlds which are non-interoperable will ultimately fail to worlds that are more interoperable (see: Facebook's "NFTs" that only work within their [centralized] platform) due to network effects stemming from composability [although this is a path-dependent outcome contingent upon a sufficiently performant open source Metaverse ecosystem that is "good enough" relative to centralized alternatives, thereby resisting accumulation of developer and user mindshare via flywheel effects].
Native internet users will seek out those [sufficiently decentralized] digital spaces which permit [socially scalable] self-expression and these are the spaces where attention [and thus capital] will ultimately congregate. This has been (and continues to be) the case with "hip" neighborhoods around the world. This has been the case with web2 social media [first the "cool kids" were elite college kids on Facebook, then bohemian showoffs on Instagram, and now whatever is going on now on Tiktok (I don't use TikTok)]. And this will be the case with "web3" x "Metaverse" once the barrier to creation is de minimis (queue: "Now everyone is a creator!") and instructions for spinning up [presumably open source] protocol-based instances of these digital spaces are made simple enough.
Scarce "digital lands" will be those spaces that provide people optimal tradeoffs between control and agency [enabled via decentralized mechanisms, presumably including crypto(-graphic, -economic) mechanisms] that afford a socially scalable experience for particular expressive use cases. What we presently consider "metaverse real estate" are merely galleries [salons on a good day] when what we’re really after are real-time collaborative studios, workshops, and ateliers that aren’t bounded by physical constraints. Digital spaces of co-creation over spaces of consumption.
A brief note on the collective exocortex to come
From a 2019 IEEE paper titled Decentralized Construction of Knowledge Graphs for Deep Recommender Systems Based on Blockchain-Powered Smart Contracts The “collective exocortex” is a term I’m using as a placeholder for an idea that I predict will begin with the benign interlinking of individuals
The potential for collective agenda-setting through iterated ranked-choice voting protocols
From Public Choice — A Primer by Eamonn Butler Voting Paradoxes in Action Indeed, as Condorcet pointed out, some systems could produce almost any result. Rock might lose to Paper, and Paper to Scissors, but Scissors would still be defeated by Rock. The outcome depends on how the election is ...
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