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Imagining a Metaverse that Works for All of Us
Continuing my conversation with Mark Pesce, who argues for a ‘metaverse of the real’.
What follows is the second half of a recent conversation I had with futurist Mark Pesce on the danger and the potential of the metaverse. Mark’s book Augmented Reality came out a year ago, and he’s been closely following developments in the virtual reality field as well. Part one of our conversation was titled, “Will the Metaverse Be an ‘Omnidirectional Panopticon?” and ended with Mark suggesting that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were trying to monopolize the future.
Q: So, given everything you’ve said, the question remains, can we head off the dystopia, the enhanced surveillance that the metaverse seems to portend, with the tools that we now have, and with the laws that we now have? Or are we still in great danger? You outline in your book the idea of a different approach to locative data that would not be owned by one company, right. I mean, it seems to me that’s still something we want.
A: Yeah, and I think that the reasons for it are becoming clearer the further down this path. Metaverse creators kind of fall into two classes of people: those who are firmly committed in open standards and then people who are happy to have entirely closed worlds now. So you can take a…
