An Open Metaverse Means Tearing Down Walled Gardens

Going back to the mists of technological prehistory there have been debates over the nature of identity, individuality, and the individuals place in society as well as the origin of their personhood. This includes questions over any attendant rights the individual possesses. Since the Enlightenment it has been an accepted truth that all political rights, power and authority originate in the individual sovereign person. Where the person gets those rights remains an issue of dispute between theists and non-theists, but it remains universally recognized. Government is only legitimate so long as it acts with the consent of the governed, and all government power that exists only exists because the individual citizen has delegated some of their sovereign power to that government by consent.

I like to paraphrase Descartes to describe this by saying "I think therefore I own myself."

However this universal truth has come under attack since the advent of the 3rd industrial revolution (the computer revolution). Where the law of the land until the 1990's was that the individual did not lose their constitutional, natural rights when in a Company Town (i.e. a community which is owned and built and operated by a sole incorporated entity) as stated in Marsh vs Alabama (SCOTUS 1946), the law of the metaverse since the 90's has been the opposite. Cyberpromotions vs AOL (SCOTUS 1992) declared that an online bulletin board is not enough like a real life community to justify protection of individual rights under Marsh. This court ruling enabled the legal basis for what we call the "Walled Garden Business Model" in which the user is converted from a customer who is a sovereign individual, into a product that is the chattel property of the owner of a given network which owns their identity, data, and property.

I would argue that as we've moved beyond a 2d flatland internet to a more fully fledged virtual economy and community in 3d metaverse of games, virtual worlds, virtual and augmented reality, that the virtual environment is a lot more like a real life community than like a bulletin board. However, rather than fighting this out in the courts (ultimately it will wind up there as corporate interests fight back) I would propose that there are technological solutions to this conflict. Blockchain technologies are one of these solutions, which when operated independently of any proprietary corporate network, enables the individual to establish their digital identity on chain in an immutable permanent fashion that only they control the existence of. The individual can associate any accounts they use into proprietary networks with that blockchain identity, so their wallet becomes their passport.

The blockchain can then be the repository of not only their identity, but of their money to exchange for proprietary tokens, of their virtual content protected by smart contracts on chain to enable better IP protection than proprietary DRM while allowing users to use content across a wider range of platforms, which disincentivizes the tendency toward piracy by presenting a better value proposition, and creators can lower prices since they can market their content in a wider marketplace.

All of these advantages of blockchain based identity would be useless without the users ability to use the blockchain in any platform. There are a number of blockchain projects seeking to enable identity registration on-chain but do not have a service delivery mechanism. There are several approaches to this but primarily there is the browser approach and the HUD approach.

The browser approach is to build a next generation browser that goes beyond mere 2 dimensional flatland websites and allows the user to browse any 3D environment: games, virtual worlds, virtual and augmented reality platforms, in a platform agnostic way. Each platform would have a plugin that is essentially an emulator for their game engine, and provide an interface for the user to log in with their relevant credentials registered with their on-chain identity. The emulator not only would handle low latency relaying of rendered 3D content but interfaces between the browser wallet and the platforms wallet for that avatar, shape shifting the blockchains liquidity token into the individual platforms game token upon user demand.

The HUD approach is a bit more insurgency oriented. It injects a communications tool into any VR/AR/VW platform that allows user created or third party content that resides on the avatar screen as a Head Up Display to enable the user to communicate with any other avatar on any other platform, and allows the user to give free copies to any other user to create a viral infection of this cross platform communications capacity.

Utilizing both the browser and HUD model together will create a system that no walled garden can resist.

3D Content for any platform can be registered on the browsers blockchain with a smart contract that is essentially a privatized form of copyright. With upload heuristics that check the contents relevant patterns: mesh node coordinates/relationships, texture byte count and color patterns, animation coordinate sequences, sound note patterns, etc, each registered content item has 'fingerprints' that can be checked against all past content contracts and if they match, provide the uploader the option to pay a royalty to the original creator or decline the upload. This sort of pattern matching heuristic gatekeeper will add a level of IP enforcement that few other DRM schema contain (YouTube has something similar to protect against abuse of copyrighted music).

More services can be added to the browser blockchain for virtual governance: dispute resolution due process, insurance, virtual land registration, group registration/incorporation/memberships, events calendars, and community voting.

I am currently working on a project/ecosystem building this vision, called MetaLyfe. We have the browser developed. We are integrating the crypto wallet for the Lyfe Coin (which can handle any number of other cryptocurrencies) into the browser that browses not only websites and games, but can develop dApps to run in the browser ecosystem. We have developed a virtual smartphone we call the GridFone that your avatar wears as a HUD to communicate cross platform within the immersive environment. With our app store, 3d content store, and blockchain technology, the MetaLyfe ecosystem is designed to tear down the walled gardens, to free each of us from corporate chattellage, and build an Open Metaverse.