(2021-07-11) Crucible We Need To Kick Big Tech Out Of The Metaverse

We need to kick Big Tech out of the Metaverse. We work, learn, live and play in virtual spaces and digital communities... Video game worlds have become so much more than play, with players hanging out in lobbies and splurging billions on the latest skins and avatar mods, or enjoying concerts in virtual reality.

We are marching toward what author Neal Stephenson called “the Metaverse”: a global, interconnected galaxy of virtual worlds, avatars, online communities, and mixed reality.

But curb your enthusiasm. As things stand, this new reality is already shaping up along the familiar, proprietary, monopolistic lines that have characterised – and dogged – the most recent phase of the internet’s evolution.

Facebook owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus, giving them ownership of our friends, our behaviour, our gait, eye movement and emotional state. Google, Amazon and Apple all are vying to build the next dominant VR and gaming platforms.

what we see, who we speak to, and what we learn is being manipulated every day

As movement-tracking, eye-tracking, neural input and biometrics are integrated to “enrich our experience” in the Metaverse, these platforms will become even more deft at inferring our moods and use them to manipulate our opinions, sources of information and community – in real time.

Automated, cross-reality illusions, tailor-made by using intimate knowledge of each individual’s life and mental states will take disinformation on a whole new level, destroying our ability to trust any source of information

The convergence of new technologies and our rush to online living have made it possible to aim for an Open Metaverse

Properly applied, these advances would usher in the anti-platform – a web of spaces, software and users connected by open standards, portable identity and practices that put the user first.

The promise of true internet anonymity that disappeared with the advent of surveillance capitalism can be restored with clever cryptographic advances such as Zero Knowledge Proofs.

With their privacy genuinely preserved behind avatars, people struggling with their mental health could find virtual psychotherapy more approachable. I'm dubious, considering how adept BigTech and other BigCos are at assembling user identities from exhaust.

Self Sovereign Identity and Verifiable Credentials prove that it’s really grandma on the phone, or that you’re actually talking to the school principal or the police, without trusting a corporate platform’s ability to keep manipulators and trolls at bay

As the pandemic pushes us to the edge of the Metaverse, we must choose between the well-trodden path of corporate control, conflict and abdicated responsibility, or that of true user sovereignty with individual control,

Ryan Gill is co-founder and CEO of Crucible. Toby Tremayne is co-founder and CTO of Crucible.