> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?
Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.
It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.
We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.
Absolutely - this is what frustrates me most about the discourse around the metaverse - the insistence that a virtual world of limitless possibility be unnecessarily bound by the worst aspects of the real world.
Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators.
I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part.
Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?
You’ve just clarified a thought I hadn’t fully formed about NFTs (since I try my hardest not to think about them)… they could define a model whereby creators receive an ongoing cut from transfer of ownership. And this could be applicable in the broader sense you are talking about in your last paragraph, eg many copies (mp3 sales) or licensing (streaming services). Time could become an NFT, giving all the contributors to a film or workers at a company a share of profit. I mean that would be truly revolutionary.
At the point where NFTs become a "many copies" model, are they NFTs anymore? It seems like "non-fungible" and "copy" are in contradiction.
More importantly, do we actually want to try and cement a system of perpetual ownership or revenue in an abundant digital world? Doesn't this go directly against our goal of encouraging creators to keep creating?
I think that one of the downside of current content models based on IP and access rights are that many companies (from Disney to Nintendo) have discovered that they can augment their revenue streams basically in perpetuity by locking down decades-old pieces of content, preventing other people from building on that content or sharing it, and then endlessly reselling and recycling it. Because they have the ability to restrict even normal people from building on their work in even non-commercial settings, they have no real competition or incentive to keep iterating on their work or to be responsible stewards of their IP. This is not the outcome that we wanted from IP law, and I feel very hesitant to try and cement it into a technology.
> from transfer of ownership
I think an important concept to get about the Internet is that content ownership isn't scarce. We have moved into a world where I can give something to you without losing it myself. There is no "transfer" of ownership at all, in the digital world there is duplication of ownership. This is a giant shift from how the real world usually works; and with our laws/businesses, we have made a deliberate choice online to ignore that paradigm shift and instead try our absolute hardest to make sure that "ownership" continues to be an exclusive right that can be transferred.
It's understandable why we've gone down this route, but it is nevertheless a complete denial of what an interconnected digital medium is and what it's capable of. I hope that as we move forward and continue to iterate on the Internet that we gradually get closer to embracing the Internet's strengths rather than hobbling them.
Ignoring all of the other criticisms of NFTs for a second, the underlying goal of NFTs as a technology is to undo the existence of digital files. It's to undo the invention of copyable data and to step backwards out of the Internet back into an older world where when you handed someone a CD you no longer had the CD. I think that even if all of the other problems with NFTs were fixed, that's still just not a goal that's worth pursuing.
You bring up a very interesting point: Lucasfilm would have been sold for the scrap value of the furniture it owned had Star Wars never trickled down the monetization hierarchy all the way to free to air channels and instead remained in cinemas forever.
I think the more apt analogy to NFTs was if George Lucas shot Star Wars, and then sold a single copy of it to a wealthy patron for a large sum of money (see: Martin Shkreli buying the only copy of the Wu-Tang album), and from there on out the film passes through a successive chain of wealthy collectors, only occasionally shown at exclusive parties for the aggrandizement of their owners. The only chance for the general public to see the film would be occasional exhibitions held in conjunction with museums.
I don't think it'd be controversial to say that the world would've been poorer for it - and George Lucas too. If the goal is financial success for artists, mass distribution always beats selective exclusion, and if the goal is broad cultural impact the case for mass distribution is even clearer.
On the flip side, a lot of people posit that it's exactly this mentality that caused the creation of the advertising profit model in the first place. Net users were unwilling to pay for content because content is trivially copyable, and the early net was idealistic so "Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors". Advertising was a way to sidestep this problem altogether and turn users into the product rather than the product itself, since nobody was actually willing to pay for the product.
Humans want to enforce certain forms of scarcity. Trying to be utopian about it just ends up creating unintended externalities.
> since nobody was actually willing to pay for the product
That's not necessarily true. In fact I don't think that holds at all. They've bought smartphones and laptops for hundreds and thousands of dollars and pay many tens of dollars every month to access the Internet. People are already paying quite a bit to access content on the Internet.
The problem with paying for most types of content is the content is not worth the amount of money it's practical to charge for it. Charging money on the Internet is expensive and has lower bounds below which no one will even conduct a transaction. That lower bound is about a dollar and so many transaction fees come out of it a seller is not going to end up with a whole dollar and the buyer will end up paying more than a dollar.
A blog post, gif, or YouTube video is not worth a dollar. For most people they're not even worth a whole penny. They're certainly not worth an up front payment sight unseen.
In the early days of the Internet charging for content was even less practical and more expensive than today.
Advertising on the Internet, like advertising in other media, is a way to "charge" users some fractional penny to access some content. In aggregate the content creator can make money based traffic. While AdTech has reached asinine levels of intrusiveness the concept of advertising isn't necessarily bad. It also doesn't exist just because users are cheapskates.
You're correct to criticize advertising, but I also want to push back a little bit on the "utopia" of paywalls as a funding method for the web.
There's a difference between paying for content creation and paying for content itself. Content creators and their time are actually scarce resources, even online. Content itself is not a scarce resource; once something is created it becomes abundant. So both IP laws/paywalls and advertising are attempts to monetize and artificially restrict/control some other abundant and/or uncommoditized resource instead of engaging with the actual scarce resource/activity that we care about incentivizing.
As such, both advertising and IP-enforced pay-for-access models have negative externalities that arise from them being indirect monetization models. With advertising, we deal with negative externalities such as privacy violations and clickbait. With pay-for-access models, we get externalities like DRM, SaaS, endless content recycling, and a general lockdown of culture itself.
With both payment schemes, we are ignoring the actually scarce resource that is actually in real demand by the market: creators and time. But instead of trying to come up with schemes to monetize that and instead of trying to imagine what a market based on creative/useful output would look like, we've instead become obsessed with making other resources artificially scarce or artificially commoditized. We fight against technology and human nature itself instead of thinking about how we can fund the real scarce resources that still remain.
This could be a longer conversation; there are multiple theories about how to pay for creation, and a lot of debate about what models are sustainable there. Too long of a conversation to get into right here. But the really short version of this conversation is that you are very correct to look at advertising as an imprecise, indirect way of measuring value, and you are correct to point out it has a lot of negative externalities. But you're making an assumption that pay-for-access models haven't had their own negative externalities, and I don't think that assumption holds up. I think we've seen a lot of suppression of innovation and general culture because of our current funding model for IP. Of course a theoretical Internet where people paid for content access would have turned out different; but would it have been better? I don't think that's a safe assumption at all.
At its worst the current pay-for-access model sometimes decreases the creation/availability of content because it incentivizes recycling and restriction of existing content, and restricts other creators from building on top of and preserving existing content -- essentially denying a universal human instinct that has been around for almost as long as humans have existed.
There isn't an easy answer about how we should remake a content economy in a world without digital scarcity (ask Open Source devs how hard this is), but recreating digital scarcity and pretending that we're still in the old system probably isn't the right way to move forward. We should try to consider how people can more directly pay for the resources that are actually scarce: not content itself or the bits on your computer, but instead content creation and maintenance and the people who are able to make the things we care about.
The more directly we monetize resources that are actually scarce and the less that we rely on indirect models of monetization, the fewer surprising/negative externalities we'll see in the long run.
I agree with you in pretty much every way here really. But shoving an ideological framework upon them ends up creating externalities. People want to be fairly compensated for their work. I agree that there's no clear answer and there's lots of rent-seekers in the mix; I just want to push back on the utopian idea of "free information exchange" because I feel like it's played a large part in creating the predatory advertising-focused model that plagues the web today. Let people be people.
I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?
Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.
It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.
We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.