The Web3 Unlock

The best way to think about how web3 enables the metaverse is that your blockchain wallet is like your in-game inventory, but for the entire internet. You can carry all your stuff around with you wherever you go in digital space.

But what can I do with all that stuff?

That’s up to the builders. Developers can choose to support whatever items that they want to. Let’s say that you have 5 items (NFTs) in your wallet. You might boot up Game A and find that they’ve chosen to support items 1, 2 and 4. In Game B items 2, 3 and 5 are supported. The items that aren’t supported simply don’t exist in that world, but not to worry, maybe they exist as a super powerful item in some other game. And if they don’t, maybe you can create your own space to use them in.

Abstract Items

This open portability of digital objects presents a problem though. Worlds need to have a consistent vibe. Like it probably wouldn’t be very pretty to just dump a bunch of characters and items from different games into the same world and call it a game. The aesthetics and ability to tell a cohesive story would be all wrong. To fix this, developers can redefine the look and abilities of items to fit into the world that they’re creating. A new skin and different capabilities in each game. But is it really the same item if it looks completely different and does different things? That’s the really interesting part — what is it that defines these things when their appearance and function is fluid?

This is really the central question that I want to see get more airtime. Our current paradigm is that all digital things are completely defined by their context. One character is stronger than another because it can do more within the parameters of the game in which it exists. It is only a piece of that game, not a stand alone thing. That’s fine, great actually, and a practice that I hope remains important. But web3 has opened the door for new types of digital objects to exist too. Ones that are not dependent on their contexts and I think we can build some crazy cool things if we really start to explore this new design space.

Cohesive, Abstract Items

What these things need is some sort of meta that gives them definition. If they’re not defined by some sort of concrete instantiation, they need something more abstract to give them a conceptual coherence that can guide the many forms they take on into a semi-coherent ensemble. In a way they need to be an idea. Think about it — this is what artists do all the time. They make works that capture an emotion or try to express an idea. The ideas and emotions are abstract things that we share as a society, but their only concrete representations are the ad hoc things that we create to edify them. What NFTs could be if they are ideas, not things, is a question that opens the door to some really interesting possibilities.

So what would that actually look like? There’s two avenues for this that jump out to me initially. One is for them to be cultural artifacts. Things that start out as traditional digital items (purpose built for a specific context) but become popular and take on a larger significance. Think of Pokemon or any other cherished game from your childhood that has become emblematic of an era.

The second path is for them to attach themselves to a preexisting movement and compete to be the most aligned vehicle to that movement and thus most emblematic of the ideas that they’re trying to represent.

Tokenized carbon credits seem like the vehicle currently most primed to fit this model. Environmentalism is a massive cultural trend already. Carbon credits are a well known attempt at taking action on climate change. Carbon credits seem like they are a good fit for being tokenized (becoming web3 native). Together, these things make them a good candidate for this new format of digital objects — they are tangible in the sense that you can have them in your inventory, they are highly synonymous with the broader idea of climate action in the public perception, and lending greater utility/value to them should in theory increase their ability to contribute to the cause that they’re aligned with.

Taking Advantage of this Opportunity

So let’s run wild. I’ll stick to carbon credits as the example, but the whole point of writing this is the hope that people will start to look for, and create, as many vehicles for this as possible.

The implementation is pretty simple. Just take tokenized carbon credits and turn them into a game item. Check the users wallet upon login and see if they have any carbon credits. If so, auto-populate their inventory with the item you have chosen to be the representation of those carbon credits. The meta of carbon credits is obviously decarbonization, so you’ll likely choose to give them a form that symbolizes that to you in some way. Others will likely play along the same theme, giving them cohesiveness and loosely defined form across different digital landscapes. That’s their form, as for their function you’ll probably choose to give them power equivalent to how important you think that they are. If you think climate change is the #1 issue facing humanity and that carbon credits are the best way to address it, then it would make sense that they are the most powerful items in your game.

In this way we can create “utility” for NFTs in a bottom-up, decentralized manner. Each of us has the power to express our values with what we create and potentially move the needle by increasing the usefulness and value of the things that we want to support.

It furthermore adds a new tool to the artist’s palette. Instead of “just” expressing ideas and making statements with digital art, the artwork can directly affect change through the further experiential utility that it lends to the tokens used as elements of that piece.

Wrapping Up

This is a crazy exciting development to me. In my view, one of the major trends of humanity has been away from the physical and toward the intellectual. I’m not saying that this is good or bad but it does seem to be true. As we’ve developed our information technology over time, we’ve tended to spend more and more time in the information space that we’ve created for ourselves. That used to just be our own brains and our own thoughts and we spent most of our time and energy attending to our physical needs. Now we’ve networked all of our thoughts and brains together and spend much more of our time interfacing with our ideas (being online) than with the physical world. The ways we express and interface with our ideas has become ever more immersive and compelling (to the point of actually calling it virtual reality). It has come to define us more and more too. We tend to define our identity these days in large part by what we believe in.

I think that the mechanisms described here are a way to upgrade our information space yet again. Allowing the things and experiences we have in the digital space to be more meaningful by imbuing them with the ability to drive change in the real world in a much more direct way. We have a blank canvas where anyone can create experiential value for any token that does a reasonably good job of translating that value into action.

The way that I keep thinking about this is that we have the tools to see the birth of new digital raw materials. When it comes to physical raw materials, we choose what's best for the job and the negative externalities embedded in those materials is a distant afterthought. The digital space is something we’ve created for the most pure expression possible of our ideas and values, and in that space we can choose our raw materials based on the positive externalities that we choose to embed in them.

This is the promise of the metaverse — that we can make it whatever we want it to be. It’s a new frontier, but one that’s only as exciting as we choose to make it. I hope you’ll choose to join me in trying to make it as weird and wonderful of a place as possible.

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