[gfodor]

I would agree a centralized authority like Facebook basically “owning” what gets blessed is a world where the promise of these technologies has not been met. The hope is that we can have a more egalitarian outcome where there are a variety of actors who align based on shared interests to agree on what contracts to recognize and confer benefits based on. Of course, one challenge with realizing this can be seen elsewhere in this thread, where people are dismissive of the entire concept (and ironically have boxed it in as a Facebook thing now, effectively ceding the entire territory before the first battle.) It’s important that technologists get sped up on what is at stake and the likelihood that correcting a misstep will be hard or impossible for future generations if a singular entity “wins” this emerging space in the next several years. There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.

[abeppu]

We're perhaps escaping the reasonable scope for a thread like this, but can you point to something that describes a potential version of "the metaverse" where no such authority exists in any form?

To my layperson's view (this is def not my wheelhouse), either such an authority exists (even if it's a foundation backed by several "actors who align based on shared interests"), in which case we're going to be required to trust it so we may as well drop the overhead of the blockchain, or no such authority exists, and there's a potentially high degree of fragmentation among platforms recognizing different subsets of ownership (or identity, or canonicity of speech or whatever), in which case ... is it a metaverse or just a bunch of distinct rooms?

> There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.

What makes you say that with such apparent confidence?

[gfodor]

I think the web and Internet have some centralization obviously but they are good counterexamples to a theoretical corporate monopoly or duopoly over a computing medium.

As far as “the final platform” bit, it’s an opinion but if you presume we get to a point where most humans are having their auditory and visual systems being overridden by a hardware/software computing stack, it’s hard to think of a breakout event from that that is analogous to eg PC -> mobile. There will be competition and iteration, but overall the inputs and outputs to that system are (body state) -> (photons, sound) and that seems like it won’t really change for a long time, if ever, so harder to disrupt at the root.