Monika Bielskyte is a world designer, immersive artist, science fiction critic, and cultivator of Protopia Futures (@ProtopiaFutures on Instagram), which is a an intersectional design practice that was distilled down into a Protopia Futures [Framework] manifesto published on May 18th, 2021 that was created in collaboration with over 30 collaborators. I’ve previously talked with Bielskyte in 2017 about Designing The Future through Sci-Fi World Building and in 2018 about Sci-Fi Worldbuilding to Collaboratively Shape Protopian Futures, and she’s actually been moving away from the concept of “building” and “world building” and more towards the more relational and organic metaphors of world growing and world cultivating.
There’s also been a distillation of the Protopia Futures Framework, that’s anchored into the seven principles of:
Plurality — Beyond Binaries
Community — Beyond Borders
Celebration Of Presence
Regenerative Action & Life As Technology
Symbiotic Spirituality
Creativity & Emergent Subcultures
Evolution Of Cultural Values
I had a chance to do a pretty epic deep dive into these seven principles with Bielskyte on November 2nd, in a nearly 3-hour conversation that is broken down into four major parts:
Deconstructing Denis Villeneuve’s Dune through the lens of Protopia Futures
Detailed unpacking and breakdown of the seven principles of Protopia Futures
Deconstruction of Metaverse Sci-Fi, how Meta is basing their vision of the Metaverse on Ready Player One, & deeper decolonial critiques of their techno-utopianism and denial of context.
This is a pretty extensive, nearly 3-hour long episode, but is able to articulate so many deep insights about how those who control the fantasy, control the future. Given the power of these science fiction narratives in how the guide, direct, and shape our technological futures, then it’s worth having some critical frameworks to use to not only deconstruct the deeper patterns of these stories that are being told, but to also provide a design framework, map, checklist, and blue print for a world design, world growing, world cultivating, and future dreaming practice that nurtures radical tenderness, radical hope, and our imaginations for what types of Protopian Futures might be possible.
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The third annual Virtual Beings & Virtual Societies Summit happened on October 29-30, and I had a chance to attend and unpack it with the co-founder of Fable Studio and instigator of a new Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the The Culture DAO, which officially launched as a part of the Summit. They also launched the social token of $CULTUR, which is a token-powered Guild for virtual beings, avatars and metaverse identity, and you can find more info in the “$CULTUR – The Beginning” manifesto published on October 6th.
Wolves in Walls was released on the Rift in 2019 and the Quest in 2020, and Saatchi said that people felt such an embodied connection to the character that they would want to try to communicate with her. This triggered a long journey aspiring towards virtual beings that have a personality, character, incentives, and motivations that make them interesting to talk with in the context of a story world. In other words, the ultimate destination is Artificial General Intelligence. In my previous discussion with Andrew Stern, one of the co-creators of Façade, he said that the constructs of a story world allow you to create a bounded context that allows you have conversations with an AI character that would feel more real and capable than what AI is capable of today giving the limitations of contextual awareness and common sense reasoning.
After many years of experimenting with GPT-3 and one-on-one chatbot types of experiences with Lucy, he’s come to the conclusion that none of the current approaches are getting us any closer to the dream of AGI. This is a big reason why he’s looking for radical approaches of incentive design from the web3 & DeFi worlds of cryptocurrencies, social tokens, DAOs, and NFTs. Rather than data mining the Internet to train massive language models like GPT-3, Saatchi is hoping to create simulation worlds that are dedicated to creating mentorship relationships between humans and AI in a way that could have train-to-earn model of a cryptocurrency token or other gamified incentive structures to move beyond the current limitations of big data scraping and training models that have reached a dead end for now.
I had a chance to talk with Saatchi this past Tuesday after his Virtual Being + Virtual Societies Summit to unpack his quest towards AGI virtual beings, and some of the recent inspirations from the web3 world, multi-modal learning, incentive design, and The Culture DAO Guild to cultivate a cooperative training community to escape the extremes of AI Winters and AI Summers, blitz-scaled companies that lead to bankruptcy, and siloed information within innovation spaces. It’s part of a larger movement towards decentralization, digital ownership, and DAOs that are gaining more leverage through community organizing and mutually financially-incentivized, cooperative action.
I still have lots of cautious skepticism towards these technologies that are always in right relationship to the world around us, but there’s also a lot of exciting potentials to create new social dynamics that just may allow us to start to escape from the more negative aspects of the consolidated power of Big Tech companies their more settler/colonial mindsets of seizing our private data to fund the underlying immersive technologies of whatever may evolve into our ideas of the Metaverse.
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After attending the Virtual Beings Summit, I was inspired to buy my first EcoNFT from XR artist Sutu. I’m excited to see where he takes the VR and AR integrations for Neonz, but also have a bit better sense of what Saatchi was talking about in terms of being a part of a community that is mutually financially incentivized to contribute to the project.
Connect 2021 happened on Thrusday October 28, 2021 where Facebook rebranded to Meta on their path towards becoming a Metaverse company, and they provided a lot of vague, speculative designs for some of the social experiences that they can imagine happening in the Metaverse over the next decade. Because it is a bit unclear for how to judge and evaluate this speculative designs built on open standards and interoperability, then I thought I’d invite on Road to VR’s co-founder and executive editor Ben Lang to unpack it all. We reflect on Meta’s vision of the Metaverse, their past behaviors around content interoperability, and break down some of their other claims around architecting the Metaverse with privacy in mind.
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The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct Productions founder Lyndsie Scoggin. Immersive theatre & VR performer Deirdre Lyons did some voice work on the original production, and helped to translate the production into VRChat along with other members of the The Ferryman Collective. There’s a lot of unique affordances of VR that this production leverages including unique worldbuilding, customized shaders, the ability to take people on a spatial journey, and having intimate one-on-one improv moments with the two actors and the protagonist interactor/audience member. There’s also more passive, invisible ghost observer audience members who are able to locomote around the space to watch the story unfold.
Welcome to Respite originally premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2021, showed at Venice VR Expanded in September, the Kaohsiung Film Festival in October, and is currently showing at the Raindance Immersive Festival with a run from October 28th to November 21st (tickets are still available here.)
I had a chance to speak with the four Ferryman Collective members about their production during their World Premiere at Tribeca in June including Andy Aloisio / Joker (VR World Building, Programming), Braden Roy (Co-founder of Ferryman Collective, VR Adaptation, Performer, and Producer), Whitton Frank (Performer, Marketing), & Brian Tull (VR Adaptation, Producer, Worldbuilder). We talk about the evolution of the project, how they integrated the various influences from immersive theatre, some of their design inspirations from Tenderclaws’ The Under Presents and Finding Pandora X, and the worldbuilding and design process for adapting this piece into a piece of immersive VR theatre.
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On October 21, there was a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference organized by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation as well as XR Association covering some other public policy issues relevant to XR technologies, but also really focused on doing some foundational outreach and education for policy makers for the types of enterprise, training, and educational use cases for what’s happening with XR technologies. There was a broad range of different representatives from different branches of government talking about how they’re adopting XR, and some of the opportunities for funding additional research.
Privacy was by far the biggest open question that came of the discussions, and so I had a follow up discussion with the co-organizers of the event ITIF’s Ellysse Dick, Policy Analyst at ITIF, as well as Joan O’Hara, Vice President of Public Policy at the XR Association. O’Hara said that the XRA has a privacy working group, and I’ll be really curious to keep track of whatever comes out of that since it would be representing the policy perspectives from Google, HTC Vive, Microsoft, Oculus from Facebook, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Unity.
For more of a recap of the day, then be sure to check out my live Twitter coverage here with lots of links to XR policy white paper references and links to the different speakers.
1/ The @ITIFdc & @XRAssociation are holding a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference today starting right now.
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Here’s the recording of the full five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference:
Here’s a thread of different human rights/tech policy frameworks including neurorights & different charter of digital rights that should be helpful in looking at how XR can help inform tech policy.
After I participated on a panel at RightsCon sponsored by the EFF about "How AR/VR Needs a Human Rights Framework" I did an interview with the folks from EFF, and then did a DEEP dive into the history of the UN + Privacy.https://t.co/3mgv5aB9Di
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the more hyperbolic musings about what the Metaverse is or could be.
Tim Sweeney & Epic Games have been talking a lot about the metaverse, but the hype train really left the station after Mark Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on July 22nd, “I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.” There was CNBC’s Jim Cramer trying to explain the Metaverse on July 29th, and then an explosion of companies talking about “our metaverse” or “enterprise metaverse” or “metaverses.” This led to a series of Tweets from Parisi from August 11th to 29th incrementally laying some boundaries and principles for what would become The Seven Rules of the Metaverse, which formally wrote up and published yesterday.
Parisi’s Seven Rules for the Metaverse
1. There is Only One Metaverse.
2. The Metaverse is for Everyone.
3. Nobody Controls the Metaverse.
4. The Metaverse is Open.
5. The Metaverse is Hardware-Independent.
6. The Metaverse is a Network.
7. The Metaverse is the Internet.
VRML co-creator @auradeluxe came up with a number of Metaverse rules to define the bounds of the Metaverse, which @AGraylin presented yesterday.
This led me to reconnecting with Parisi, and setting up a time to chat with him on October 22nd after he had a chance to properly write them all up. So it was great to have a chance to talk through and unpack them more over the course of a 70-minute conversation.
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Here’s a thread of my comments brainstorming what a human rights framework might look like for the Metaverse in response to a comment made by Erica Southgate.
After I participated on a panel at RightsCon sponsored by the EFF about "How AR/VR Needs a Human Rights Framework" I did an interview with the folks from EFF, and then did a DEEP dive into the history of the UN + Privacy.https://t.co/3mgv5aB9Di
Adam Draper is the founder of Boost VC, which a technology accelerator that has funded over 70 VR companies and over 100 crypto companies since 2012. He’s been in a really unique position to understand how blockchain technologies and the more immersive virtual and augmented reality technologies are both approaching an inflection point. But he also sees that these two technologies are on a convergence path towards creating a decentralized metaverse. I had a chance to catch up with Draper to talk about how virtual reality needs to be a foundational aspect of talking about how it enables a more immersive and embodied experience of whatever the metaverse ends up evolving into. We also debate many different deeper philosophical and ethical aspects of the crypto world that I had some personal reservations about.
Draper has been very bullish in investing in VR companies during the most recent winter of VC investments, and he wanted to come onto the Voices of VR podcast to announce to the broader VR community that he wants to hear about whatever outlandish idea you have about what you’d like to build within XR. He’d like to continue to be on the frontiers of funding and supporting the types of projects he refers to as Sci-Fi Technology ideas to really push the limits of what’s possible with immersive technologies.
We also had a lot of discussions and debates about the role of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and decentralized finance when it comes to the confluence of other exponential technologies including VR, AR, AI, IoT, wearable computing, and the crypto worlds of blockchain, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and web3. I entered into the conversation with a lot of skepticism of whether the DeFi worlds of cryptocurrencies and traders NFTs were going to disrupt the financial industry that results in a some sort of financial revolution that creates more equitable culture.
There certainly been a lot of hype about the potential of DeFi, but with the ecological impacts of crypto combined with a focus on personal wealth generation through pump-and-dump scams then I haven’t personally been putting a lot of faith that it would somehow shift some of the underlying wealth inequalities of our culture coming purely from a shift towards a more DeFi tech architecture. I do hold the possibility that this tech can help enable a massive shift and create new ways of empowering and sustaining artists working the open web and allow us to escape some of the ills of surveillance capitalism. But at the same time I do believe that it will require some fundamental shifts in consciousness and the underlying worldview that is more aware of the dynamics of relationality and being in right relationship with the Earth and the larger ecosystem of humanity. For more on why ecological thinking and relationality is a big emphasis for me, then be sure to check out my conversation with Alfred North Whitehead scholar and Process Philosopher Matt Segall.
I entered into my conversation with Draper with some skepticism around some of his unbridled hope and optimism for the potential of cyptocurrencies, and I’m leaving with some more hope and optimism but still a lot of skepticism. There’s still a lot of underlying philosophical and ethical challenges that come with what Draper has coined as the “Tragedy of Scale” that has come from social media apps like Facebook and Twitter. But Draper also emphasized that in order to come up with viable alternatives to the giant big tech companies running so much of our lives, that the market incentives that can come from cryptocurrencies will potentially enable a type of collective action that unlocks whole new realms of opportunities and options that were never there before.
One of the points that Draper made was that we’re still in a transitional skeuomorphic phase of cryptocurrency where folks like Decentraland are selling virtual plots of land. He says that the intent of this is to teach people what it means to have ownership of digital objects that are leveraging the embodied metaphors of owning actual land, but then expanding into new realms of possibilities for digital ownership that transcend the limitations of space in the virtual realm.
After attending the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit 2018 and Decentralized Camp 2019, then I found a lot of potential for creating alternative infrastructure for what’s generally referred to as web3 that according to Nadar Dabit has the following characteristics: Verifiable, Trustless, Self-governing, Permissionless, Distributed and robust, Stateful, and has Native built-in payments. The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle told me at DWeb Summit 2018 that they had launched a part of their website onto a decentralized web infrastructure in order to fight governmental censorship in specific countries.
But even though there’s always been a lot of hope and optimism for these decentralized architectures, one of the inventors of the Internet Vint Cerf told me at the DWeb Summit 2018 that he’s a lot more skeptical that a decentralized version of the web could reach the scale of a service like Google in a way that’s both economically sustainable, reliant, and performant. The economies of scale of centralized systems are just way too efficient, fast, reliable, and affordable to catalyze moving to a decentralized architecture that’s still technologically immature, slower, more unreliable, and a lot more expensive. It takes a lot of passion, dreaming, and vision to commit to building out alternative architectures since it’s not very practical or pragmatic by any other measure other than the more resilience and freedom in oppressed societies with lots of state-backed censorship.
One of the things Draper told me that it could be that one of the missing pieces is having a viable cryptocurrency market and ecosystem that can invest and creative viable incentives for people to do some of the foundational hard work to make the full potential and vision of web3 a reality. So while folks may look at NFTs as a toy today, Draper argues that it’s building up a type of knowledge and networked capacity to be able to leverage in the future.
In order to really tap into the full potential of our decentralized future, Draper pointed out how we needed a company like Coinbase to be steadfast enough to create a bridge for ordinary consumers to be able to get onboarded into the realm of cryptocurrency. Once there’s a critical mass of people, then new affordances are made possible.
One of the conceptual frames that came up again and again at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018 was Lawrence Lessig’s “Pathetic Dot Theory.” It’s a terrible name in my opinion as it’s more of a techno-economic theory of socio-political control where any sufficiently difficult collective problem is some combination of cultural norms, laws, market dynamics, and the underlying architecture of technology and it’s code. Here’s my interview with the Internet Archive’s Wendy Hanamura, who describes how she used Lessig’s theory to curate and program the Decentralized Web Summit 2018.
In the photo above, I like to re-imagine Lessig’s theory as more of a set of mereologically nested contexts where at the highest level is the culture, which drives the governance and laws, which in turn governs the market dynamics, which then allows underlying tech architecture to code to help. This emphasizes the fact that culture will ultimately drive the laws, market dynamics, and whatever technology can exist within the bounds of that culture. It’s may be tempting to take a technological determinist approach in believing that a change in underlying technology will automatically yield entirely new cultures. While it’s true that there are feedback loops up and down the levels of nested contexts, at the end of the day the types of futures that we create will come down to the need to have more fundamental shifts in consciousness and our worldviews to be more in right relationship to other people and the world around us.
What cryptocurrencies and DeFi enables an underlying tech infrastructure that enables new levels of trust enabling people to exchange value. Or the way that Draper says it, “Web3 replaces third party trust with mathematical proof and verifies that things happened.” By enabling new underlying technological foundations for creating anonymous identities, brands, and businesses without having to rely upon state-sanctioned modes of identity means that we’re moving into a world where 1000 Satoshi Nakamotos can bloom, as Draper phrased it.
When all of these decentralized technologies of the blockchain, web3, and DeFi aspects of cryptocurrencies and NFTs are combined with virtual reality, WebXR, and the infrastructure of the Internet and the open web, then it’s leading towards an interoperable future of what many refer to as the Metaverse. Draper’s argument is that you really need all of these DeFi parts of the blockchain in order to create the right incentive structures and fund and sustain whatever the metaverse evolves into.
Talking to Draper emphasized to me that we shouldn’t come up with value judgments about a technology in the absence of looking at the broader culture of people who are using it. Draper addressed some of my skepticism and cynicism around some the more noisy, scam-riddled, multi-level marketing, and pyramid scheme machinations of crypto traders trying to make a fast buck. He’s personally differentiating himself from that culture into one that is investing in a vision of the future that is empowering people with more freedom of expression and sovereignty.
But yet for me, there’s still a ton of open questions around ecological sustainability, and how to deal with other ethical and moral aspects of our networked reality including money laundering, child pornography, spam, human trafficking, disinformation, piracy, terrorism, online harassment and bullying, hate speech & dangerous speech leading to incitements of violence and genocide, human rights violations, and all sorts of other things that have been enabled on unmoderated and unfiltered networks on the web. These are all open questions and challenges that have yet to be fully figured out on the centralized web, and many of these issues are arguably even more difficult to solve technologically on the Decentralized Web and web3 tech stack. Many of these were also points of discussion at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018 and Camp in 2019.
But that all said, we’re still at a very early transitional skeuomorphic phase of technology development both with crypto and XR porting over applications and functionality that exists in previous centralized and 2D contexts and ported them over into decentralized and immersive contexts. And if we really are going to fully live into Draper’s ultimate potential of an economy that’s based more on imagination, then there’s still many of ecological, technological, economic, legal, sociological, and political hurdles that still need to be figured out so that it’s a technology that’s not only in right relationship to the world around us, but also to each other.
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I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called “E3XR: An Analytical Framework for Ethical, Educational and Eudaimonic XR Design,” which looks at the intersection of XR ethics, best practice approaches for applying immersive XR technologies for technologies, and how to create experiences that promote human flourishing and eudaimonia. Their paper provides a great survey of a broad range of citations on the intersection of technology and ethics, and a first take of separating between the range of must-have ethical considerations as well as some of the more nice-to-have aspects of eudaimonia. Where exactly that line is between issues that are more ethical and ones that are more eudaimonic is a question that I believe will depend on the specific context that will change from project to project as there are different tradeoffs in mitigating harms across different intersectional identities and demographics.
Lee cautioned that some of the research into the efficacy of immersive EdTech apps can have a “hand waviness” that assumes that VR is a silver bullet that will obviously lead to better learning outcomes. Lee & Hu-Au lay out some of the contexts where VR probably isn’t a great fit, and where it really shines. Lee also said that the underlying applying immersive tech to education is relatively under theorized for creating systems and frameworks to help navigate how to best leverage the affordances of XR for education.
Lee & Hu-Au’s paper was published on October 6th, which was an auspicious time for me as I had a couple of related panels and talks I was giving to XR education folks. I gave a quick a 10-minute primer on XR Ethics for Education for a webinar put on by the IEEE’s Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality focusing on XR for Education ethical and policy issues on October 14th I also was invited to give a talk on October 20th for the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation on “XR for Higher Education: Experiential Design Affordances, Ethical Considerations, & Production Strategies” (the video should be coming soon). So this paper also provided a great launching off point to check in on some of the latest theories and research for how to best leverage XR tech for education.
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UPDATE: The video of my October 20th talk on “XR for Higher Education: Experiential Design Affordances, Ethical Considerations, & Production Strategies” that I mention in the intro/outro of this podcast was published on October 21st:
The WebXR Design Summit was a 9-hour series of talks about immersive design & experiential design that was organized by Ben Erwin and his WebXR Polys Awards team on October 12th. I was the host and moderator for the day, but also helped to curate a few sessions including a fireside chat with two immersive design professors Doug North Cook, Program director & Assistant Professor of Immersive Media at Chatham University, as well as Robin Hunicke Game Designer and CEO of Funomena as well as Full Professor at UC Santa Cruz, and the founding Director of the Art + Design: Games & Playable Media program.
I wanted to hear about some of the latest trends of how they’re teaching immersive technologies and experiential design, and a common theme was interdisciplinary collaborations. North Cook was talking about a Design Dialogue practice that was sort of like a telephone game where an architect would create a blueprint, which was then created into a 3D model, transformed into an immersive audio file, turned into a water color painting, and then created into an immersive VR experience. The goal was to see what kind of design practices translate well into other modalities and affordances, but also to escape the normal production pipelines for each media.
The theme of interdisciplinary collaboration also showed up for Hunicke, who announced that UC Santa Cruz’s Art + Design: Games & Playable Media Department is creating a newly shared department with her colleagues in Theater Arts that blends game design, game production, game art, with dance, theater, performing arts, dramaturgy, and critical practice to create a shared hybrid curriculum combining the affordances of play, performance, design. She mentioned that A.M. Darke is creating an Open Source Afro Hair Library, micha cárdenas is looking at embodiment & performance in terms of environmental challenges, Ted Warburton is looking at the combination of the environment, dance, and teleawareness, and dramaturg Michael Chemers is looking what insights Japanese Puppet Theater can provide to the location of embodied performances of puppeteered avatars and virtual beings.
North Cook and Hunicke also talked about what insights that web design and WebXR could provide to the overall design practices for immersive technologies and experiential design talking about aspects of telepresence and the fusion of lots of data into experiences, but also the uncertainty around the economic sustainability of the open web and what the new models to support a diverse and robust ecosystem of immersive experiences.
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The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th, and the virtual festival starts on October 22nd. FIVARS has been curating independent and avant-garde immersive stories since 2015, and I had a chance to talk with founder, executive director, and chief curator Keram Malicki-Sánchez who provides some highlights of the interactive and 360-degree video featured pieces at FIVARS. The interactive pieces will only be available at the West Hollywood location in LA, and all of the 360-degree videos will be available remotely.
Even if you’re not planning on attending FIVARS physically or virtually, Malicki-Sánchez shares a lot of interesting trends that he’s seeing as a curator who sifts through a lot of the early experiments and prototypes of immersive storytelling. He also eloquently describes his curation process and philosophy that is able to tap into the larger collective zeitgeist of stories that need to be shared right now, and how the immersive nature of XR provides a visceral way to deeply connect to other people’s wide range of human experiences.
Malicki-Sánchez is also a visionary when it comes to using interoperable and open WebXR immersive technologies to host both his VRTO conference and FIVARS festival (see my previous conversation with JanusWeb developer James Baicoianu and him here.) So I’m looking forward to checking out the latest updates and upgrades of visual aesthetics that leverage the latest build of Three.js when the virtual portion opens up next Friday.
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