Name: Siva Vaidhyanathan - Welcome to the Metaverse at NISO Plus 2022

Description: Siva Vaidhyanathan - Welcome to the Metaverse at NISO Plus 2022

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Upload Date: 2022-08-26T00:00:00.0000000

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Segment:0 .

JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So we're very happy to once again be sponsoring the NISO Plus conference and especially excited that this year, it's being fully hosted on the Cadmore Media platform. It's a great pleasure to introduce the opening keynote speaker, Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan. Dr. Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Oxford University, 2018.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University, 2017, and The Googlization of Everything and why we should worry, University of California Press, 2011. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Dr. Vaidhyanathan's talk is entitled Welcome to the Metaverse: The Profound Consequences of a Science Fiction Vision. Welcome.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Thank you, Jessica, very much. And thank you to everybody for joining me today. This is not everybody's favorite format. We all love being together in the same room. And hopefully, someday soon, we will all get back into that, although this does have some advantages, and we'll try to make the most of that. So today, I'm going to walk you through some thoughts that I've been having over the past three or four months, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But in actuality, these are thoughts I've been having for three or four years. You might remember back in November, Zuckerberg announced that his company, Facebook, one of the most successful companies in the history of the planet, was changing its name to Meta. And this was a direct reference to the idea of a metaverse. Metaverse is a very foggy notion.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It's one that Zuckerberg tried his best to define in those moments, both in his announcement and in subsequent interviews. And I've been following this guy for years. I've gone through so many of his speeches, his writings, his interviews. He is generally precise and articulate, even when he's being cagey. But in this case, he failed.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: He failed to fully describe his vision for metaverse. And he failed to link it to a wider discussion of metaverse, in a much broader community. A community of people who have been involved in virtual reality research. People who've been involved in game development. People who have been involved in very almost utopian visions of what technological change might do for us.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: All of which I think is crucial to understanding the next decade, maybe the next 25, 30 years. The reason I say this is that first, through my study of Google that went into my 2011 book, The Googlization of Everything, and then my study of Facebook, which went into Antisocial Media, which is published in 2018. I had observed many of the trends and phenomena and interests that Zuckerberg has tied together with this phrase, metaverse.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But I missed that word along the way like. I was trying to find the term. Trying to find the term that actually wrapped up all these elements, all these initiatives that these companies. Not just Google and Facebook, but Microsoft, and Amazon, and Apple to some degree, and about a dozen other significant companies at various trajectories toward the grand center, which is those companies, of course, were practicing.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And the best they can come up with was a very 20th century metaphor. And in Antisocial Media, I dubbed it the operating system of our lives. And the reason I described it in Antisocial Media that way is that I had missed out on describing it in Googlization of Everything. The book came out, Googlization of Everything came out in early 2011.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And about a month after it came out, I was discussing a variety of things that Google had been doing beyond our screens. And it occurred to me that they were building the operating system of our lives. And this metaphor made sense to me, being a 20th century person. A person who grew up with computers. There were actual operating system battles, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That grand question occupied us through the 1990s. Which company would dominate the operating systems of our desks and maybe even our laps. And if we got lucky, we might have operating systems in our hands at some point if we could get it small enough, right? And of course, by the end of the '90s, Microsoft had triumphed. And by the early 2000s, there was a blowback, a Linux blowback, and a steady regrowth of the Macintosh operating system.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And then eventually, iOS, which was which debuted in 2007. So the operating system battle though ended up not being that interesting. But knowing what our operating system is was crucial in those days, right? The notion that there's this jumble of software that would manage the flow of data and manage the interaction among inputs and outputs and process things.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That it was the central nervous system of these machines that were changing our lives so profoundly at the time. And so I thought, well, the operating system of our lives makes sense because what each of these companies seem to be doing from what I could observe was getting way beyond the screen. Way beyond the box. Way beyond the handheld. And trying to manage, monitor, and monetize everything in our lives.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And then we're doing so with an authoritarian bend, although the results certainly could end up there, right? They were doing so because growth is the imperative. Growth is the ideology. Growth in all senses. Growth in the sense of being more important to people's lives, being more important to people's time commitments. That is the driving imperative, the ideological fixation of Silicon Valley and of many companies, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And this is important to remember. It's so different to look at a company, any institution but a company specifically, and understand that it's imperative is growth and not profit. Growth and not revenue. That it's not about the bottom line this quarter. It's about the 20-year vision for how you might dominate not just a market, but life itself. But from the point of view of the founders.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I could speak directly to Facebook and Google, but it goes way beyond that. I mean, you might even include Larry Ellison in this sort of thing. From the point of view of the founders, the notion of domination isn't regressive because they know best. Social engineering is still engineering. And what's better than engineering, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: The flaw is in this. This is an imperfect machine. And the relations that we built over centuries have been imperfect. Look at all the ways we're bad to each other. Maybe we could create a better way with a different set of incentive structures and different rules, and guidelines, and tendencies. And what if we had enough data to predict our behavior and curb it or encourage it?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What if we had the kind of algorithmic amplification that can guide human behavior in ways that might be better as the founders would define better? Now, this was rarely explicit, but it's clearly implicit in the ideology of these companies, in the utopian ideology of these companies. And that also comes from the 1990s, to some degree, earlier than that. But something else comes from the 1990s.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And that's this book, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. You're probably familiar with it. It was, in fact, the earliest use of metaverse. It describes this really rich virtual reality environment in which the main character Hiro operates and is quite successful. But what interests me about Snow Crash is what happens outside of metaverse. And I'm going to read you a passage here.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Now, let's be clear. The idea of metaverse and its currency comes from this book. I don't know if Zuckerberg ever read this book. I hope he does because he would clearly see it as dystopian. OK. So here's the passage. And I apologize for reading out loud to you. It's not something I like to do in presentations very much, but this is I think appropriate.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: All right. So remember, the main character's name is Hiro. H-I-R-O. He's a pizza delivery person, by the way. That's his day job. But he has this piecemeal job on the side where he gets paid for-- well, I'll describe what he gets paid for. This business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It's funny that he used xerox. By the way it's with a lowercase x. I'm sorry. Yeah. A xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. He uploads it to the CIC database, the library, formerly known as the Library of Congress.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But no one calls that it calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word Congress means. And even the word library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine readable form, which is to say ones and zeros. And as the number of media group, the material became more up to date.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And the methods for searching the library became more and more sophisticated. It approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big, fat stock offering. Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and sovereigns, rifling through the library looking for useful information. And if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid. All right. So that's what's happening outside of the metaverse. Inside metaverse, Hiro is a hero. He's like this amazing person, right? But this question of inside and outside metaverse is something I want to get to.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And I'm going to start sharing my presentation, so we can get into that part. All right. Good. Now, you can see it, right? Everybody's good with that. All right. Yeah.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Welcome to the metaverse. So look, I think we owe Zuckerberg some gratitude for renaming this company, Meta, and for articulating for the public a notion of a metaverse. Although as I said, articulating it rather poorly. Rather poorly. Now why should we thank him? Well, by making it a subject of discussion, by getting hundreds of publications to run what the heck is a metaverse articles, and by inspiring a lot of questions and a lot of ridicule, Zuckerberg has inadvertently allowed us to think comprehensively, ecologically, as well as critically about what a metaverse vision might be.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Now, it's crucial that he invoked metaverse, which is a dystopian notion that comes out of science fiction, right? As soon as people started talking about metaverse, they immediately went to Ready Player One, a Spielberg film from a couple of years ago that is quite dystopian. It doesn't reflect a positive life, a life any of us would want to live in.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Of course, Snow Crash is the same, quite dystopian. And of course, the master of all dystopian, metaverse-based science fiction works would be The Matrix, which is like the ultimate vision of living virtually and not caring to a large degree whether you're living virtually. So given all that, Zuckerberg did though invoke a tremendous amount of blowback and criticism. He was able to get a lot of people to say, what the heck are you talking about?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: You've basically wagered this amazing company on the vision for virtual reality. And we are so far from having viable, expansive, and inclusive virtual reality as part of everybody's daily life. It's still a niche product. The notion of refashioning an entire company like this away from what we used to call social media into this new thing seems like a huge risk. And investors were not pleased.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But here's what I want to ask. What would it-- actually, that should be what would it mean. Not what would not mean. What would it mean to take metaverse seriously? What if we took the vision seriously? Not just Zuckerberg's sense of it, but the larger sense of it. What are the implications? All right.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Well, let's look at what happened when Zuckerberg brought this out. Well, as you've heard, Facebook's stock took a dip. Now, what I've presented for you here is a five-year view of the market capitalization. Actually the price, not the market capitalization, but the price of Facebook's stock. And you can see that as of this morning before the market opened, it was significantly down from its peak of just a few months ago.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Now I would say because I'm giving you the five year view, which your financial reporters rarely do, you can see that if you're holding Facebook stock at 217.70 a share, you're still pretty happy if you bought it at any point before 2020, late 2020 basically. You're still pretty happy. You're doing pretty well. And in fact, had you bought it at its most recent trough, which was early 2020, you'd be very happy.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And of course, most of the institutional investors, the ones who are looking at the long term prospects of this company, but Facebook much earlier. Maybe as early as the IPO in 2010. But certainly between 2010 and 2020. That's when most of the Facebook stock was grabbed by the big institutional investors. So what happened to scare investors away to this degree? I mean this is not nothing.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But I do want to caution you that this does not mean the company is in trouble in any way. Market capitalization has really no effect on the day to day operations of a company. A market capitalization drop or a drop in the stock price might have an effect on the leadership of the regular company, but not at Facebook. Because Zuckerberg having, in perpetuity, the majority of voting shares of stock, can never be fired and can never actually be corrected or criticized effectively.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It's a terrible way of running a company, but you know it's worked for him. And stock dropping really doesn't matter. Also remember, this is other people's money. It's not Facebook's money. It's other people's money. It's like your pension fund, your retirement account, your index funds. So yeah, you lost this money.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Zuckerberg did not. Although when you hear people talk about Facebook, and they were laughing about it a couple of weeks ago after this quarterly report came out. Like, oh, Facebook lost x billions of dollars. No. No. You lost that. Look.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: This is the other thing that concerned investors. Well, this is the main thing that concerned investors I have to say. That is look at the very top. This is the growth in Facebook usage. I remember when I told you growth is what matters. You can see as early as the second quarter of 2021, so early 2021, that the curve was flattening. That the trajectory of growth was unlikely to match the previous, let's say, four or five years.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And by the way, this growth is astounding. Really remarkable. What does this mean? This level of growth is not going to continue, probably not going to continue for Facebook itself by the way. This is what they call the blue, the basic Facebook app. By the way, growth for Instagram remains strong. Growth for WhatsApp remains strong. And Facebook doesn't care whether you're signing up for Instagram or Facebook.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It wins either way. WhatsApp doesn't make any money for Facebook, but it is, again, about growth. It's about getting into people's lives. But really, Facebook the blue app is the big one. It's the thing that makes Facebook almost all of its money. So it does matter. The fact that the growth rate is leveling off is really interesting and important.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Now, in terms of net, Facebook actually lost about half a million users, that in the last quarter. But that gain was more than made up for by Instagram users. So again, Facebook's not particularly worried. I would say also there's a really strong plan there to merge Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp into one service over the next few years, which would probably help growth continue.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So here's a number of Facebook users worldwide by region. And you can see that when it comes to Facebook's basic growth strategy, the United States doesn't matter that much. It's been flat for a long time. North America has been flat for a long time. South America, not so much. The reason that there is some upward curve to that gray line, the Americas, is that there's been tremendous growth in Brazil and other parts of South America and Mexico as well.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But the United States and Canada have been flat for, oh, geez, almost a decade at this point. It really haven't had much room for growth. But they had early, almost complete penetration. Nonetheless, North America and Western Europe are where most of Facebook's revenue comes from. But again, it's not so much about revenue as it is about growth. You can see, Asia is the big thing.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Asia is the big thing. The place with the strongest growth curve right now seems to be Africa, however. All right. Here are the leading companies by revenue. Not surprising. Amazon, Apple, Google, which is alphabet. Alibaba, Facebook, Tencent. Alibaba and Tencent are both companies based in China.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And then Netflix, PayPal, Baidu. I want to emphasize that all of these companies are to some degree involved in a vision of a metaverse. They're either contributing elements to it or they have a full fledged vision for how to manage it. And of course, you would have to throw Microsoft up there as well. So here again are the revenue curves for both Google and Facebook over the last few years.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Absolutely fabulous revenue. These companies have nothing to worry about. They have more cash than they know what to do with it. They can throw cash away. So that's the one reason to take a big shot, to change the company's name. To go bigger and broader, and offer a vision, and hire a whole new slew of people at high salaries. So what are we talking about here?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What are we talking about here? Are we talking just about virtual reality? Are we talking about us a more totalization vision? One that might lead us to some really steady improvements in our lives or might lead us to a Neal Stephenson-type dystopia with the full degradation of society, and culture, and democracy. Well, look. Virtual reality seems to be where most of the conversation is.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: As soon as Zuckerberg made his name change, a lot of the stories that you saw come out. A lot of the reactions were all about virtual reality. A lot of what Facebook presented as the sense of how you might enjoy this metaverse vision had to do with virtual reality products and projects that had already been in the pipeline for some time. Now, of course, Facebook is but one player in the virtual reality and virtual reality gaming space.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Google has its Google Goggles sort of thing. It's cardboard and other versions of virtual reality. It hasn't really put it forward as an identifying part of its company, but it's been big and early in it. And of course, Fortnite is the big player in this right now as you might and if you know any young people who play games. It's pretty addictive and pretty powerful as a vision of it. Now, virtual reality, of course, has really tremendous possibilities and actually present applications in life as well.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: You can imagine that training and education are two big growth areas. Training, that should be obvious. It'd be fabulous if people could practice surgery for a couple of years without having to mess up a human body. You can imagine we've had virtual reality flight training for years as well. Many other professions, various forms of engineering, et cetera, could be done with virtual reality quite effectively.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: You could model all sorts of situations, and learn from them, and have great feedback built in. And if you're building a training module, of course, your ethics, and your imperatives, your values are based on creating the safest possible professional. So it's a completely appropriate use of this really powerful technology. There are other potentials for potential uses for virtual reality in a rich way.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: There are people who are involved in therapies who are trying out virtual reality efforts to supplement cognitive behavioral therapy, for instance. And as you can see in the photo on the top right corner of this, there is a sense that virtual reality might be very valuable as an educational tool. And I want to distinguish between training and education, of course, because while I'm bullish on the training, I am not bullish on the education part.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Because even this rather absurd photo, this young woman has virtual reality goggles on while in a classroom, which seems to not necessarily be necessary. But also, you have to wonder at what point the spectacle overwhelms the deep understanding. Again, the difference between education and training. The spectacle of training, which is purely experiential, it can be crucial.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But the spectacle of presentation can actually undermine understanding in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of work that's been done on this. It's something I'm really into right now. I can go into a deeper some other time but it is something to be concerned about. Virtual reality right now seems to be a good bet. This is a chart that comes from consultants, by the way.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And so you have to be wary of it. You can look at 2019, 2020, and 2021, these are the industry numbers for virtual reality headset sales worldwide. And you can see they're modest, but growing strongly. It's not nothing. It's not overwhelming anybody. That's in millions of units. So about 16 million units.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That's the cumulative installed base of 16 million units by 2021. By this year. This is of course projections once you get past '21. Projections, and I'm not sure how they arrived at that particular slope of the curve. But they're consultants. And they perform magic.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So we probably shouldn't pay too much attention. But understand that the industry does pay attention to consultants. And you can see people seeing a graph like this and then pouring R&D money into virtual reality as a result of these predictions. Here's another analysis from another consultant, which is gaming revenue worldwide from 2017 to a couple of years that have not yet happened.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And you can see gaming revenue going up significantly. Sure. I'm willing to believe that there will be an increase. Again, we don't really know whether it's going to flatten or not. And here this is, this is really important, the combination of augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality, market size worldwide from 2021 and 2024.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Again, with a projection. The only number we really have is 2021. But they're predicting this exponential increase in the market size for all of these different platforms. And when I talk about this augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, that's when we're really talking about a metaverse kind of play. All right. So here's my first question.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Is metaverse just really good virtual reality? Is it just really good virtual reality? All right. So I want to caution that I don't think it is. It's too easy to dismiss the term by saying it's just a substitute for the virtual reality promises that have been made to us for many decades. Just like artificial intelligence and machine learning, which is omnipresent, phenomenal, interesting, influential, but not nearly what its great visionaries had promised, virtual reality basically offers the same thing.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It has been really difficult to establish widespread consumer interest in virtual reality beyond the gaming niche. And even then, there are some limits. And beyond specialized training, we haven't seen it adopted commercially very well. It doesn't mean it won't be. But really, metaverse means something much bigger and much different.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So augmented reality. Here are a couple of examples of augmented reality. The notion that you can look through a lens of some sort and see layered upon your vision information, guidance, maybe instructions, right? So in this case, and this is available right now through Google. You can hold your phone up in various places in the world and see instantly little tags on what you see ahead of you.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What you don't see ahead of you actually. Like you don't see that there's a restaurant up there necessarily or a watch shop. And you can click on or punch the little icon, and then get more detailed information about the scene. Augmented reality is, of course, ubiquitous in the heads up display of high end automobiles and increasingly all new automobiles. And of course, the Tesla experience itself is worth noting as part of a metaverse experience as well.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We can get into that later as well. Augmented reality requires a lens. It requires something. Until we have chips implanted in our minds, you have to supplement your vision with something. We all know about the ill fated Google Glass experiment of 2010 through '12. Great failure. Even Sergey Brin stopped wearing his.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It became sort of a joke. People were harassed in bars for wearing them into bars. And one of the problems with the design there was that Google actually took seriously the idea that people should identify the glasses as not normal because there was the surveillance factor, right? There's a big camera sitting up there. So Google wanted people to identify them not just specifically as something odd and Google-based for the sake of branding, but also because they wanted fair warning to people that they are being surveilled.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Now, we've seen Snapchat in recent years roll out spectacles that can contribute to Snapchat stories instantly. And it's connected to Snapchat directly. And then in the past year, we have seen Facebook come out with a partnership with Ray-Ban to basically mimic Snapchat stories spectacles, just like Instagram mimicked Snapchat's stories and has mimicked Snapchat in every way it could.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And so now, we're getting to the point where there are much more socially acceptable glasses available for people. They're still quite expensive. They're still quite intrusive in their surveillance possibilities. But augmented reality is a big part of this. And this is one of the questions I really want to have people delve into, is how can we look at these companies that are investing so much in augmented reality and so much in virtual reality, and know that they explicitly are using the same teams to do this research and this product development, and not understand that at some point, there will be some sort of fusion between virtual and augmented reality.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What would that mean to daily life? What would that mean to our consciousness? All right. Then there's the notion of wearables, and haptics, and smart clothing. The notion that there could be and they're in fact are examples of clothing with sensors in them. They can sense if you're working out. They can sense the extent of exertion.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: They can sense all sorts of bodily processes. I've had some students who are on the football team here at the University of Virginia who wear suits much like this while they go through practice. They're constantly monitored. All their bodily signals are monitored, and tracked, and graphed. They are in complete self-tracking mode, although their coaches are actually doing the tracking more than themselves.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And the idea that I've asked these athletes, what do you think about this? Like what is the purpose of this? And they're pretty clear about it. That it's about optimal training. It's about keeping people from overtraining. Because competitive athletes have a bad habit of overtraining. If they're not told that they should slow it down, then they won't.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And look, the idea of self tracking, and wearables, and so forth is increasingly popular. The Fitbit was the first successful consumer product that does this sort of thing. Now, all of these services are directly connected to servers, and data collection, and all sorts of things. And it's all presented for marketing. But the important thing here is that we are tagging and monitoring the human body.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We're also monitoring the things that human bodies exist in. I mentioned the Tesla earlier as a sort of prime example of an automobile that is completely connected, constantly monitoring things, and reporting back to a central power. We are increasingly inviting other such monitors into our homes through our thermostats, through our appliances, through our alarm systems, through these things that we put on our counters that make noise and listen to us constantly.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And we seem, for the sake of convenience, to be quite enthusiastic about letting these monitors into our lives. And again, this all feeds into a process of personalization, and commercialization, and targeting. And then there's crypto. Now, what the heck does crypto have to do with this vision, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: This is one of the most interesting layers of a metaverse vision. So in the current metaverse, like virtual reality platforms, there are economies developing. There are ways to purchase capabilities, purchase items, purchase skins, purchase identities. And they need a currency that is accepted across borders, is easily manageable among each other.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And so they're choosing various forms of cryptocurrency to do that, despite the instability of the particular value. It depends on the cryptocurrency they're using of course. But it makes it possible to have this simulated economy. So they're using simulated currency to run a simulated economy in a simulated world. And then layered on top of that is the blockchain-enabled practice of non-fungible tokens, NFTs, which are getting quite a bit of notoriety now for reasons I can't quite understand or explain.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I guess I can understand it. I can't explain it or justify it. But the notion that you can actually have some sort of deed to an otherwise replicable cultural expression or even item in the world, even though that doesn't have any legal power, seems very attractive to people who are envisioning building interactions in societies beyond our normal states of governance or our traditional states of governance.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So cryptocurrency and NFTs are becoming a very big part of a vision of a metaverse. This by the way, is one of the reasons why Facebook got into this business or tried to get this business. Right now, they've sort of hit pause on the idea of creating their own currency. But I don't think they're giving up on it because for them to build out environments that are metaversal, metaverse-like, and work across borders, they're going to have to be able to facilitate economic exchange.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And economic exchange, by the way, financial exchange and economic exchange, are crucial to Zuckerberg's vision. It's among those are among the first things he mentions when he talks about why people might want to engage with this stuff and what people might get out of it. He talks about people building businesses as one of the first examples of what could and should happen under this system.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So what are we talking about here? We're talking about all these varieties of human interaction. All being connected to networks, data flows. Think back to the 1990s. In the 1990s, we had a practice of logging on. We had a particular spatial metaphor that guided our digital practices. And it involved this initial act of logging on. And to log on, one must have had an idea that now is the time to log on.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And there is a place where I sit and I type to log on. And there is a device that sits on a desk that lets me log on. And I'm logging on to someplace distant, to someplace distant. A chat room. A server somewhere. A computer at a distance. All of the spatial metaphors stays with us. We've carried it on that legacy of that spatial metaphor, even though we don't actually live like that anymore.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And this is one of the things I really want us to get to think deeply about. Because we taught ourselves to think about digital networks, and digital communication, and digital interaction under a very different model of daily life and interaction. One in which for a small portion of the day, one would choose to log on to a chat room or something else, and interact, and then move away. And there would be a clear distinction between what you might call the real world and what you might call the online world or the cyber world.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And there was this sense that were online or offline that since 2007, has not really reflected our lives in any meaningful way. We now carry with us, on us, on our skin sometimes, devices that are always on. And therefore, we are always in. There is no in or out. There is no on or off. There is just being.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I sound like Yoda all of a sudden. So what does that mean? Oh, my gosh. Well, all of a sudden, these virtual reality opportunities sound 1990s-like, right? They're separate spaces. Separate spaces. So it's like a return to a 1990s utopian or dystopian vision of an online space, of cyberspace.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So you could look at this in a very almost nostalgic way. Oh, my gosh. Like all the stuff that people are talking about and writing about. Remember, Stephenson wrote Snow Crash and published it in 1992. Oh, at least we're finally going back to this great vision that we had in the 1990s, where you could create an ideal world, and control your identity, and like escape from the bonds and troubles of your daily life and be totally new.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We tried that. We all thought the internet would do that for us. It didn't do that for us. We carried our prejudices, our hatreds, our limits, our distractions, our perversions into these new environments. And then blasted them apart to the point where we are the environment. We're completely embedded in the systems.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And the data flows flowed through us. And there is no distinction between online and offline. And that's where we are now. But now, this vision, at least the virtual reality part, seems to invite us into that 1990s framework of escape, of a new start. And the Utopian vision of cryptocurrency is attached to it in a very attractive way. Again, a new start.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: One that is state-free. One that is perhaps radically libertarian, although we have to see. We've already seen Facebook draw very stiff rules. In one of its virtual reality platforms, characters are not allowed to go within four feet of each other. I don't know what a foot is in virtual reality, but that's what they say. So there could be no touching.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And if you saw the Super Bowl ad for meta, they all look like that old children's toy, the weeble. They don't have legs, which I found oddly comforting because you can do less harm if you don't have legs. So what we're really looking at though, and this is why I'm urging people to get beyond the virtual reality notion of metaverse, is a fully connected collection of human bodies and minds.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That has different implications than just better virtual reality. That has significant implications. So here's my basic core question. This is the question I'm going to be pursuing over the next few years. So I wish I had the answers. I'm sure you were all excited up here thinking I was bringing answers.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I'm actually only bringing questions. What are the implications of all of these efforts to enhance, embed, infuse virtual reality, augmented reality, haptics, wearable tech, self-tracking, smart devices and appliances, automobiles, smart cities, and cryptographic assets? Like what is going to actually happen here? What could happen? What really cool stuff and useful stuff could we get out of this, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And we need to make a blunt account of that as well, an honest account of that as well. For people with limited abilities, a lot of these technologies, at least in their own distinct forms, can be tremendous enhancers to life. The quality of life. You can imagine that certain virtual reality and certain augmented reality technologies can do a tremendous amount to enhance the quality of life for someone with limited sight, limited hearing, limited mobility, limited dexterity.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Haptics being another great area of research for this. And given the variety of human bodies, this has great social justice potential. Given the prospects for translation in real time as humans interact, that has tremendous prospects to enhance human well-being as well. You can probably think of a dozen things right off top of your head, that this collection, the suite of technologies might actually significantly enhance human flourishing.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I happen to be a huge fan of a simple thing. Heads up display. I find that when I have heads up display on my Honda Accord, I don't speed. Like I've got the reminder right in front of me. There's no moving my eyes down to see my speedometer. Like I am constantly on top of things. And it is an enhancement and not a distraction as it is currently designed.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think one of the reasons heads up displays is designed well is that car companies don't want to cause accidents. They don't want to make their product less safe. Although Tesla being the exception, which seems determined to make their cars less safe. But this is the long story here. Back in the 1990s, we were talking about data and documents.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What can we do with data? What can we do with documents? How can we enhance knowledge? How can we overcome discrepancies and differences? How can we create connections? How can we enhance learning? How can we enhance knowledge from data to documents to bodies and minds? We are no longer talking about data and documents, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: The data and document game is not of interest to these investors, these inventors, these entrepreneurs, these corporate leaders. They're interested in bodies and minds. Zuckerberg I think was largely responsible for the shift. Zuckerberg never cared about the things that Google cared about. This is the big difference between these two companies. Brin and Page, when they started Google, they were very clear about it.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Their mission statement is still their mission statement. To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. It's always about information. Zuckerberg never cared about information. He cared about people. He cared about bodies and minds. And how we might monitor them, manage them, monetize them, and manipulate them.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And that's what he's done. And that's what Facebook is, top to bottom. It's all about monitoring, monetizing, and manipulating minds. So this is going to open up all sorts of different questions for us as we consider that we should not look at each of these issues distinctly, but look at them as all part of an interactive ecosystem. That these companies are all committed to building and committed to dominating.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Because even though all these companies are giving lip service to interoperability, about how different platforms will allow you to transfer and share and the real competition, that seems to just be a throwaway to keep antitrust at bay. In reality, they're not going to work very well if there are not one or two or three dominant players, just like there are in our current information ecosystems. But here's the big question we should be asking.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What about this stuff would enhance human flourishing? I've already mentioned the ability to compensate for limited ability. But there are other ways that we can enhance human flourishing. Maybe art in a virtual reality platform can be mind blowing in ways that it hasn't been yet. Just as film was an enhancement to our art world, our creative world. Maybe that's one way one place to look and one place to invest, one place to celebrate.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Maybe again, I said translation. Maybe in the sense of overcoming some loneliness. Maybe in the sense of therapies. Certainly in the sense of training as I mentioned. Lots of different ways we can enhance human flourishing. Lots of different ways though we could do the opposite and only enhance corporate control of our lives and decisions. And what we did already.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Like the first run of this from let's say 1995 to 2015. We didn't pay attention to the first question. And we didn't pay attention to the second question. We made the mistake an assumption that what was good for Google is good for humans. What was good for Facebook was good for humans. And we just let these companies roll on and build these systems. And I have to throw Apple and Microsoft in there too and Amazon.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We just let these companies build their systems to their own specifications, to fill their own needs. And we've discovered the hard way that there are huge prices to pay with this. Let's not do it again. Again, Zuckerberg's done us a favor. By laying out this vision of a metaverse, he's let us ask the basic questions again. And when we can.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And we have more knowledge now. We have more awareness now. And we can actually ask harder questions with better information. And we might actually be able to guide the next few major technological decisions in a healthier way than we have over the past couple of decades. Thank you very much. And I'd love to consider some of your questions if we have time for that.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN:
TODD CARPENTER: Siva, thank you so very much. That was a very interesting walk through a very complicated set of issues. I want to encourage anyone. There's been a lively chat going on in the sidebar. If you have any particular questions, or thoughts, or ideas that you'd like to share, please put them in the Q&A. Gosh.
TODD CARPENTER: I don't know where to start. Because as you were talking, I had like five or six different threads of ideas. What I thought was interesting was your connection between the metaverse as a VR experience. My son has one. He was super excited that he and his friends buy it and play video games on it.
TODD CARPENTER: But as a thing that is going to-- you're not going to get millions and billions of people putting one on and experiencing the world in that way. I liked your connection though to crypto and the other elements of this world. Well before the transformation to Meta, Zuckerberg was keen to announce, what was it, Project Diem, his cryptocurrency, as a digital, which summarily got abandoned last month.
TODD CARPENTER: But now, I'm thinking the way that he could get into this world is not through glasses. It's through this enlarged sphere of digital interactions. And we'll call it the metaverse. But I think it's so much more than Oculus and his VR team.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: You know, what's interesting is that when Facebook announced this, and it's changed its name a few times, its various currency projects, I was much more positive on it than I have been about just about anything Facebook has done. And the reason is that there's a really important part of the world economy that has been underserved by the market. It's a great example of market failure. And that is remittances.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Money that flows from the Global North to the Global South. The wealthy parts of the world to the less wealthy parts of the world. Many billions. It's something like $30 billion flows north to south generally roughly in the world. And it does so through family, right? So a family in the Philippines will have two people working in other countries and sending back what they can because they're making money in a more valuable currency and sending it to the Philippines.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Same thing with Central Americas. Same thing with South Asia, where remittances are huge, Africa. And a lot of the world relies on remittances to keep its money supply up and enhance its buying power in the absence of any sort of local monetary policy that's of any effect. Now, part of the problem is some parts of this global economy have really unstable currencies.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I can think of two places. One would be Lebanon. Lebanon has had a disastrous currency inflation over the past two years, where nobody's savings is worth anything right now. And everyone is trying to hoard currency in other forms, including crypto. And Venezuela. Same thing, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So if you're unfortunate enough to live in Venezuela or Lebanon right now, other forms of currency, even highly inflated, they seem to us to be unstable values like cryptocurrency, actually seem really essential to hold value. More often than not, they're still trying to hold American dollars because dollars are still the global currency of sort of pegged in stable value. And so if you're lucky enough to have dollars in Lebanon or in Venezuela, then you're great.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But some people are moving into other forms. But what Facebook saw, what Zuckerberg saw. Maybe Zuckerberg didn't see, but other people at Facebook saw was that the companies that currently facilitate the transfer of money remittances do so with terrible exchange rates, and terrible fees, and undependable delivery. So if you want to send money to some of these places, you have to have the recipient go to a bodega basically, a pavilion, or a store, and pick up the cash in the local currency, which is almost instantly trouble.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: But people do it. It's the best they can do. But what Facebook saw was an opportunity, through WhatsApp mostly, to have a currency of exchange rate. So the cryptocurrency in Facebook sense would not be the ultimate currency, but it would be the facilitator of exchange and of retaining value because it was going to be a very stable value and not speculative.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It wouldn't be speculated about in a market. And so it would be really useful. If I'm sending $1,000 to my family in India, I could transfer it into Facebook's cryptocurrency using WhatsApp and have my uncle pick it up through his phone, his WhatsApp. And have it stored there in a stable currency. It doesn't matter how inflationary the rupee is at the moment.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And he can convert what he wants when he wants. As he would go forward, it would be a tremendous boon. So I saw a great opportunity for that. Unfortunately, Facebook didn't do well in presenting that as an improvement in life. And that it was going to undermine this basic, like there's almost a monopoly with Western Union on this sort of work. And so it got a tremendous amount of blowback.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Everyone's like freaking out about Facebook taking over currency and trying to destroy the Federal Reserve and all this crap, which wasn't at all part of the vision. It was actually a very practical and very reasonable intervention. Now, what happens in the absence of being able to do that in the real world? Well, I'm sure that Facebook is going to just retrench and figure out a way to sponsor a crypto-based economic transaction within its various virtual reality platforms going forward.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And hope that it then can leak out into the rest of the world and augment our reality.
TODD CARPENTER: Not surprising, an interesting set of questions here that came in about how does this ecosystem, this metaverse that you've been describing. How does this tie into the community, the kind of traditional community of data and publications and documents that are part of the world that NISO members and the people who are participating here are looking into?
TODD CARPENTER: How does it impact the production or communication of knowledge?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah. So this is one of the things that's really fascinating. I mentioned that the attention of these companies have moved over from the production and dissemination of knowledge. It no longer interests them. Of course, it interests us. This is our business. So my big obsession with this is how can we retain attention and affection for the processes of knowledge creation, distribution, preservation?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It seems like an afterthought these days. Not so long ago when Google's great project was its library project, its library scanning project that became Google Books. And there was a tremendous amount of attention put on that. And this seemed to be the great utopian move way before we thought about metaverse, right? There were all kinds of problems with that, all kinds of like silliness coming out of Google.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: All kinds of foolish decisions. But at least, it was about the knowledge production and distribution, about the production and distribution of knowledge, right? At least it was about that essential part of human flourishing. What concerns me now is the extent to which we no longer even care. And again, we do.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: They seem not to, right? This seems to have faded from the attention. So for the first 20 years of our digital revolution, the production dissemination of knowledge was crucial. And now, there's so much attention being paid to misinformation, and propaganda, disinformation. All of which is an essential conversation. But so little attention paid to attention being paid, right?
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And so what really concerns me, flashing back to the training and education part. So virtual reality environment, which can be so seductive, so addictive perhaps, is really ideal for a carefully calibrated training platform or tool. But to imagine that as educational is to assume that immersion and attractiveness is a virtue in and of itself.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That it solves the problem of how we enhance knowledge, create knowledge, transfer knowledge. And it worries me because I'm still a firm believer that this technology is pretty great in terms of the ways it efficiently holds information, disseminates information, and allows for contemplation and deliberation beyond it. And I've not found, in all of these years trying to have an open mind about it, a better delivery system for what this offers.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: A better delivery system for like even scholarship. So I think though, we're at an unfortunate place where these conversations mean less. Where games mean everything. And not everything can be a game. I think we're inviting ourselves into a very dangerous situation if we try to throw every part of human life into a huge game environment.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN:
TODD CARPENTER: Yes. Several shout-outs to the fact that you actually have hard copy books that you brought out during your talk. I think you're talking to the right people. Time for one last question before we need to break. And it kind of ties onto the things you were just talking about. So we have clear understandings of human behavior and how human behavior is adapted and changing in online communities and influenced in online communities.
TODD CARPENTER: Is there any hope for lessons learned that we might be able to put some guardrails into place with regard to this environment? Yeah. I often sound like a real downer if you'd come to one of my Facebook talks over the past four years, I've generally tried to deflate what I see as the solutionism, the American spirit. That can do, we can fix it spirit.
TODD CARPENTER: Or worse than that, we can invent the good social media platform spirit, right? I've been a total downer. But with this, I actually have some hope. I have some hope because we have learned a lot in the past two decades. Because we have a different language about technology than we did all those years ago. Because we no longer put Mark Zuckerberg on the cover of magazines and worship him as the boy genius.
TODD CARPENTER: Because we've seen so many charlatans come and go, offering this great promise and really offering us fraud. Enron should have taught us years ago that the pure financialization of everything was not going to lead us to greater wealth, but in fact, to greater fraud. And we've seen that time and time again. So I think we now have, at least globally and culture wide, a healthy cynicism about these things.
TODD CARPENTER: I think that's one of the reasons why Zuckerberg announced his big name change under this new vision, and the stock markets of the world did not immediately go, oh, yes, Mark. We totally trust you to get this right. Here's some more money. That didn't happen. The opposite happened, right? The opposite happened.
TODD CARPENTER: Where they're saying, wait a minute. We're not sold on this vision. So I actually see a lot of hope that-- it doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is going to give up on its vision. Of course not. He doesn't care about that signal. But it does indicate to me that he's going to have to work harder to prove that this vision will enhance human life in measurable ways or at least enhance the bottom line in this company in measurable ways.
TODD CARPENTER: And that's going to be quite a challenge. He never had to prove himself before. He's never really been tested. He's floated by on good luck and the wealth of older men for his entire life. So this will be interesting in that sense. And just the larger sense as I opened with. The fact that we now have metaverse floating in the culture, in the discourse allows us to look at this comprehensively and ecologically, which is what I've been begging for my entire career.
TODD CARPENTER: To look at the changes in technology as ecological phenomena. So we don't try to pull out the single cause of anything. It's about the dynamic interaction of everything.
TODD CARPENTER: Well, a great place to leave things. And I love the fact, I think you completely nailed it in terms of what we were trying to achieve with the conference, both in terms of the content. But also, hey, I have questions. I'm bringing questions and ideas. Let's discuss them. Rather than, hey, know the solution here. So Siva, thank you so much for joining us today.
TODD CARPENTER: I really appreciate you kicking off the conference this way.
DR. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: My pleasure. I hope everybody enjoys and learns a lot. Thanks again for being patient with me. And hope to see you again soon.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. Thank you.

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