[ad_1]
As religious prophets, The great technological luminaries preach the coming of the next Internet. According to their gospel – blog posts by both technology companies and venture capitalists – tomorrow’s cyberspace will be empirical, transcendent, immersive, 3D and all put together, the various sites and services we live and die from, brought together under one love. It will be a super-platform that brings together sub-platforms: social media, online video games and easy-to-live applications, all accessible through the same digital space and sharing the same digital economy.
Virtual reality companies say you’ll get there via VR headsets, while augmented reality companies say you’ll wear smart AR glasses. And with a boyish enthusiasm for science fiction that feeds their piety, these preachers call this vision metaverse, after Neil Stevenson ‘s dystopian novel of 1992 Snow disaster.
Back when Stevenson wrote his book, the network was a bit of a weird little planet connected only by the gravitational force of server technology. Beginner developers have built basic websites using HTML and HTTP. Soon, Friends fan sites and Texas Internet Consulting pages hanging separately from the intrusive GeoCities.com, full of Broadway lyrics. From this scattered solar system, web browsers such as Mosaic and then Netscape were born to solve the problem of sorting and aggregating information.
The metaverse, as originally conceived by Stevenson, is centered around a three-dimensional digital street with virtual real estate, where consumer avatars can wander, party, and do business, finding spaces and each other. It is run by a company called the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, which makes its money acting as the backbone of 3D cyberspace.
Star-eyed futurists from the 1990s embraced the idea of face value, transforming users as avatars into isolated cyberspaces like Activeworlds. The other half of the vision – the important half – was connecting cyberspace, and they weren’t able to do that.
The metauniverse must be interoperable; the digital services associated with it must be assembled, like a quilt, to form its fabric. Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who often writes about the metaverse, says, “Interaction effectively requires companies to loosen control over their own formats or otherwise adopt open source ones.”
In the early 2000s, open source metaverse projects flourished to solve the problem of merging existing virtual worlds. If the code was free and accessible to everyone, everyone Snow disaster a fan with some know-how can carve his own alley in the metaverse. And if the Internet had been frozen in its early form, one could easily have imagined the porous, egalitarian metaverse it would give birth to: a 50-year-old with a Barbie avatar walking straight from her Second Life Dream house to Sephora.com’s VR boutique , where he buys a digital spiral with won gold World of Warcraft.
But these open meta-universal projects never started. “There wasn’t much enthusiasm for the relationship, in part because there really was no motive for it,” said Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life publisher Linden Lab. “We as a company were trying to make some money.
By the mid-2000s, it became clear that the money was not for building separate websites; was in making information sorters, channels, aggregators and publishers – open enough to scale with user-generated content, but closed enough to make huge profits. “Several online services have begun to have a truly global user base, and as a result, a global infrastructure dedicated to optimizing their needs has grown,” said Karl Ganberg, senior policy adviser at the Internet Society.
This was the evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. For nearly 30 years, the weight of consolidation has united the cyberspace under the auspices of fewer and fewer corporate titans. Strange little planets come together, collide, make bigger planets, collide again, create stars or even black holes. Facebook eats Instagram and WhatsApp; Amazon is taking over two dozen e-commerce sites. And you are left with these few supermassive players who control and appropriate the celestial movement of billions of users. Here’s how Big Tech got big.
[ad_2]
Source link