Linden Lab’s Second Life has been one of the largest and most successful virtual world ecosystems with nearly 13 years of existence. But Linden Lab recognized that the infrastructure and foundations of Second Life was not going to be able to drive the level of low-latency performance that virtual reality requires, and so they announced in June 2014 that they were going to be building a new project codenamed Project Sansar that would be optimized for VR.
I had a chance to sit down with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg this year at SVVR to talk about their design goals and plans for Project Sansar. We also talked about a lot of deeper issues about the future of the Metaverse ranging from the tradeoffs of walled garden silos vs the open web, control vs. freedom, identity vs. anonymity, and moderating for the group experience vs. justice and reconciliation beyond a one-strike ban.
This interview with Ebbe also inspired a lot of deep thoughts about how the overall political, economic, and legal context is setting the tone and boundaries about the future of VR. This interview made quite an impression on me, and I appreciate Ebbe’s candor and honesty to discuss and explore some of the larger issues of the closed vs open web, and the future of privacy and data tracking as we move beyond the “Information Age” and into the “Experiential Age.”
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Linden Lab has had a lot of experience of running a successful virtual world with Second Life, and they are well-positioned to make an early move at creating a user-generated virtual world at scale. A press release from last August mentions that pilot users of Project Sansar will have to “create 3D content using Autodesk’s Maya® software,” and so it will be interesting to see to what types of world-building tools will be available within the experience to their non-expert, 3D modeling users. At SVVR, Linden Lab announced that they’re taking creator preview applications for people interested in creating experiences on their platform starting later this summer.
This interview inspired a lot of deep reflection, and I noticed that there was a qualitative difference between being able to track data from your behaviors in a web browser and being able to track biometric data from a VR experience. I think this reflects some of the wider discussion in the tech community that VR and AR may be catalyzing a larger shift from the “Information Age” and into this new “Experiential Age.”
MOVING FROM THE INFORMATION AGE TO THE EXPERIENTIAL AGE
On Monday, Mike Wadhera wrote an article on TechCrunch titled “The Information Age is over; Welcome to the Experience Age,” where he argues there’s a fundamental shift of “the changing context of our online interactions, shaped by our connected devices” that has users posting and consuming less personal information and moving towards having more “experiences” online.
Wadhera argues that Facebook and Twitter are Information Age natives where users aggregate data to reflect their identity. He says, “Accumulation manifests in a digital profile where my identity is the sum of all the information I’ve saved — text, photos, videos, web pages.” With original Facebook status update sharing on the decline, then this could be an early indication that the tide is shifting away from experiences that value data and information, and more towards ones that emphasize visceral emotions and deeper meaning.
The Experiential Age is more about having an authentic experience of being yourself rather than collecting abstract representations of identity through the posting of information. Wadhera argues that Snapchat is a native to this new Experiential Age, and that their ephemeral, self-destructing messages “force us to break the accumulation habit we brought over from desktop computing.”
Wadhera identifies mobile technologies as one of key drivers of this shift, but I would also argue that the rise of virtual and augmented reality has the potential to move the center of gravity of our attention from information on screen-based media to experience within immersive media.
The Virt’s Phil Johnston argues a similar point in his post from 2014 where he says that Virtual Reality represents the Dawn of the Experiential Age. VR allows for the direct transmission of experiences that goes beyond a level of data transmission that happens when it’s abstracted into a 2D plane.
This is a similar conclusion that I came to within my summary of 400 Voices of VR interviews talk that I gave at SVVR. I titled my graphic “The Human Experience of Virtual Reality” because it was the underlying human experience that I found could make the most sense of understanding the virtual reality landscape. The “human experience” landscape of VR is less about market verticals, and more about how VR has the capacity to reflect the full complexity and nuance of the human experience.
I would argue that the more of these twelve different domains of human experience that a VR experience can include, then the more popular it will be since it will be able to reflect the fullness of our actual human experience. Both Second Life and Project Sansar aim to give expression to all twelve of these domains of human experience within the context of their virtual worlds, and this is often overlooked or not fully appreciated by the new consumer VR community.
This was a point that was brought home to me in my 2014 interview with Ebbe as well as with Second Life documentarian Bernard Drax. Linden Lab does have an incredible amount of experience in fostering and cultivating each of these domains of human experience, and so I would expect that if Project Sansar enables user-friendly world-building capabilities, then they’ll have the potential to be one of the first virtual worlds that captures the full range of expression for all of the different dimensions of the human experience within VR.
INFORMATION AGE BUSINESS MODELS DRIVEN BY SURVEILLANCE
One of the primary business models of The Information Age has been that information is freely available, and that it’s supported by ads. There’s an explicit agreement that authenticated users are volunteering to be tracked and surveilled by companies in exchange for all of this free content and social connections that they are enabling.
This was a point that was made by Ethan Zuckerman in a Reply All podcast, where he argued that the JavaScript pop-up ads that he invented in 1994 may have helped to sustain an ad-based revenue model on the Internet that could have had the unintended side effect of “ushering in a world in which the american public has grown too comfortable with the idea of being under surveillance.”
Zuckerman feels guilty that he may have “helped create a world today in which Edward Snowden can come forward with his revelations about government spying, and most of us will just shrug, because we’re so used to being generally surveilled by the websites we visit.”
We often don’t hesitate to consent to the Terms of Service agreements of Information Age websites that dictate how our data are collected and used in exchange for the attention of our social network and the platform tools to share photos, status updates or videos. We have a lot of agency over what information we share and don’t share, and so this is a value exchange where we’re willing to trust these companies in exchange for the real value they’re providing.
WHY EXPERIENTIAL AGE SURVEILLANCE IS DIFFERENT
While there’s a level of consent for data that we are explicitly sharing on websites within the context of the Information Age, the Experiential Age is going to be tracking behavioral and biometric data that is a lot more unconscious but yet still revealing. Virtual Reality has the capability to gather an enormous amount of biometric data ranging from our heart rate data, our emotional states, identifiable body language cues extrapolated from head and hand tracking, and eventually our eye-tracked “attention” for what we’re looking at and getting impressed by.
While we have had no real pause with sharing abstracted information with companies, then perhaps we will be more cautious about what type of unconscious medical data from our bodies that we’re willing to share with companies. That means that Facebook, Google, or Linden Lab could start to save vast repositories of personal biometric data that could become a target for governments or hackers.
US companies can receive a National Security Letter from the government requesting data that they’re prevented to talk about under a gag order. There are government transparency reports available from Google and Facebook that have assurances that they’re not required to hand over certain private data, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation has found thousands of pages of documents from a related lawsuit that showed repeated revealations of government abuses of power.
The Terms of Service from Oculus even remind us “[No] data transmission or storage can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect the information we maintain, we cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any information you disclose or transmit to our Services and cannot be responsible for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of information.”
While we like to think that all of our personal data will be completely safe in the hands of these companies, the truth of the matter is that there are hackers and abusive governments that make it impossible for companies to be able to guarantee 100% security.
THE EVOLVING BUSINESS MODELS OF THE EXPERIENTIAL AGE
Will the Experiential Age catalyze a change in what types of Terms of Service that we’re willing to accept? And will this lead to new viable business models that don’t rely upon surveillance? Here are a number of big open questions as to what the emerging business model of this Experiential Age:
- Will VR users still be willing to share personal data in exchange for free content?
- How much of this gathered data will VR users be willing to share?
- What types of benefits of interactivity or more targeted content would this data enable?
- What insights and judgements could AI-trained, deep learning networks be able to assert about us after studying months of our biometric data gathered from VR experiences?
Overall, I think that the underlying business models of The Experiential Age may be evolving towards a pay-per-event type of model. So rather than receiving all of the immersive content for free in exchange for seemingly innocuous data collection, then perhaps we’ll move towards a culture that is willing to pay for experiences up front without having to submit to additional surveillance.
We’re already moving towards an app-based ecosystem with VR where there is a pay-upfront mentality that more mirrors what we have seen in the gaming market, but it’s still an open question as to whether we’ll be willing to pay for every immersive experience after living through this Information Age ethic that “Information should be free.”
We are still willing to pay for live sporting, music, and cultural events, and so perhaps The Experiential Age will introduce new viable business models for holding virtual events.
MICROPAYMENTS AND DISTRIBUTED TRUST WITH THE BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION
One key technology that may provide a viable solution for micropayments and the anonymous exchange of payments is the “Blockchain,” which is the underlying trust mechanism in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Don Tapscott & Alex Tapscott just released a book on May 10th about The Blockchain Revolution, which talks about some of the implications of the blockchain including, “Keeping the user’s information anonymous, the blockchain validates and keeps a permanent public record of all transactions. That means that your personal information is private and secure, while all activity is transparent and incorruptible–reconciled by mass collaboration and stored in code on a digital ledger.”
I believe that there are a lot of decentralization implications of the blockchain that could impact our political, economic, and legal systems, and that the blockchain is a technology that has the potential to change the larger context towards enabling the full potential of The Experience Age.
Will companies and the government still try to track and surveil us? Of course. Just because our attention is moving towards the Experience Age doesn’t mean that the Information Age is over. We are still a long ways away from completely transcending the limitations of our current obsession with Big Data and the Information Age business models based upon the pervasive surveillance of our digital lives. We’re still just at the very beginning of this transition, but the overall political and economic context may shift more towards privacy and liberty given the decentralization of power that the blockchain enables. Perhaps after that point, privacy will have become an absolute requirement for any viable implementation of the Metaverse.
THE METAVERSE IN TRANSITION FROM INFORMATION AGE TO EXPERIENTIAL AGE
There are a number of different companies and technologies that would love to be the foundation and primary enablers of the Metaverse, and this battle is unfolding as we are still shifting from the Information Age to the Experiential Age. There are two major approaches to building the foundations of the Metaverse, and it comes down to a walled garden versus open web approach. There are walled garden, hosted virtual world solutions like Linden Lab, AltSpace & Facebook, and then there are more open source or self-hosted solutions such as High Fidelity, VR Chat, JanusVR, self-hosted Unity Builds, or WebVR.
Each of these approaches have different tradeoffs between control and freedom, identity and anonymity, and whether or not there will be different sales or property taxes that are collected within these virtual worlds. It’s also an open question with the walled garden solutions whether or not you’ll be able to export and reclaim ownership over the content that build within these worlds. The walled garden tools will no doubt have some of the most user-friendly content creation tools and communities form around them, but there may be some free speech and behavioral restrictions with these tools and networks. It’s also most likely that the walled garden approaches will have the strongest networks of people and vibrant social interaction.
The Information Age has also had a very punitive mindset when it comes to policing trolling behavior, which could get your IP banned for life. This may have been tolerable for authenticated websites within the Information Age, but getting banned from a virtual world could have implications that are much more serious and long-term. If the Metaverse becomes the primary source of income or social interaction for some people, then banning them could have a much bigger impact on their life. Having the ability to restrict access is one of the potential risks of consolidating power to a private company with no official appeals process.
There will need to be tools to deal with legitimate trolling behavior, but what types of recourse or due process will be available for those who have been unfairly and permanently banned from a virtual world that may be as enriching than the real world? Will could be new truth and reconciliation mechanisms in the Experiential Age where a more restorative justice system evolves that balances accountability with the chance to change and grow?
The walled garden versus open web is a debate has played out on the World Wide Web since the early days of AOL and CompuServe when the balance of power was concentrated within a handful of walled gardens sites. Then the ugly HTML pages become more interconnected, and it was this linking between documents that ultimately provided more value according to Metcalf’s Law. This was a victory for the decentralized open web, but now there seems to be a reconsolidating of power into a small handful of social media, technology, and entertainment websites. Will VR experiences and the evolution of the interconnected Metaverse experience a similar trajectory of Closed, Open, and then Closed again?
CULTIVATING TRUST AND PRIVACY IN THE EXPERIENTIAL AGE
After talking with Ebbe, I realized that a lot of these privacy issues may go beyond what Linden Lab are reasonably able to design for at this point. There is not a lot of direct evidence for how big of a concern these evolving privacy issues are going to be within the context of this New Experiential Age. And there’s not a market demand that can be articulated down to a specific feature request, and so it boils down to whether or not the consumer can trust a company like Linden Lab or Facebook with their data.
Ebbe said that there are some websites that he would not trust with his data, but that he does happen to trust Facebook with the limited amount of engagement he has with the site. But a lot of other people are not so trusting, and they were very vocal with their skepticism when Facebook bought Oculus. Ultimately, in the short-term, there’s no doubt that the Facebook acquisition legitimized VR in a powerful way, and therefore overall helped VR on it’s path towards going mainstream. But yet, the long-term privacy implications for VR are still very much open up for debate.
The Information Age has cultivated a culture where in order to use a website, then we have to sign a Terms of Service where we consent to having all of our actions and behaviors tracked on their site while we’re an authenticated user. Most people barely read the terms of service before checking the box because there have been no real severe consequences. But these same seemingly innocuous Terms of Service may have much broader impact within the Experiential Age.
UploadVR’s Will Mason wrote an article about some of the potential privacy concerns with Facebook and the Oculus Rift’s ‘always on’ process that’s detailed within their Terms of Service. This article got a lot of social media buzz, and it even caught the attention of Senator Al Franken who sent a letter to Oculus asking six specific questions about privacy. The Oculus Terms of Service has a clause that says that “We use the information we collect to send you promotional messages and content and otherwise market to you on and off our Services. We also use this information to measure how users respond to our marketing efforts.”
Oculus responded by saying that they’re not even using that data for anything yet, and that they’re not yet even currently sharing any information with Facebook, but they may do so in the future. Given what the Terms of Service allows, then there’s absolutely nothing stopping them from using that data they’ve collected and sharing it with Facebook at any moment.
Facebook has traditionally taken a slow and steady approach of eroding default privacy controls over many years. Matt McKeon made a visualization of the default privacy settings (shown as blue in the graph below) at Facebook from 2005 to 2010, and the pattern is clearly moving towards making more and more information public by default.
In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation traced the evolution of Facebook’s privacy policies since 2005 to see a very clear story evolve. The EFF concluded the following:
Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.
So while Facebook may be taking a conservative approach to what data they are collecting and sharing with the Oculus Rift, then the clear trajectory is that privacy will continue to erode in order to benefit their advertising and business partners. There seems to be a certain level of autonomy and independence that Oculus is emphasizing to give the impression that they’re still independently operating from Facebook, but this will not last forever. Given Facebook’s history, then it’s almost inevitable that their Information Age business model will continue to push towards gathering and analyzing as much data as possible for the sake of selling more ads.
CONCLUSION
There are a lot of open questions as to whether the future of the Metaverse will be dominated by a handful of walled garden sites or a larger set of openly connected virtual worlds.
Here’s a number of open questions that can only be answered over time by the virtual reality community, and eventually everyone as we transition into the Experiential Age.
- Will any of these companies building the Metaverse be willing to take a strong stand on privacy?
- Do VR consumers even care? Or will it even matter?
- As users of VR, will be we willing to support a culture of micropayments or pay-per-events?
- Or do we want an ad-supported immersive future where we’re willing to be share whatever data on us can be gathered and used to get better targeted advertising?
- Will the winning business models of the future be based upon an Information Age paradigm or some sort of emerging Experiential Age paradigm?
- Will it be a matter of the best technology winning? Or will market demand for strong values around privacy be a differentiating factor?
These are all big open questions, and you can bet that some users will be keeping a close eye on these terms of service as we continue to move into the Experiential Age. Ebbe was right that many of these questions go beyond what individual businesses may have the capability to reasonably address, especially with the lack of consumer demand for specific features.
But if we really are in the midst of moving from the Information Age to the Experiential Age, then perhaps we’ll start to see a larger shift in the political, economic, and legal context. Then perhaps this will enable us to fully live up to the ultimate potential of virtual reality that accurately reflects the full complexity and beauty of the human experience. And ultimately any tracking and data that’s collected will be primarily focused on enriching our experiences within VR rather than enriching a small handful of companies at the cost of our privacy and freedom.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. Today, I talked to Ebi Altberg, who is the CEO of Linden Lab. And Linden Lab created Second Life, which is arguably one of the largest and most successful virtual worlds that's out there today in terms of the size of the economy, the number of users, and the types of tools that allow creation of experiences within a virtual world. So Second Life has been around for a really long time, but the primary interface to this virtual world is through a 2D screen. And even though they do have some integration for VR, it's not really designed to be able to scale and move forward with where VR is going. And so London Lab, a couple of years ago, decided to essentially start over from scratch with Project Sansar, which is their new virtual world. So they're taking all the lessons they've learned in terms of governance and running a virtual economy and empowering users to create virtual worlds, and they're putting all their efforts into this project Sansar. And so I get a chance to sit down with Ebe and really talk about some of their design goals, as well as some of the bigger issues of privacy and the future of the metaverse and the approach of walled gardens versus the open web. and all the different trade-offs between control and freedom, identity and anonymity, as well as the benefit of the group experiences versus justice for individuals. And so in a lot of ways, the breadth of these experiences in virtual worlds are really mirroring the breadth of the human experience within our real world. And so we'll be talking about all these different various issues and how they translate into VR. So that's what we'll be covering today in today's episode. But first, a quick word from our sponsor, Today's episode is brought to you by the Virtual World Society. The Virtual World Society was started by Tom Furness, and their goal is to become the Peace Corps of VR. They want to transform living rooms into classrooms, and so they're in the process of trying to recruit potential subscribers, as well as content creators who are interested in creating educational experiences that help solve the world's problems and help make the world a better place. So if you're interested, go to virtualworldsociety.org to sign up and get more information. Bye. So this interview happened at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference that happened in San Jose in April. And this is the second time that I had a chance to talk to Ebe. The first time was at the very first SVVR back in 2014. And that was before Project Sansara was even announced. And so I've actually run into Ebe a number of times at different VR conferences since then. But I've either not run into him or he wasn't ready to talk about Project Sansara yet. So I was very grateful that he was willing to sit down and to really take a deep dive into some of these deeper issues that are facing the future of the metaverse. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:05.359] Ebbe Altberg: Hi, I'm Ebbe Altsberg. I'm the CEO of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. And also, we're working on this new project called Project Sansar, which is a huge effort to build a completely new platform from the ground up to let users easily create virtual experiences, share them with each other, and then have social interaction within those experiences, as well as monetize them.
[00:03:29.173] Kent Bye: So what are the primary design goals that you had with Project Sensar? Because you're essentially deciding to build a new stack from scratch, aside from what you had built with Second Life. And so what were some of the things that you were really trying to achieve in your design of this new platform?
[00:03:45.927] Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, some key differences, although I mean in spirit we say it's similar to Second Life. It's a platform for you to create virtual experiences and share them with others and make money on them. But some key differences is distribution or how you can easily share these. Second Life is very much like a closed wall garden. Very few users come into any one particular experience. They basically come in through the front door. I sort of liken it to imagine YouTube with the only way you could find YouTube videos and consume them was to go to youtube.com and start searching for stuff. That's not really how you discover them and that's not really how you enter into them. So with Sansar we may open it up so that every experience is easily an entry point in of itself. and make it easy for creators to attract their own audience into their experiences directly from the outside world so that they're not sitting around being dependent on us to shove traffic at them. Part of the great things with Second Life is just this incredible vast different types of experiences that you have from anything from education to health to role-playing to everything in between games and everything in between art and music. But no one in the outside Second Life world sort of knows that those experiences exist and wouldn't necessarily know how to enter into them. So we want to make that super easy for creators to create and then make it easily accessible for people to enter into their experiences. Another one is accessibility. Second Life is pretty much just a desktop product. So if you want to share that experience with other people, And that person happens to be on a mobile device, there's a no-go. And also, we obviously wanted to solve for VR hardware. Second Life is not going to get you to the performance of 90 frames per second that you need to have a comfortable VR experience. So we built Sansa from the ground up to be performant, to solve for all those different types of hardware. So cross-platform, including VR hardware support, and including controllers and all that. Another difference is ease of use. I mean, Second Life was very much kind of organically grown over many, many years and there are lots of buttons and checkboxes and it can be quite confusing for people to understand how to use it and how to create and how to share and all that. So, with just spending a lot of time thinking through how you can make the experience easy for both creators and consumers to use the product, it's going to make a big difference. Another one is the business model, Second Life. We primarily make our money by basically renting out simulators, which means a fairly small simulator by today's standard is 295 bucks a month, which is kind of out of reach for all of us to just own one or more of those types of experiences, which puts sort of a barrier of entry for people to create and own experiences and share those with others. We want that to be a lot lot cheaper so that we can all own our own experiences for various purposes and then instead make up more money on the marketplace which in Second Life we basically make almost no money on. I mean the GDP in Second Life is about north of half a billion dollars and we collect no taxes or fees or anything on that so which means that for some content creators on the platform there's like a tax-free haven And for some landowners or people that own simulators, it's a high property tax and a very low sales tax, put it that way. So in Sansar, we want to bring the property tax way down and bring up a sales tax, if you will, to kind of equate it to the physical world. And then also smarter levels of subscriptions for different types of users that makes more sense. So those are some key differences.
[00:07:18.710] Kent Bye: It's interesting to think about these virtual worlds as a model of YouTube and subscriptions and Twitter followers. What would a subscription look like to subscribing to somebody's world in Project Sansar? Because you're talking about more of a metaphor of a city or of a physical space. it's less of a data stream of the next video. And so, like, how would you imagine people being able to grow an audience who may be a content creator and want to create an experience? How does that expand out from the first experience and then connect to the others?
[00:07:51.205] Ebbe Altberg: Well, obviously creators can choose to interconnect their experiences as they wish, you know, whether they're stitching together their own experiences in multiple ways, or ganging up with other people to stitch together large experiences that span many, many simulators. Obviously we will do things over time to make it easy to search and discover experiences, to make sure that it's easy for creators to classify their experiences a certain way, so if it's education experiences we can do search and directories and stuff for people to discover those. Also give every experience sort of its own webpage that can be found through SEO that people can click over to and see, oh, this is what the experience is about, and then sort of click to go through into the experience, which will require a download because this stuff is not possible on the web yet. and then give more tools over time for the creators to better understand how good of a job they are acquiring their own traffic and their own users. There's too many experiences in Second Life, for example, and there will be in Sansa for us to even be able to comprehend all of them. We're talking languages and cultures. and use cases that are so diverse that we can't successfully acquire users on our users behalf. They have to find a way to acquire their own unless they're in some very super high popular type of categories because it's an extremely long tail. And over time, obviously, we can help people understand that, oh, if you like these types of experiences, then maybe also you want to go and check out these types of experiences. So we can do things to sort of move users around in ways over time as we grow. But for starters, starting with just the idea of make it possible for a creator to succeed by themselves without us pushing users at them, they should be able to succeed on their own. Because there's a lot of use cases, too, where you're not necessarily talking about having attract a large audience. It's trying to attract a relevant audience, which might just be my family, or my students, or my co-workers, or what have you. If you want to make a big popular game that has millions and millions of concurrent users, then it's a slightly different game. But then you probably need to start having savviness in how do you acquire all those users and retain them and all those kinds of things. So how do we provide you the tools to successfully do that?
[00:09:59.846] Kent Bye: And one of the things that I've been saying is that whatever company is able to create the world building tools that lowers the barrier with as least friction as possible, take their imagination and their ideas and be able to create it in a world, then those companies that are able to create those tools to enable people to do that, but also have them interconnected, then that's going to be a super compelling indication in my mind that those are the ones that are going to be successful in the long run to be able to generate the types of experiences that draw the crowds of people. And so from Project Sensar's perspective, what are you doing in order to achieve that?
[00:10:38.939] Ebbe Altberg: Well, it's a lot of things I spoke about. I mean, if you make a low barrier of entry for people to start to create, if you make it easy for them to create, if you make it easy for them to then invite an audience into their creation, if you then make it easy for them to have a social interaction, and whether it's for a game or a class or just sitting down with your family and talk and play chess or watch a movie together, if you make all those things easy, You know, we all know how to do this thing in the physical world, which is not that easy, by the way. You have to learn a lot of things to successfully acquire your own space and put stuff in it and invite people into it and all that. But if we can make that easy, then I think we probably can hit what is a really super core use case for humanity in general to just I find that it's kind of what humans do is they create spaces for various purposes. They invite various unique audiences into those spaces. Your family room has, you know, a set of rules for who can access and what you do there versus your office and your conference room versus the park versus the movie theater versus the bowling alley. But they're all human-created spaces, whether indoor or outdoor, for particular purposes to have people come together and have social interaction within those spaces. If we can make that easy throughout all the steps, then there's almost no limit to all the different ways that people can use something like this.
[00:12:03.170] Kent Bye: It sounds like you're going to be lowering the property tax, but I don't imagine that it's going to go all the way down to zero dollars, or is it?
[00:12:10.793] Ebbe Altberg: Well, I don't want to say too much yet because we're still noodling on some of these things, but it might be approaching zero for certain types of spaces. For example, we want people to create public spaces that attract audiences. Maybe we charge you for the ability to have privacy. How we exactly sort of slice and dice this so that it's friendly for the users, but also enables us to, you know, make a business is something we think a lot about, but we do not want just a basic ownership of an experience to be a big hurdle for people to overcome.
[00:12:46.939] Kent Bye: For me, I see it as a little bit of a trade-off between freedom that you're giving up from having complete control over your domain to be able to do whatever you want in terms of hosting the virtual world on your own server, for example, versus how much power you get by just using the tools that are available. So do you decide to go on your own and run a WordPress blog and do all the stuff where you have to maintain it and update it? Or are you going to go and pay Squarespace to be able to maintain it for you? So I kind of see that as a trade-off, as Project Sensar is one of those sites where you may be paying and giving up some control, but at the same time, you may be getting other tools and being empowered to do things that you maybe don't want to have to be bothered by doing.
[00:13:29.545] Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, there's no doubt that with our platform, trying to make it this easy and we're going to be a full stack. So yes, we will be hosting all these experiences, but that's because 99.9% of whatever the population would never know how to run something on a server. I mean, that's just a safe server. And most people on this planet wouldn't even know what you're talking about. And I think you can make, obviously, a huge scalable business, whether it's Facebook or YouTube or whatever, where you're the full stack. So that's how we think about it. And yes, you do give up some control. If you want to have completely your own brand and your own user namespace and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then yeah, maybe at some point you're so specialized that maybe you're best off just roll your own on top of unity or unreal or whatever else is out there and there will be I'm sure there'll be room for Plenty of people want to tackle that way, but I think of those as more of sort of companies and businesses or something like that I don't know that individuals will want to go to that extreme and And we're on that sort of, I call it sort of a gradation of from sort of total black label to total white label. And then there's gray label in between. How much flexibility do we give you? And we do not necessarily want to think of it as you coming to Sansar the world. We want you to be coming to class or coming to Ben's living room or something. And yeah, it's powered by Sansar, but it's your place and your experience for what you're doing with your audience in that context. But yes, We're sharing that real estate with you to some degree, right? We're going to make it possible for people to discover other experiences from there. So you are interconnected with the whole fabric of experiences that are out there. So it's not like you can necessarily make it sort of this white label isolated thing on our platform. That's not how we think about it right now. think more YouTube or Facebook than open source WordPress. Or think WordPress.org more so than WordPress, the open source thing you can install on your own server and sort of have full control top to bottom.
[00:15:24.123] Kent Bye: Well, I think the larger point that I'm leading towards is that thinking about the metaverse, we're gonna have Facebook, we're gonna have Linden Lab, we're gonna have maybe perhaps these walled garden metaverses, but yet, would you be able to link a Project Censar metaverse into a Facebook metaverse? So I think that the point that I'm getting at is that there's a little bit of this open versus closed model of moving forward and that, you know, the argument that Philip Rosedale told me last year at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference is that You know, you can kind of look at the early days of the internet, where you had AOL and CompuServe, and then you had the websites, and the websites looked terrible. They were just not beautiful, and they weren't a great user experience, but yet, you know, when you go into AOL and CompuServe, they were great content, but yet, in the long run, the thing that Philip said is that given Metcalf's law that the value of the network increases with the square of the number of nodes that are in the network, it's interconnectivity between these worlds and the portal nature. And so that if we have a world where these silos of walled gardens that aren't able to connect between them, then maybe in the long run, they're not going to be as valuable. So I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts on that.
[00:16:31.404] Ebbe Altberg: I mean, the internet hasn't solved this. I mean, and that's a lot easier problem than the metaverse, right? I mean, the sense of identity in the metaverse is, I think, like a much more complex issue than just on the internet itself. So internet, I mean, Facebook, Amazon, like you can take all these, they're all walled gardens in their own ways, right? And so that's where most people spend their time. Not necessarily in this sort of layer of sort of free floating Things but you know and they obviously can't interconnect that can link from one to the other But then I have to log in again and now I become another identity on this other property because it's owned by another corporation or whatever So, since the internet has not solved this, I'm not necessarily expecting the metaverse to suddenly solve this, where I as an avatar can just move freely from the Sansar stack to the High Fidelity stack to the whatever stack and just continue to be myself. and continue to have my same relationships and continue to have my same appearance and all that, that just makes my head hurt. I mean, it's just such a complicated problem. And we're so far away from even getting to that point. Maybe in a beautiful future, we'll have some sort of level of common framework across everything that makes some of that possible. Like I said, I think it would be an easier problem to solve on the internet than it would be in the metaverse, and the internet hasn't even come close to solving it. Now, you do have the value of being able to click from one website to another, but not as an authenticated person, right? I can go look at sort of public places where I don't necessarily have an identity, I can pop around. But as soon as I want to bop into a place where I want to have an identity, I have to sort of become someone else that's relevant to that place's identity system. I think that's a problem that is so big that I can't even start to think about it. If we just start with making it possible for more than just a few million people to have virtual experiences, and we can get into the tens and then maybe the hundreds of millions, they can actually have the benefit of these kinds of things. I think we can make it so beneficial for so many people without having to try and figure out how to solve that problem. If we try and solve that problem today, I don't think we're going to move forward very fast.
[00:18:45.676] Kent Bye: I guess from the beginning of the internet to where we are now has been quite an evolution of the open web and innovation, but yet we have been moving towards these walled gardens like Facebook. If you look at the amount of time that people are spending on the internet and what they're looking at, it's usually from Facebook and their friends and the content that they're posting. That's great for Facebook, but yet there's an element there of fear and distrust of privacy and governance of like they have so much power that they can start to dictate things like, okay, you have to use your real name. You have to be involved in the system where we're going to slowly erode your privacy and kind of like this slow burn, like maybe that was there. strategy for the whole time. So I guess it's more of like looking at what's already happening in the web and the things that kind of make us in our gut feel like I don't know if I really trust what's happening here with my privacy moving forward. And when we start to move into virtual worlds, I see a similar type of trajectory of this walled garden of control and power and potential distrust. And so how do you go about cultivating that trust of like privacy to prevent this situation of, you know, having too much power?
[00:19:57.534] Ebbe Altberg: Well, I think in the interest of commercial success, you're always going to be fighting this battle till the end of time. So, you know, all I try to do personally is to just engage with entities that I trust sufficiently with the data that I provide them. And I don't interact with actors that I don't trust. I happen to trust Facebook, although I don't use it that much. But I don't know, I don't think they can do much damage to me with the information I've given them so far. And there's lots of other players on the internet that I definitely wouldn't give half as much information as given Facebook, because I don't trust at all what they would do with it. So, but yeah, I don't even know what the solution would be to some sort of magic world where no one has an ability to collect the type of information on you. And certainly for certain services, I need to collect certain information. Because there are obviously people that are bad actors and how do I make sure and protect my users from other users who have bad intent? So some level of understanding of who is who and what are their intents and it becomes important to run sort of a safe trusted service. All of us running around anonymously interacting with each other obviously is not necessarily the formula for the healthiest environments out there. I mean just look at anonymous comment sections on the internet or even in Second Life today where completely anonymous with no validation of your identity whatsoever you can jump in and some people obviously take advantage of that and make it and not pleasant experience for other people that have good intentions. So to protect the good, we have to do some work to collect some information. That's just how it is.
[00:21:33.658] Kent Bye: Yeah, the themes that I'm seeing in terms of the amount of biometric data and amount of information that VR is going to open up a portal into with our heart rates potentially and like all sorts of like our attention or our emotional states throughout the course of being in VR. So I think that there's just a lot more kind of personal data that could be involved that's more of a health thing. You know, it's like we have a certain rules and regulations with HIPAA around what kind of medical information and that's not going to be used against us for getting a job or whatnot. there's a certain regulations that when we start to get into VR the lines between the information that we're disclosing on our own conscious choice versus stuff that we're not even fully aware of but that who knows what type of stuff could lead to. So I guess that's more of like the long term of where things are going in terms of like the amount of metrics and analytics and data that VR is going to provide into users and then as a custodian of that, your responsibility as Linden Lab as to like, how do you ensure and trust that people are like, okay, we're not going to use your data for this or like, how do you even, you know, you've, you've had to do that to some extent with privacy and different regulations you have with Second Life, but you know, how do you see that changing or evolving for Project Sensar?
[00:22:46.285] Ebbe Altberg: Well, I think it will always evolve and it will always be an ongoing conversation with our users and amongst ourselves to make sure that we do things that can continually create a better experience for people. There's a lot of information that we gladly give away if it benefits us. So we just have to be proud and comfortable with how we run our business, what data we collect, how we protect that data, how we anonymize that data, how we share clearly with the users what data we've collected and what control they have over that data, etc, etc. So I think this is just something that will never go away. It will always be there and yes, you're right, you know, there'll be a lot more personal information through now with all these sensors and starting to be able to detect just based on someone's facial expression of what mood or state that they're in, it's going to just be more and more powerful and see how they interact with other people and with what environments and what they do and what they, you know, there's a ton of stuff. And so we have to make sure that we're not crossing lines that make it a bad thing. And I don't know exactly where that line is. It's one of those things that you see it when you see it. And then you just have to make sure that you have people on your team that make continually the right decision to stay on the right side of that line. and to be very transparent with the users of where the line is and on what side of that line is being used for what, and again, what control they have over that. So I think it's just part of life of something that we just have to be continually aware of. I don't think there's a simple yes, no. I don't think 100% anonymous is the right answer because that makes it very hard for us to Make a better and better service and also I think it makes it over time then therefore a less ideal experience for our users But I also don't want to sort of infringe on anybody's privacy. I mean we take very strict We have very strict policies on sharing of personally identifiable information on second life and anyone that Ever sort of starts doing that, you know, those people get banned, you know, we don't want to have those kinds of actors So it's something that we probably have more experience with than most, given what we've done with Second Life so far. So I feel quite comfortable that we're a company that has the right attitude, the level of seriousness we take on this subject that I feel we're going to do fine.
[00:25:11.762] Kent Bye: And I just want to kind of shift gears and maybe talk a bit more about your vision in terms of, like, you're building this technology that's going to enable people to go into these virtual worlds and express their imagination and creativity. And you're moving something from these virtual worlds that have been in a 2D plane and now into a fully immersive 3D environment. So what do you foresee, like, some of the qualitative differences that people are going to be able to see or do and experience in Project Sensar that wasn't previously possible in Second Life?
[00:25:41.819] Ebbe Altberg: Well, I think significant differences to me will be the sense that you are there as opposed to watching it. As opposed to you watching you being there, you are truly there. And that instead of you manipulating a character that represents you, you are the character, and you are the person that are in there. And that you also sense these other people in that space are there with you. So it becomes much closer to the way we feel about how we interact with people in a physical space. Like I'm here with you right now and I can constantly read your body language and sort of that sense of presence of sharing a space with other people is going to happen now with this VR technology. So I think that's a huge differentiator. I think it took people that had either a better imagination or could more easily feel the sense of presence on a 2D plane than other people. But I think with VR being in there, it's already been sort of understood that the human brain cannot really distinguish between a virtual and a physical interaction or experience at that point. So it's like straight to your cortex, like just bam, it's just instinctually like real and you're there. And that for various reasons, whether it's learning, interacting, socializing, or all these things that humans do all day long are just going to get so much closer to what we're used to in the physical space all day long. And therefore I think it narrows the gap of today. I think people have to do this translation from this 2D surface into their head of and add imagination and stuff to it to be there. That translation is sort of just all gets removed and that was just direct. I'm just there. I'm just sharing this space with these other people and I think I think Oculus Toybox was a fantastic demo. I think that, for me, is still sort of the pinnacle of VR experience. Even though I was sharing a space with a blue head with blue hands, there was no doubt in my mind that I shared that space with another human being. and that I wasn't translating anything. It was just direct. And that is going to happen. And then when you make that possible in all these different contexts, whether it's with family around the campfire, or with friends in front of the movie, or with fellow students in a classroom, or with colleagues in an office, And for whatever you're doing there if it's just socializing or playing a game or learning something or teaching something or healing someone like all of those things are gonna be just like so real that it's I don't think people realize yes how impactful that is and that's why I have the belief that VR will ultimately impact almost everything It's going to be some crazy stuff. It's going to be some bad stuff. There's going to be some incredibly good stuff. And for some people, the difference between a bad life and a good life. And for a lot of other people, it's going to be able to augment their lives in ways that is going to add a tremendous amount of value. They're going to be able to go places and do things and learn things and experience things that otherwise would be impossible or too expensive or too risky. So I'm super excited about where we're going.
[00:29:05.908] Kent Bye: Do you have any personal favorite memories or stories from your time in Project Sansar?
[00:29:11.892] Ebbe Altberg: What's interesting is that I actually have a lot of memories that are as vivid, and it actually takes me like a double take to sort out whether that was a physical memory or a virtual memory, or a memory from a virtual situation or a physical one. So I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge almost every day, and we have a Golden Gate Bridge in Sansar. And every now and then when I think about it, I have to like think twice about which one am I thinking of, right? I've also had interaction with people just standing on this Mars scene we have in Sansar where we have meetings and just remembering sort of these funny little situations of someone just doing something funny, right? And it doesn't even have to be It's not even about scoring points or winning or anything like that. It's just these little moments of situations where you just remember the scene and what people said and it was, you know, just like you have memories from the physical world from your childhood or with friends or when I hit that shot in the golf course or when I saw that weird animal come out of the bushes. Those kinds of normal everyday situations that start to blend now in my mind that I've realized I have this weird mix of memories from the physical world and from the virtual world sort of intersecting.
[00:30:27.563] Kent Bye: Wow, I feel like it's gonna be happening a lot more as well. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:30:36.570] Ebbe Altberg: I don't think we can foresee it, like how far it can go. Like when I start thinking about where this will be in 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years, it reaches a point where my mind explodes, it's just, I mean, there's a lot of things that we need, obviously, from the physical world. I mean, there's nothing like real human contact. There's nothing like eating real food. And, you know, having children and all these kinds of things that, you know, I don't think the virtual world is ever going to sort of replace or anything like that. But just the richness of the kinds of experiences we can have is just going to go to a whole other level. Not just for entertainment, but for really life-changing type of interactions, enabling people to experience things, learn things, or heal themselves in ways that I don't think we can even fully comprehend yet. And it's going to take years and years. I mean, I think we're just at the beginning of something. I think it's going to happen faster than we realize. I mean, the famous saying, you know, that, you know, we overestimate the short term and we underestimate the long term. I think it's very true here. I think we're maybe a little overhyped on what's going to happen in the next two, three years. And we're probably underestimating how impactful it's going to be in the next 10 years.
[00:31:54.621] Kent Bye: Great. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:31:57.856] Ebbe Altberg: I just appreciate the work you do with all this interesting information you're gathering from this time in our history. I think in the future, people looking back at all this work you're doing, it's going to be absolutely fascinating to just see and hear all these stories about a time that I think is going to be quite unique when you look back at it. It's kind of an inflection point in sort of human history in a way. It feels like we're a part of. So I just appreciate the work you do.
[00:32:25.992] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you. That's, of course, I obviously think the same thing. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing all of it. But yeah, I appreciate that. That means a lot. And I think that for me, I'm just fascinated with all the different dimensions of what's happening. And to me, virtual reality really encompasses the full human experience and all different dimensions. And I think that This is a technology that we can really look at all so many different applications and so new and yeah, I'd kind of think of it as this Gutenberg press of the 21st century that's going to enable all these new types of experiences and spur a renaissance in our creativity and imagination and that we just are at the very beginning of seeing what the implications of that and that by taking these little milestone data points and samplings of what is the topic of conversation and like year after year you start to see like a trajectory of where things are going when it's like a we're in a you know, that adage of all these blind men in a room touching an elephant where we don't really know what the ultimate potential is and not any one of us, but we're all kind of like one of those blind men with our hand on an elephant and we're able to see one little slice and that my hope and intent is that by gathering all these, we can start to piece it together on our own minds for where all this is going and what it means.
[00:33:42.232] Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's, There's so much work to be done, though. I mean, there's so much to learn still. You know, just basic things still, like how do you make it comfortable to navigate 3D space in VR? It's like, you think that should be a simple thing, and it's not, you know? And that's such a fundamental thing to just move about. And at the same time, we can all sort of really quickly just sense the power of this thing. So it's a fascinating instrument that we'll see how it develops. In our mind, there's absolutely no doubt that we have to provide more power to more people to express themselves in this medium. It can't just be in the hand of the few. We can't just be consumers. We have to be participants, and we have to be creators of that future, not just following the big company show, right? It's just like the physical world. We have to be able to create our own space, our own networks of people, create our own lives and our own experiences. Otherwise, it's kind of dead otherwise.
[00:34:42.595] Kent Bye: Well just to expand on one point on that because I feel like there's an element where this goes back to what we were talking about earlier of making sure that everybody has access but you know you mentioned at some point that you were banning certain people from Second Life and if you think about in the future if we have these virtual experiences overlaid on top of real life it could have like much richer experiences that people are completely cut out of that whole dimension of that part of existence, you know? And so the penalties of like, in real reality, we have, if you get in trouble, you go to jail. And then sometimes those people have a mark on their record that basically make them second class citizens. And so Guess I'm I just get worried about like, how are we going to get in a situation where there's no too much power consolidated into the Facebook's or perhaps the London labs is of the world where they have so much authority and power that they can just snap their fingers and all of a sudden take away a whole realm of existence from somebody because they made a mistake and
[00:35:47.196] Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, and maybe it should be completely okay for you, regardless of how mean-spirited you are, to at least own your own experience, right? You can trash your own living room as much as you want, and you can invite people in there, and if they don't like you, then they're going to leave. But you've also got to be able to prevent other people to just randomly be able to enter your living room and trash your living room and your life. And you clearly have some people that have no intention of doing anything, you know, like, I don't know, you know, how you feel about ISIS or, you know, there's some groups of people or some individuals that really just, if you leave them unconstrained, they're just going to completely wreak havoc and just kill millions of people. And so what do you do about people that enter your product or your platform or your network or whatever? You have to protect yourself against some because some people just really have no good intention whatsoever. At the same time, you want to have some level of leniency just because someone makes a mistake, which is found. I think there's some interesting research done by the League of Legends guys that have done a lot of work in sort of who do you ban and how do you ban them and all that. And there's been some fascinating work in that area. And I actually found that Most of the griefing was done by people that had no intention of being griefers, but just did something at the spur of the moment that they later regretted and are not likely to do it again. And that shouldn't mean that they should be permanently banned for something like that, but then you also have a small population that really have no other interest than just be a griefer. And so there's a small percentage that you just want to keep away, whether that's griefers or ISIS or whomever it is that there are some people that's serial killers that just you can't fix. At the same time, make sure that the person that just makes a mistake doesn't get swooped away with that. It's an interesting problem, but I agree. It shouldn't be that easy for us to just ban someone because of one mistake.
[00:37:41.136] Kent Bye: Yeah, in a lot of ways what this shows me is that we're in the process of replicating real reality into virtual reality and that we have to find out some way to deal with sociopaths and the ways to have some sort of justice system that is fair and allows people to make mistakes but also have some sort of ways of having some sort of truth and reconciliation. and accountability at the same time. So I think there's a lot of big questions that we're gonna be continuing to investigate and explore as people get into these virtual worlds. And yeah, I just wanted to thank you again for joining me and sharing me some of your thoughts and being willing to be grilled on some of these deeper philosophical questions about where this is all going. It's awesome. Good conversation. Thank you. Thank you. So that was Ebe Altberg, the CEO of LindenLab, and they are actively taking beta submissions for people who want to create content within Project Sansar. And so I have quite a lot of different takeaways from this interview. In fact, I haven't really been able to stop thinking about it since I did it. And part of the reason was because there seemed to be a number of issues that came up from this interview that start to address the underlying political, economic, and legal structures of our society. And how much the process of running a business these days, these are just different trade-offs that businesses have to deal with. And so I feel frustrated on some sense that we're on this trajectory towards giving up more and more of our control, our privacy, and our data. But I also realize that it is a trade-off between all the different powers that we're going to be able to get from giving over this data. It's just this consolidation of power where we're moving towards a world where, at this point, different polls have shown that about 28% of all time spent online is on different social media websites. And so you could list five or six of the big ones and get a majority of the different attention of where it's going online. And so we're moving towards this point where you have to decide whether or not you want to continue to be with all your friends and easily post content on the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. And, you know, that does this great job of connecting to your friends and having the power to do that. And I think that Project Sansar is going to be in that realm. It is going to allow people to have these very rich experiences with your friends, and it's going to be pretty simple to get involved. But you're going to be giving up some of their control. It's going to be kind of like the equivalent of running your posts on Facebook versus running your own blog and doing all the hassle of maintaining it yourself. I think Ebe is right that most people don't want to deal with maintaining it themselves. And as a business, Linlab is going to continue to move forward. and create and innovate the tools that are going to give the best experience that is possible. So I think we can look at the internet to some extent to be able to see this evolution of what happens in terms of AOL and CompuServe versus people being able to run their own servers and put out their own content. There is going to be a long tail of experiences that are out there that people are hosting and have complete control over. And there is going to be a certain amount of freedom that's restricted in terms of your free speech and in terms of what happens when you mess up. What are the mechanisms for justice when you're getting banned and how do you get back? But what I see is that there's going to be different collections of virtual worlds that are interconnected that have a certain values and culture that come within that. And so, for example, maybe in Facebook, you do have to use your real identity and there's no way to be anonymous. Maybe in Project Sansar, there's going to be more ways to do private bars where you don't have to have your name disclosed. And so how do these worlds interact with each other? What are the different authentication methods? What happens to your identity? Because there's this larger trend that's happening that was recently written about by Mike Wadera on TechCrunch, where he talks about how we're moving from an information age, which has been ruled by the internet and email and data transmission in these data streams, and we're moving into an experience age, which is more about a full human experience. And when I look this up, there is an article by Phil Johnston, co-founder of VRT, who he talks about virtuality as being the dawn of the experiential age. And I really like that term, the experiential age. And really juxtaposing it between the information age and the experiential age, we start to see some of these differences that even came up in this interview, where in the information age, you have the agency to disclose status updates or photos or all different things that you're sharing on Twitter or Facebook. Now, in the experience age, which is more along the lines of what Snapchat is doing in terms of taking selfies and sharing specific moments from your life, I think that virtual reality and augmented reality is starting to get into the full breadth of not flattening down our experience into this objectified 2D plane, but we're giving people a full human experience. And with that, with these different companies, there's different implications when it comes to tracking different biometric data from your heart rate to emotional states and your attention and all these different levels of information that companies are going to start to have. on you. Now the larger context and issue is the national security state where the U.S. government can go to a Facebook or Twitter and give them a national security letter that they can't talk about and then they have to give over all the data that they've collected on specific people. And so we're starting to get into like this big brother type of situation where it's not just the fact that you're doing some type of information exchange where you're you're agreeing to let over some of your privacy and control to be able to share information with people. But in an experiential world, what does it mean to be able to have the government have access to all of your emotional states over time? Now, this is something that's way down the road and something that I think that companies like Linden Lab can't really think about too much in order to do their business. But I think that as virtual reality starts to grow in this political, economic, and legal environment that we have, then some of these issues are going to start to be addressed more and more. Because at this point, we've kind of been resigned to knowing that we're being tracked. There's all this data that's been accumulated on us and that in some ways it's driving more targeted advertising to us. And so it's a value exchange where we're getting things for free in exchange for giving up some of our personal data. So in the long run, there's all these issues of moving forward on the metaverse and the open web and all these different issues of freedom and control and justice that I think that in this interview I've been thinking about a lot and in some ways goes beyond what virtual reality alone as a technology can address. And I think there's certain points when I was bringing up these different points and Ebe was kind of throwing up his hands and say, hey, look, I have to run a business and this is an ongoing debate. We're never going to be able to solve it. We just have to deal with that climate. And so I think in the long run, we could find that our political, economic and legal environment is limiting how far we're able to take some of these different experiences. So I think something like the blockchain of what that's going to do for banks and trust and authority, that could start to revolutionize the economy in a way where instead of having these debt-based currencies and these huge institutions that have all this power and control, maybe through peer-to-peer networks and cryptocurrencies, we're going to be able to have that power distributed more evenly throughout the entire population. And with that, perhaps we'll move away from a, let's surrender all of our data to companies and get free advertising, to more of a micropayment system where we're paying for these different types of experiences. Because right now, we already have a model of if you're going to go to a basketball game or a band or a show, we kind of know that you have to pay money for the experience. And so in an experiential age, will we have more micro economies where we're paying for things up front rather than giving up some of our control and freedom of our data? So those are a lot of things that I've been thinking about since this interview. And I'm just super grateful for eBay being willing to sit down and really explore some of these issues because frankly, I don't think that they can really even think about some of these right now. They can't really even design for some of these. issues and I think in the future thinking about like identity like how do you want your avatar to move from place to place. This is a big thing between the information age is that at this point you are using your authentication at Facebook or Twitter as your kind of ID card to get into certain websites to have an experience that you're able to track your identity. But in virtual worlds, in the experiential age, you may actually want your avatar. You may actually want all of your virtual goods that show your social status in different contexts, in different situations. Right now on Reddit, I have a reputation that is aggregated amongst all the different Subreddits that are out there, but yet maybe I want to be able to take my reputation outside of reddit into other contexts but that doesn't really work right now because that's really specific to that website and so what does it mean to be able to take your identity and reputation and social capital in between different websites and and this is a hard problem that eBay's right. The internet hasn't really solved on its own. And so it may be even more of a problem because you didn't have a problem being a ghost in the information age, but you don't want to be a ghost in the experiential age. You actually want to have a body and an identity and to be able to have some sort of reflection of your internal sense of self as you're going into these different experiences and having these social interactions. And so Lots of really interesting different things that I think came up and results of this interview and that's in part why I decided to put this as episode 360 which after over two years now, this is the 360th episode and for After I had my episode 300, someone told me online, hey, your next milestone is going to be episode 360. So with that, I wanted to just put this interview out there as something that I think is the strength of what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast to dive deep into some of these issues and to start to think about the future and where this is all going based upon the systems that we have in place right now and how some of these systems and structures could be a catalyst to changing other things that when it comes to our political, economic, and legal systems in order to have the types of full breadth of experiences that we want. So with that, I wanted to just thank you for listening. And if you want to support the Voices of VR, please tell your friends to listen in or leave a review on iTunes. That would be awesome. Or you can become a monthly contributor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
