Image from the Metaverse Lab project

“So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer generated universe that’s drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”

In his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, Neil Stephenson gave us one of the best preview of virtual reality. The “metaverse” was a digital 3D rendering of a parallel world. Avatars could roam freely up and down “the street”, build real estate, do business or just hang out.

Despite the widespread excitement and anticipation of the days, it took us more than 20 years to bring the concept from fiction to reality. Anybody who has tried the latest generation VR hardwares would now agree that the idea of spending time in a virtual world is finally within reach.

But creating a new world where we can go and hang out is only the superficial manifestation of our new possibilities. There is something more profound connected with living in a fully digital (or better, digitised) world. What can we do when everything is a bit?

Super powers and super memories

The “virtual” part pealed away, what’s left is a shortcut to a fully augmented life. Kyle Russell captured this aspect of VR in a recent post:

“… a re-imagining of interaction through computing that more closely maps to how we work, play, and learn with people In Real Life (IRL). Except we’ll also have superpowers, because you, the environment, and the mechanisms of contact between the two are all bits instead of atoms.”

The first “superpower” is the ability to manipulate objects. From creating them to breaking them apart, passing through all intermediate states: stretching, zooming, miniaturising, etc. Blink your eye to summon a new brush. Paint over a never-ending canvas. Duplicate your work infinite times.

The second one comes from layering data over the world. When every object, and living being, is digital we can immediately tag it, add descriptions to it and access all this meta information anytime we want.

A digital world also means we will leave a footprint of everything we do. What happens today while we browse the internet or use our phone (an increasingly large portion of our days) will extend to all aspects of our lives. A life in VR is a life under continuous tracking.

This is one of the aspects that fascinates me, and scares me, the most about VR and our increasingly digital life in general. To assist our imagination, we can draw on another master of science fiction: Ted Chiang. His short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, takes us to a future where continuos life logging has become ubiquitous. A new search engine , “Remen”, can search through an entire life of logs and find a precise moment or memory.

“… how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera? Just as there’s a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there’s also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.”

The story prompts us to a deep question: what happens when we can recall and reply any moment of our life. When we can challenge our memory and interpretation of facts. When we don’t even need memories anymore? Our lives are build on a stratification of events and our subjective memory of them. Interpretation and re-elaboration are constitutive elements of our personality. We tell ourselves stories we want to hear and we forget facts that would make us feel bad. Personality is a construct, life under constant tracking can put an end to it.

While testing “Remen” on himself, the protagonist realises that a pivotal event in his life happened the opposite way he remembered. The initial shock mutates into a glimmer of hope:

“Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that — I hope — acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.””

It sounds like a far cry at a time when even the most basic facts are contested in the name of partisan objectives.

Bringing the metaverse to us

Fifteen years ago, at the apex of the Dotcom boom, Josh Harris conducted an experiment. For 100 days he and his girlfriend Tanya lived under the eye of 32 cameras installed in every room of their New York apartment (she lasted “only” 60 days, but that’s another story). “We live in public” was a fascinating peek into a soon-to-come future of public sharing and continuos tracking.

In the case of Josh and Tanya their memory was provided by the audience. Real people that followed their life and interacted with them through live chat. Video logging, though, is only a first step, not a sufficient one. Just like in Ted Chiang’s story, the true turning point happens when our logs becomes searchable, when our entire life is transformed into bits.

We are getting there. Take a look at Amazon go for example:

“What if we could weave the most advanced machine learning, computer vision and AI into the very fabric of our stores…(so you never have to wait in line)”. Convenience is the Trojan horse used by permanent tracking to conquer our lives.

A similar phenomenon is happening in our offices. Conversations that used to happen at the coffee machine are moving to Slack, where they are made permanent, always a search away. A Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.

More and more we are encouraged to fill in the gaps. A new tool we are building at Founders, for example, is meant to bring meetings and offline activities back into our chat stream. Soon, nothing will go untracked.

A final thought goes to the implications of all this. A life under tracking means a life under potential surveillance. Our shared lives are saved on private servers owned by private companies. It can be true, as many say, that privacy won’t even be a thing in the future as a new generation grows up accustomed to not having any. I prefer thinking that the implications of living a life of bits will prompt us to reconsider how we deal with our footprints.

Imagine living in a virtual world owned by a private corporation or, even worse, by a government. All your steps, your actions, your conversations, your purchases, maybe even your thoughts constantly recorded on a searchable log. You may not believe in a future when we all live in the metaverse, but you better start believing in one where the metaverse has taken over your world. Let’s be prepared for it.