[00:00:00] Katherine: Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman and I am talking to doc Searls and Kyle Rankin. You probably know who Kyle Rankin is because he has been on the podcast several times. What if you don't, he is the CSO at purism, which is a Neato company that you should Google. Uh, maybe we should actually, no, you should duck that.

It's funny. So we're going to talk about a few things. Kyle has big ideas that I want to dive into, and I'm really excited about that. But before we get started, I would like to remind everyone to visit our website at reality, two casts.com. That is the number two, where you can sign up for newsletters and find interesting links to interesting stuff.

Uh, so yeah, and thank you for everyone who has contributed. We have some Ko-Fi contributors and some Patrion contributors. And of course, everyone who emails us and sends us messages with feedback. We appreciate all of it. So thank you very much for listening and giving us that feedback. Um, so Kyle, let's talk about all of these big ideas you have.

So I reached out to Kyle because I wanted to talk about the metaverse because that's what everybody's talking about right now, but I thought we might bring a little bit of something different. I think we're all a little concerned probably on this call about Facebook or a Facebook taking such a lead on an idea like this.

I think that's one, one topic, but so let's talk about the, the metaverse for in the non-Facebooky sense, perhaps. 

[00:01:26] Kyle: Yeah. Well, so maybe we'll when I, when I hear it, which I think most people do, and the reason they're calling it, this is because of snow crash and everyone who has read snow crash. Who's in tech tends to just like they reimplement everything and star Trek.

Ultimately we sort of use this as design cues. Like Google earth is clearly, you know, was inspired by snow crash and they, those engineers read snow crash and then re implemented it. And, and, uh, Facebook clearly the reason they acquired Oculus was to, to build something similar. To the virtual reality environment where everyone's sort of living.

And I mean, the thing is it's supposed to, it's supposed to kind of be a dystopia in a weird way. You know, I mean, everyone in a living out of a utility storage shed but with this elaborate universe that they're living in on their computer, where they have, you know, virtual property, We've all at least I think the three of us have we're around long enough to see other implementations of this like second life, for instance.

Right. Which, you know, for me, like, as someone who read snow crash and someone who likes the idea of a cyberpunk, maybe utopia, maybe not dystopia, but anyway, like I like the idea of having some sort of virtual environment I may, or I already lived in. World in a text sort of way. So I'd like the idea of having something like that exist.

But for a while it seemed like second life might be in, at least it had design cues or cues for how it could look in the future. But yeah, so now, um, Facebook is taking up that mantle possibly even more inspired by the fact that everyone's at home now and, and working remote. And they have probably have a direct need to have all of their employees who are working remotely do so in a virtual way, or, you know, like a physical, like way.

But the thing that really jumped out at me when I was hearing about it was I happened to be hearing about their metaverse at the same time that people on my social media feeds were doing explainers on web. And I don't know how much you, you two have had people on here talking about that.

So I don't know whether it pause and explain it or not, 

[00:03:32] Katherine: I guess a little bit. Or what do you mean when you talk about web three? What do people generally mean? 

[00:03:39] Kyle: Well, the way it's been explained to me, how about that? So the way it's been explained to me at least is essentially sort of like a combination of.

The centralized, at the centralized web that is powered in many ways or funded in many ways through blockchain. And so there are notions of people being able to provide resources on this web and perhaps be compensated for those resources via tokens of some kind. And that's usually, you know, underpowered by like some sort of blockchain.

That's at least how it's been explained to me. I dunno if you have a better. Summary than that. 

[00:04:14] Katherine: Not really, but, you know, we ha we have actually, we had a recent episode about NFTs and, and the the sort of potential various arenas really. Um, there's so many different things you can use this type of technology for.

And I think this is an interesting example. 

[00:04:28] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. So when, when I hear a metaverse and I think snow crash, I mean, a lot of people focus more on the virtual reality 3d. Part of that, where everyone's, you know, moving inside of a physical space, but they're, they're avatars doing all this crazy stuff in this virtual space and they focus on that part.

But another part of it was the fact that in at least in that, in that future, that every piece of information on the web was monetized. It didn't have not necessarily but the infrastructure in place in snow crash was one where if you put information on the web, unlike web 1.0, I suppose, where everyone just sort of freely shared information, right?

Like in snow crash, at least in the metaverse, all of that information had usually a price tag. Not necessarily, you could give it away for free, but most people assigned some sort of price tag. So if you happen to be at an event where you filmed something interesting happening, and you would share that on this web, in the metaverse

and everyone who wanted to access that would have to pay you whatever you decided to charge for that information. And the main character hero protagonist in snow crash made much of his income that way. And he, he comments in particular about how he was lucky at every now and then to have access, to particularly valuable pieces of information that he could resell multiple times.

And that's how he made a lot of the money that he lived on. So when I hear metaverse, I also think of. And it just happened to be that when I hear last week that, you know, Facebook moving to the metaverse and that's been their focus and also see web three pop-up, um, in my feet, a lot about people talking about that to me, the metaverse at least as far as snow crash is a combination of those two things.

And so maybe, maybe what we could talk about, or one thing we could possibly talk about is how those two things collide into. Do we want the future that's described in snow crash because it seems like we have two different groups that probably don't think that they're on the same side. I imagine the people who are, who are gung ho about going with, with Facebook's or Meta's metaverse are probably not the same group of people who are really heavily pushing for web three.

But, but those two groups are kind of, if you're pushing for at least the snow crash version of the metaphor, Then both of those groups are partnering to build the same future, which is a web where most information probably if you want to access it, um, probably defaults to having a price tag. And then if you're fortunate, someone decides that it's free.

But then also one that does that while also being connected with virtual reality. 

[00:07:10] Katherine: It'd be interesting also to talk about what does a price tag mean? Exactly. Because I can mean a lot of things and if it's all, what are we exchanging? 

[00:07:18] Doc: That would be another interesting thing. Right? Cause I mean, that's a lot of the conversations I'm hearing lately and I'm not educated on this at all is that the future is going to be all cryptocurrency in a future where we have the metaverse.

We're probably all going to have cryptocurrencies as well. And you know, That Fiat currency will not be the predominant currency of that, but I don't know. I mean, it's very hard to imagine not having Fiat currency. And, uh, so I dunno. Do you have any thoughts about that kale? I don't want to, like, I mean, I think sideways because.

[00:07:54] Kyle: Well, I mean, I see it, at least in terms of, of, of, uh, metaverse is being like, um, like in that purchases in a game or something, right where, you know, I mean, there's been other examples of this too. We're not necessarily breaking new ground there. When you talk about, you know, like EverQuest or pretty much any MMO RPG where people have currencies in game currencies that have value within the game and only have value within the game.

And this, the difference now is the game is when the. Is is the game that Facebook made and that is tr is selling it as something that everyone's going to be partnering in on and everything, but at least in their game, you know, there, they will be choosing the currency. Now, is it going to be Facebook's coin or whatever they call, you know, remember they had a drive for a while to do their own currency.

Maybe this is part of that grand vision, but you know, we'll in, in the metaverse will they control the, choose the currency? That's. Um, or whatever the store of value is that you, the token, just like you're going to an arcade, the token that you use in that arcade that's shaped like a quarter, but isn't a quarter and it doesn't work outside of that arcade.

[00:09:02] Katherine: I mean, that depends on how interoperable the metaverse becomes. Right? I mean, it seems to me that if Facebook has the vision and the goal and the means they'll edge every, everyone else out and will become it, they will control the entire thing. I mean, it's. Is that, um, does that seem likely to you 

[00:09:22] Kyle: well, so I see the same week that they announced that Microsoft more recently said, uh, uh, us too kind of thing, where they teams yeah.

They announced no, we've, we've already been planning to do this in teams and fine. I guess we have to release this demo quickly. You know, I, I imagine the announcement happened last week, then all the people on the, in Microsoft teams that were working on this, this feature who were probably further ahead, I would imagine.

Then Facebook is on this, like rushed out a release. They, no, no we've been working on this too. Don't, you know, go all over into, into this. So, um, at least those two will be doing this. The question is how many other people will be jumping on board and whether, I mean, I, I don't, I don't think that Facebook necessarily has a good track record on.

Um, having open standards that other people follow that are really shared. I mean, they, they own three chat clients that don't inter-operate with each other, you know? Um, and they had they've put, put a post in the ground and said that they want to try to get them to inter-operate. But that was a year or two back.

And so, you know, it's, it's. 

[00:10:31] Katherine: So doc, uh, in the, in the back channel just mentioned something called hop in. So hop in is, uh, an events platform. It's actually, it's not bad. DrupalCon has used hop in the last actually 

[00:10:45] Doc: I heard of it. It'll do it because it grew from six employees to a hundred during the pandemic and a multi-billion dollar valuation.

So it obviously is not an open source thing, I guess it's just yet another. Uh, it's a, it's a zoom of some sort,

I guess, but

[00:11:02] Katherine: it's interesting because there, there has long been this idea of virtual trade shows, virtual events, virtual exhibitions, that kind of thing that never really came to fruition and insignificant way because people could still travel.

And then all of a sudden, boom, there's a pandemic. And the innovation in that area has been incredible. I mean, So like the company that I work for has put on events and, just looking at the interface and how it, how it, it, it works as a, as a participant is just kind of, I don't know. I mean, the progress that was made in that is impressive.

That said, you know, it's a far cry from. , the, the metaverse that we're fantasizing about and the way that, Facebook, Metta, whatever is putting it out there. But I don't know, like this Teams thing it's interesting too, because Do we really see yeah. Microsoft teams. So they put out a demo where basically, so, so for this call, for example, we're on a zoom call right now.

So I could, if I look like crap today, which probably I do, I could flip a little switch and instead of you seeing me, you wouldn't see me anymore. You would see this sort of animated, not very realistic kind of cartoonish, or at least that's the current state version of me that I've put up. I've made my little avatar and it will have some expressions.

And follow along with my voice. And then I think the idea is that it would learn me over time. And that's what you would see. You wouldn't see me, you would see cartoon me and, but y'all could still be on video or not, or, you know, it would just be an yet another option you're turning your video off or, or you could, you could put the, cartoon version of you.

I wonder how valuable that is. Is, is that valuable? Like, I don't know about y'all, but I do a lot of, I do a lot of meetings with people who are, I guess like-minded and just, we just, we, we do it like a call. We live our video off, unless there's a particular reason. Um, you know, we don't, we don't have the video for this.

We typically leave the video on, because I think, it's fun to have the video on because we enjoy interacting in that way. And I just wonder what, what value this other thing brings? 

[00:13:04] Kyle: I think that there is a. As a size that a number of attendees limit where videos useful. I think, definitely a one-off one-on-one meeting with someone that you're doing virtually instead of physically what you normally would do physically can sometimes benefit because you can kind of pick up on the non-verbal cues sometimes on video.

Those still not as well as in person, uh, three people, four people maybe. But I think when you start getting into this , anything resembling like a big, a big. Then I don't know that there's as much value, in fact, so for, for us, it's not like for example, a purism, we're a fully remote company.

Um, and we always have been, so we always have, we sort of built from the ground up to have tools that help us work remotely. And we, when we do large group meetings, it's all audio only, in fact, we use mumble. Uh, which is normally used for sort of TeamSpeak video game type stuff, I guess. But, uh, we found it very useful in particular, for example, our all hands meetings are done that way, not video, cause there's not necessarily any deceased, cause that's a one to many, it's like a broadcast, you know?

And so audio just makes more sense. And so, but, but it scales really well in a way that most video chats, there's a certain upper limit where it starts to be painful to have everyone's video on, , Say 50 people in a meeting, a hundred people in a meeting, um, where with audio, it works better, but that was, you were more talking about avatar.

I mean, I see, I think having an avatar is, I guess it's, it's nice for people that don't want to have their video on, but it also, when you think about all the privacy stuff that it means you have to do 

[00:14:39] Katherine: Did I just change out your screen, by the way? 

[00:14:41] Doc: You just changed the whole things.

Very cool. So, so for the people watching their radios, um, we're now out of three of us at a virtual reception desk at a city, uh, you know, you could see out the window and it looks like a very corporate setting. Um, but, uh, but we're here, you know, I, I look like the one who's actually here, um, because I seem to have my background erased, which is really weird.

And, uh, but oh, now here we are the dead people in the wall and the. 

[00:15:14] Katherine: yeah, only we're animating for those of us who do not have video, like everyone listening. I'm playing with the zoom feature that says immersive view that I had not actually noticed until just now. And I started playing with it during this recording.

That's a we're that is kind of fun. 

[00:15:35] Doc: It's kind of, it's interesting. Cause we're, we're all, you know, all of these play with what are the cliche backgrounds? You know, what, w w what is the cliche setting? When in fact we're in a whole new world now where we can break up entirely new environments, that don't have to be cliches, right.

That's an, that's an interesting thing. I w I want to go back to the Microsoft teams for a minute, because it was in a conversation this morning with a friend who I'll leave nameless because he works. He's worked for nothing but giant companies in tech always is like a pretty high ranking, but not all the way up guy.

Cause he likes not being at the top. He actually likes being able to. Secretary third level down and get more stuff done, which is interesting. And he said, Microsoft, Microsoft is a hot shit company right now. It's getting more hot shit than, and some of it has to do with they're really embraced open source, but they're doing it in a way that we probably wouldn't like, which is that coming from where we tend to come from, which is.

They're going to rate it for everything they can to build their proprietary services on top of it. But they are contributing code. They're very involved, but at the same time, like teams is hardly an open source product, but, and so same with exchange. I've watched a horror show by the way, a better exchange.

There we are. We're on a ski lift right now, um, with zoom on the cross. Yeah. And again, I look, I look, I think, well, you would, I, Catherine, look, it doesn't understand Kyle well enough to drop out his background. That's the, that's an interesting thing. Uh, but my, my point about this though, is that apparently Microsoft has some kind of enterprise corporate mojo going right now, partly because they decided they are going to be an enterprise company and they can go after some of the big ones like Salesforce and Oracle and stuff like that.

Right. And teams is part of it. Teams is, and everybody hates teams. I mean, I look up teams online. I'm looking at it here, a sincere letter to the Microsoft teams, team, Microsoft teams. Why does this suck so much the horror of Microsoft teams? Why is it so bad? So clearly teams has issues, but, I'm just sharing that because that's an interesting thing.

[00:17:52] Kyle: Well, another player that we haven't talked about yet, that's going to be big in the space, probably is apple. They're going at it in an augmented reality way instead of. Uh, but I think mostly just like with everything else, you don't hear, they, they will downplay anything that someone else is doing until they have a product out that does it.

And then it's super important once they have a product. But before that, no one cares, you know? And so, but they clearly are. They, I mean, there's been news stories about how they're working on some sort of augmented reality thing, and I can imagine them also creating. Virtual walled garden with augmented reality.

Right? And so if you have all of their products, that'll be interoperable with their products. And maybe if you're imagine using their version of a VR headset where just like an iPhone nine message, where if you're using an apple product, you get a S you know, you have, your chats are a certain color, and you can identify the people who don't have an apple product.

Right. I mean, I could see the same thing happening with your avatar. On Apple's metaverse. Now the question is, so, yeah, I don't think that this idea that we're going to have a single metaverse going back to that, what will actually happen? I think what we'll have is a bunch of little, little islands, like we already have, because people have, we've already shown that we can't do it when.

Um, in the case of chat, you know, text chat is the easiest thing possible to enter, to implement and to be cross platform compatible with. And if these big companies can't manage to make their chat inter-operate with their competitors chat much less free software chat. Um, then there's no reason to expect that they will do the same thing for a virtual reality environment where there's three 3d rendering and all of the complexity that's involved there.

It's just one. So, what you'll have is you'll have everyone wants to have the first mover, just like we don't with video chat, right? There's how many different video check companies now that are all trying to get in on the pandemic business model. Uh, and they don't inter-operate with each other. I can't use my zoom client to connect to a Microsoft teams meeting for.

Uh, or vice versa or anything else. Right. And I don't believe I have no reason to think that the metaverse will be any different. In fact, I have reason to think it will be worse because it's way more complicated to make an interoperable. 

[00:20:09] Katherine: Each place will be a destination. And you know, you can't go to Disney world and universal at the same time.

[00:20:15] Doc: Yeah, that, there's a, so somebody who has maybe mentioned this before, but somebody I know. Who's plugged into both apple and Facebook somehow said that what Apple's working on is, is basically there. You're not going to hear anything from them until they have the eight K or 16 K wall.

In other words, you, you get this wall for your house. I mean, it's, it's a big, big, big screen that lets you not just be entertained by it, but you're going to attend things, looking at it. And with the. They're there right now, they have this $600 headset that, uh, that is 3d. It's big. They're very big. Adobe Atmos have Dolby.

Atmos is the new way to have, and they're doing a lot of recordings with this, that, that when you record something on your, on your iPhone 14, it's going to have, you know, the mikes for Dolby, Atmos, completely surround you'll have, um, Do you remember binaural sound the whole idea behind by behind binaural sound?

It's kind of like that where you have the binaural sound. You have a micro two microphones on a head on a, on a bus, like a head and it's recording what your head would hear. And when you play it back and you're listening on headphones, you get the 360 degree sense of being there. But this is going to have like multiple speakers and you buy a bunch of home pods, your apple little home pods, which is going to be like 90 bucks or something, and you scatter them around and they're going to give you a soundscape or you wear the special headphones and they're going to, those will give you the soundscape.

And, but it's a wall and a soundscape. Basically. That's going to be the thing. The soundscape is going to be Dolby Atmos, and the wall is going to be eight or sixteen k. And one of the re you know, there, and they're not going to do a screen detector to do anything like that until somebody has the big screen that does that.

So I don't know if that's, I mean, that's not, that's not the metaverse, but it's the kind of thing apple would do. They're going to be tied in with Disney and all those.

[00:22:20] Katherine: I wonder what the, what somebody is going to do about those of us who can't handle any kind of virtual reality. I feel like I'm going to get left behind. I can, I can play. What does that beat saber? I can play that for about maybe five minutes and I have to take it off. Can't do it anymore. Am I just left behind all of this fun? I don't know. 

[00:22:40] Doc: Have you looked into what. And I, I, I know you've got, uh, Catherine you've had prepper Linux machine there, but you also have Macs. And supposedly I was told today, actually that apples give a very generous trade-ins on, on, uh, on Macs because they want you to get the new M one macs.

They want it, they want to flush the old, the older ones out of the market, which is I'm using one of those. And I haven't looked at what they'll give me for this one. 

[00:23:11] Katherine: I actually looked at what the, I got a new one last year. That was very expensive. It's very, high-end, it's pretty, it's not fully loaded, but it's pretty nicely equipped as they say.

I'm sorry. I really could feel bad for getting no, no, I bet there were reasons I got it last year instead of waiting, but. And I actually looked to say, I was curious, like what, what would it cost me to, to what would they give me for this to, to trade up to the brand new one and not near like, not nearly enough?

I mean, it was, it was so low. It was insane. So, yeah, that was not a viable option. Yeah. I have too many, too many machines. I, uh, I like to use a lot of different stuff. Apparently I do. I have a Librem 15.

Uh, I do different things on different machines. That's something, 

[00:24:09] Doc: well, we've worked, we hardly talked about Facebook that we were going to do that. I shared some stuff there, there are people starting to doubt whether they can even do what they're talking about, uh, which. I I've been of that.

I've been of that belief for a long time. the middle versus. A giant red herring is a giant misdirect away from all of the problems that they actually have.

And you touched on that a bit with with the, with your point, uh, Kyle, that, you know, they have right now, they have three different chat systems that don't get along. So this is an LA Patel of the verge saying Facebook is trying to pivot away from his Facebook problems, which is a content moderation at scale problem.

It might well be unsolved. And I've had that belief for a long time. I don't think you could do content moderation at scale. I don't think anybody can, you know, it's easier just to turn people off. I don't like them just turn them off. Because it's, it's really, really hard. You can't tell what's bad, and then there's, you know, with the wall street journal said years ago that, they're paying, in fact he said something like this, they have 40,000 people or some crazy number of.

Doing content moderation, which is as the journal. Looking at human depravity and saying what's good and what's bad, right? What's a little bit more than what's not it's, 

[00:25:24] Kyle: It's unethical, I would, I would argue it gets to the point of almost being unethical. Uh, which, I mean, that's one of the reasons why, when we were looking at how we're going to handle with Libra one.

Like a vision I had for, for the way that we would do a social network is moving all of that moderation, uh, ability into the individual. So they would have way more moderation tools that they in their peers, because I think the only way that you could scale something like moderation is to give you and your peers, all of you who have similar sensibilities of what you like.

And don't like, and what you, what offends you and doesn't offend you. And all of that. Have all of that be in your hands. So you curate your own feed based on that, but that would then remove the power from the social media company to curate your feed, which if you're driven by ads, you can't do, you have to be able to sort of inject those things into your feed and get to know you so they can do that.

Um, but to me, the, yeah, to me, the, the way that, that scales is to not try to scale it from the top down, but to have individuals have more and more power to, to decide that sort of thing. I totally agree with that. I think that's, uh, I think that's the way things ought to work. It's just very hard to trust that if you're, especially, if you can't see how it works.

I mean, if you don't have a centralized view of who are the smart people who are moderating well here and what are they doing, I suppose, I suppose the ways you could get a group to advertise what they're doing. I suppose the way that, the way that I propose doing it is, was as simple as having individual have giving you the ability to add a hashtag to someone else's.

That only you can see. So you just like you tag every, whatever else you can add a hashtag to someone else's posts. They can't see it because otherwise it would be graffiti. Right? Cause then if everyone in your feed could add stuff to your posts, you wouldn't want to see it, but you start by saying, oh, that person's writing something that I'm interested in on Drupal, but they didn't tag it hashtag.

I'm going to go ahead and add that hashtag so I can have all of these so I can sort of curate my feed to all the things that I'm interested in. I'm interested in Drupal. I will tag that for them. Then someone else could say, oh, that's really handy. They're really good about tagging all of the feeds that they like that are about Drupal, Drupal, hashtag Drupal.

I'm going to, I'm going to turn on the setting that allows their hashtags to be visible, to. So that then I can add my filter rules to prioritize things that are about Drupal or whatever. So that's, that's the positive sense of this. You can add hashtags to things and then see curate your feed based on the things you want to see based on you and your peers, who you trust their ability to tackle these now from the negative sense, same sort of thing.

If someone says, um, something is racist or something is whatever their sensibility is that they want to blow. They can add those hashtags to this is hate speech, whatever it is, they can add those hashtags for their own feed. If they see something that's not already tagged and then anyone else who has the same sensibilities who trust their taste and their senses and their, um, you know, their level of offense for things can, can follow their tags and get the same benefits.

So you may, you may have just a couple of people who are really good at tagging. And the, um, posts as being a certain way, then you can also have thresholds that way and say, you know, I don't want to, if someone's gets tagged by this person too many times, I don't want to see them. That sort of thing. Like the blocks, basically you allow your peer group to help determine what you see and you can choose who you want to follow.

Just like I can decide if I want to see your retweets or not. Okay. You know, if I cheat, if I, if I like your retweets, then I follow them. If I don't, then I can choose not to. In the same thing with tagging, you made the fault in the challenges, what do you default to? But anyway, that's an idea. I had a while, like a couple of years ago when we first started Libra more social as a way, because I didn't think it was, I didn't feel.

About hiring people whose job it was to look at the worst bet the mess that on universe could create that, then have to decide how, if it's too bad or not, you know, I felt like that was, I would much rather give individuals that ability. And that was the only way I could think of to allow that is because then that way you can create, you can filter on hashtag very easily a Mastodon.

And so you could say, I don't want to see anything that's hashtag hate speech. And then it would be blocked. And either things that you put tag yourself or things that your peers tag would all just automatically disappear from your feet.

I can see the benefits and I can see a lot of downsides. I think it's a bit it's, it's, it's an interesting start to something that's different from the way that it works now, which is the nice part. Well, it's also different in the sense that at least the way that we're doing it, you're the feed that you, you only see the people you follow.

So you're not seeing posts from someone that you didn't explicitly opt in to seeing. So there's nothing in your feed that you didn't opt into to begin with content. Exactly. So you're only seeing that. And then anything beyond that is someone from the outside who's contributed comments. So then you have to deal with how do you deal with poor commenters and then that's, this is a way to sort of handle that sort of thing.

[00:30:36] Katherine: Interesting. Yeah. I remember actually having that conversation with you. It was, yeah. I mean, it is interesting, actually. It's especially interesting now looking back, you know, and to see how things are today versus two years ago, which is interesting, but you did mention something that I didn't want to forget, and that is Facebook deleting there or.

Not no longer using as they deleting it are no longer using facial recognition. 

[00:31:04] Kyle: They announced that they would be the leading that they, the database of like 2 billion or however many, you know, faces that they were tracking in a book of some kind a Facebook, if you were, uh, uh, that tracked all these faces.

Uh, yeah, I mean, so that was, that was the rare case where I see privacy news about. That seemed positive. And so I'm so unhappy. Do you trust it? Exactly. You're so that you're like, well, where's the, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And you know, there's been a lot of people that have been saying their opinions about it one way or the other, where from the far ranging fully cynical, they're not deleting it.

They're lying kind of. To the, to the other end would be yay. They're finally doing something good. And then something in between would be something like, well, they're doing this to distract from all of those, right. PR to me, the way that I read it is maybe the timing had to do with that. But to me, it, it reads, I started thinking about what do I really feel about this one?

I was just, that's great. I'm glad that you're doing that. Maybe other, hopefully everyone else will do it. Cause I think data is toxic and I want people to delete as much data as possible. And the feed of it is, um, I, my read on it is it's sort of like someone going through their closet and throwing away the stuff that no longer fits, you know, um, that's sort of my read on it is I, I, I do doubt some of the altruistic reasons behind it.

I think it has more to do with, this is something that could get good news about, but they also are throwing away something. They don't. Yeah.

[00:32:44] Katherine: I just see it as, you know, going, moving forward into the VR metaverse type stuff that they're working on. I think that they needed to make a bold move like this in order to gain trust so that people would trust.

Wide adoption of something like, you know, going all in on an immersive environment, you know, means letting Facebook more into your life. And so to me that, I mean, I wouldn't look at it. I would look at it as a PR thing, but maybe not necessarily in such a cynical like, oh, well this is just a distraction. I think it's just a necessary step in, in making this clear to people like, okay, well we're not going to do this anymore.

We learned that lesson. Now come join us on this new path we're taking. But I mean, that's the, that's the.

[00:33:26] Kyle: The that's their message that they're saying, but to me, I read it more as they don't need it. They don't need that database anymore because they have something better that they're going to yeah. Yeah.

They have something better in the metaverse, which is full on face tracking. So one, they know your identity. Yeah. So they, they know who you are because they need to know who you are. Uh, to sign into this sort of thing right there. There's not going to, I doubt there's going to be anonymity in the metaverse in their metaverse, right?

Just like there's not really anonymity in Facebook. You kind of assign yourself an identity. That's supposed to be linked to you as a person. Um, but also all of the features that they're describing require things like face tracking so they can see your facial expressions and that sort of thing. And so, and build, build maps it of your face.

If you want to have, like, there's been precursors to this with everyone, having a bunny face on their face and all of that stuff, right. That's face tracking. I mean, this is that only in three dimensions so that you can do your, your avatar. Is it your actual face, but a projection of whatever you want your avatar to be that has facial expressions, right?

Well, to do that, they have to do face tracking. And to do that, they need to build some sort of a. Of your face and stored in some kind of, let's just call it a book, a

face map, but if face book, if, if you were would, um, but yeah, I mean, how else will you, so they have the store that you can call it whatever you want. It's not, maybe it's not an actual picture of your face. That's now being stored. Although it probably will be, if someone wants to have a three-dimensional map of their face now go over there app.

Right. Which a lot of people will. I mean, some people will want someone else's face on there, but if you want to use your own face in your avatar, you'll have to scan it and tag it and that sort of thing. Right. Interesting. Yeah. So yeah, I just don't, I think they don't need it anymore. I think it's, it's no longer a value there.

They're clearly the value of saying they're deleting. It is higher than the value of still having. And so that's yeah, 

[00:35:31] Katherine: it's probably, it's probably spot on. Yeah, I like it. Hmm. none of this matters to me? Because of course I can't participate in the metaverse cause I'll throw up. So I guess I don't have to worry too much about what's going to be collected since I don't get to play.

[00:35:53] Kyle: Until there's some sort of meeting that you have to be on, you know, like th that's that's the problem with these sorts of things is that it's as, as someone who also in general chooses not to participate in a lot of the things that I don't agree with, the privacy implications or whatever behind there's still areas where it's really challenged.

You can't completely open. Not easily, at least once society adopts certain things, you know,

there's a baked in assumption that you will have two things.

One you'll have a smartphone and two you'll have internet. And if you don't have those things, there are certain, certain things are challenging. 

I'm sure a lot of people listening would just think it's unthinkable to live without the internet in the modern day. But all that, to say the challenge with these, with things like the metaverse is, is not when it gets started and people are using it as a cool toy or whatever, or a way, or you have to join use it.

If you work at a company that uses it for their meetings, which is the other thing, right. Um, If it starts becoming fundamental in society, like the internet that, you know, like the internet has. If the metaverse does become the future of the internet and you have to have a token to access certain types of information and you have to be part of a platform to, to meet certain people, to accomplish certain things.

That's you know, that's going to be challenged. You may not be able to opt out to do certain things. 

[00:37:16] Katherine: Accessibility issues will be with this. Like, for example, I'm thinking in a workplace you would have to accommodate people under ADA. And I would imagine that there are people who just wouldn't be able to participate in, in a, in a, in a VR meeting or something for a, for a lot.

I can think of a lot of reasons, the health related, why you wouldn't want to do that. Um, I wonder how that, how that evolves, like how do you make something like that accessible? 

[00:37:45] Kyle: And then on the flip side, on the flip side, I guess you could argue, in some cases, people with certain, certain disabilities it could perhaps make it easier to do.

[00:37:54] Katherine: Oh yes, absolutely. There are certain, certain place where ways or when they were, it would actually be extra accommodation. But at the same time, I can see there being, I don't know enough about it, but there are certain conditions where I could see it being a problem. And then you have people like me who would just puke in the meeting.

[00:38:12] Kyle: I mean, just, just to something as simple as someone who's visually impaired, where if you're using a computer, now there are reasonable accessibility tools for people screen readers and all of that sort of thing, where you can use a modern. If it ha if you're using something that has reasonable accessibility tools, um, and get things done.

But I, I doubt that a VR headset is going to take all of that into account and there could be a audio track or something, but yeah, I don't, I don't know.

[00:38:41] Katherine: This is, this is a question for our future episode. I think I need to contact an accessibility expert who has some expertise in accessibility for VR.

There are a lot of questions. I have, I have many, many questions. Yeah. Um, huh. Interesting. I mean, 

[00:39:01] Doc: I've got a I'm gonna call him a friend, but a guy know someone well, who is now? He's a, he's a quadriplegic he broke his neck and, but I'm thinking Hmm. For him and for people like. What a metaverse where you can actually, you know, re ambulate and you can have a complete self again, that's sort of like that's, I mean, it could be that there would be frontiers of accessibility in the virtual world that aren't possible in a physical one.

That was what second life was already anyway, but I mean, it's a, but I'm wondering to what extent thoughts going into.

[00:39:42] Kyle: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is like a lot of this ground was already broken in second life and I don't necessarily think you need, you know, have to have a high-end graphics process with all of this stuff to get a similar enough effect, because a lot of it was already sort of in place with second life.

It's just based on, you know, a long story with their architecture had had trouble. Upgrading their graphics to meet modern sensibilities of what gaming graphics are supposed to look like. But in the meantime, they still built this world that a lot of people got a lot of value in, in a currency that people were making, you know, making there are people making a living in there converting Linden bucks into, into dollars or whatever on the side and selling, selling real estate and all of that.

So, but then again, you can look at it now it's sort of like. When Facebook took over from all the other social networks that proceeded it and everyone's saying, well, this is going to, you know, eventually it will be the, it will be the next, um, for Insta or whatever. Right. Um, and I guess now we're sort of seeing that maybe if they move over to the metaverse, but then the question is, well, are they going to be the next second life where.

You know, you have a lot of people who invest. I mean, think about all of the people in all the time, the, the many, many, many hours that many people invest in a second life building worlds, building real estate creating, or like real estate businesses, uh, clothing, businesses, and everything else that went on in that world.

I mean, it was, yeah, it was a huge 

[00:41:08] Katherine: speak about it in the past tense. Is it still, I think it's still going on. 

[00:41:12] Doc: It's not a big world, but They're there. I'm just looking up second life fashions is a lot of stuff, not in a widow, how old it is. But I mentioned for, you know, are there similar fashions for any other place?

I mean, if you're going to be a fashion designer, that's going to do dress up an avatar, you know? I imagine

I played with it a little bit back when, remember when bill, a journal author, bill was Bill's second life avatar was on the cover of Linux journal a little bit back then, because I was just, you know, I was curious It is it's, it is kind of a fascinating world.

I never got super into it because, well, frankly, I can only look at that type of screen for so long. But yeah, I mean, there are, you can buy clothes. I bought clothes. I, you know, I played with building things. I could see getting kind of lost in something like that.

If it were, if it were, um, More realistic.

[00:42:11] Kyle: Yeah. I mean, I dabbled in that sort of thing around that same sort of time, basically in its heyday. And then I would, I would find myself going in, poking around, walking around and it was sort of like, it reminded me a lot of going to a camp, like a big conference where I didn't know anybody and didn't run into anybody I knew in the halls.

So you have a lot of people that are all in the same place, but unless you're extroverted enough to make friends, wherever you go. Then you're just sort of in a crowd walking around and not sure what to do. And I sort of had that sense. A lot of times

[00:42:46] Katherine: I had a little bit of that. I, I also, this is really funny, but I just remembered something that I did.

I would go around to all the sort of like Linuxy they were, I don't remember how it worked, but there were, um, Areas. Yeah, there were little worlds within the thing, and I would find all the Linux related ones and I would drop virtual copies of Linux journal with a little cover. And it was like a little litter, second life with copies of a virtual Linux journal.

And in that sense, some people would chat me up about it and it was, it was kind of fun. Um, but yeah, that's, that's, that was about the extent of my. 

[00:43:25] Kyle: Well, I mean, the, the other thing that second life, at least that, that extended its its lifespan from a business standpoint for people was the sex trade. Uh, they ha there was like a whole other area of that.

Where if you moved past the default worlds and into the, the adults only world, there was apparently all kinds of stuff going on with. Uh,

[00:43:47] Katherine: in things that would translate into the real world or things that were virtual only

[00:43:52] Kyle: I don't know all the details actually, but I, at the very least things that were only trends that at least were, um, To begin with.

I don't know how much of it translated into, into the physical world or how much of it stayed virtual. I suspect any future metaverse will have the same sort of thing go on. Um, but yeah, I know, I know that. I mean, that's one of the commentaries. If you see people talking about second life, they would say, you know, how do you make money in second life?

Well, I guess you could either real estate selling clothes or the. The virtual prostitution. Yeah. Virtual prostitution was one of the, one of the big moneymakers in second life. 

[00:44:31] Katherine: Wow. I don't think I realized that. I do remember actually going to like adults only areas of second life and kind of like, oh, that's, that's kind of funny.

And, but I, I guess I didn't, you know, I didn't, I didn't stay long enough to learn.

[00:44:43] Doc: That was probably the biggest part of second life. Oh, I'm sure it was. Yeah. 

[00:44:47] Kyle: Yeah. And metaverse will be similar thing. I imagine there's going to be. Yeah. Unless they somehow shut that down then. Yeah. It's going to be, you know, that's going to be another big part of that.

[00:44:58] Katherine: That's the musical, the song and the internet is for porn. Yeah. The internet is for porn or porn. Yeah. The, the creature, there was a, it was a cartoony thing.

[00:45:11] Doc: Whether a guy with internet is a wonderful thing. For porn. Um, take a look. I just took this in the chat and of course people listening,can'tsee it, but just look it up, look up, uh, Ethan.

Uh, uh, Zuc C K E R M a N. Um, sacrament actually, um, he hit a piece in the Atlantic. They got a lot of notice called Hey Facebook. I made a metaverse 27 years ago, and then the subtitle was, it was terrible then. And it's terrible now, you know, and he's, he was a real pioneering guy. He was a colleague of mine, uh, when I was at the Berkman Klein center.

And. You know, he was there and he was at MIT and now he's at UMass Amherst has a great podcast by the way, called re-imagining the internet. And, uh, uh, but anyway, he, uh, it's a really good piece because instead of visits all the problems with it, you know, his big problem. I was how lame it was that, I mean, what, what, what, what Zuck showed was really, you know, Hey, here's a, here's a kind of a effect simply of me.

So what was seen as before and here are these floating entities trying to play a card game in an office or something like it's really cliche or stuff. And that's been done before and not very interesting, you know, and that, but that's what he showed off. but he's got more money than God. So who knows what he's going to do?

[00:46:34] Kyle: Okay, well, I'm going to make a prediction that the most successful platform for this, because I don't think there there's not going to be a single metaverse. I, I know there's no way to proprietary. It's going to be proprietary. The one that, um, I suspect the one that embraces porn, uh, essentially the sex trade will probably be the one that, that blossoms the most, because that'll be one of the prime, because there'll be a place for doing business.

[00:47:02] Doc: Yep. I think that's going to be it. And, um, especially if they have a way that people can pay for it anonymously, you know, it doesn't have to be on their credit card if they could do it that way with the token of some kind, but token, a token of some sort, you know, so it is not traceable back to two parents or spouses, you know, that's the that's they, they got that worked out there it is.

[00:47:27] Kyle: And here's the interesting thing. I doubt that people will trust. To say that they have anonymity and don't track what people do. Oh, absolutely. Right. So that'll be a major hill that they would have to climb. So if someone . Yeah. So if someone has a Metro first that is anonymous, that allows anonymous exchanges of money, then that will be to their advantage.

Yeah. Yup. Yeah. That's, uh, that's what it'll be. I, I, I agree with that. And I think, I mean, it, I mean the game world is all proprietary, right? And it's all isolated. You're in this winner, that one or that one, there's not a whole lot of, it's not like a single game world that all the different games work in, like with the internet dust, you know, they may use the internet, but they're, they tend to be proprietary and closed on the whole and a better versus probably going to be just this.

You know, whether the mid oversees the middle Versailles. 

[00:48:21] Katherine: So basically Metta is going to take all of this math, the massive financial success of Facebook and build out a porn site. 

[00:48:33] Doc: There's not a lot of evidence that having all the resources in the world means you've got to make exactly the thing. You know, that's going to take ass.

[00:48:40] Kyle: I mean, especially since they're having a hiring problem, you know what I mean? That's the other thing with a lot of these large companies, people will, you often will hear people say, well, if I don't do this, then someone else will kind of thing. Or, you know, like, like the tech decisions are inevitable and someone's going to build the thing.

But if, but if you have enough people. And if you, you see this in tech companies like Uber, for instance, when Uber had the height of their reputation problem, they were scrambling trying to get people to work there. And if you can't hire enough tech, tech workers to do a thing, you can't do the thing. Yeah.

[00:49:14] Katherine: Yeah, I've read everything I see about Facebook lately is that they're having a really hard time hiring people, which is interesting. I mean, I don't, I don't think it's surprising exactly, but apparently it's pretty significant. It's more significant even than I would have thought.

[00:49:27] Kyle: Um, which is a well, there's a couple of reasons that people will often join a large tech company.

You know, one of them. Among others. I mean, usually once you get, once you're a large tech company, you owe you compensate to make up for, you know, whatever other negative things might be as a result of the job. And the other thing is you'll have opportunities there because of scale that you may not have somewhere else.

But the other thing is some people will join a big, a large tech company because they want to have that on the. Right. And Facebook, they know a negative, right. And so a lot of people, people who have that factor, that's the main reason that they want to work for a large company besides maybe more pay is the point to that later for the resume.

Um, now that's a negative, right? And so people are like, why did you know what was going on at Facebook? Well, especially sort of like joining, like, for example, joining Uber at that particular time period where there's a time period where you could say, well, I didn't know. What was going on. And then there's a time period after that, that if you joined, you're like, well, you clearly knew it was in the news everywhere and you joined anyway.

Yeah. And now there's the Facebook papers and puts them in a weird, weird position. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I think I'm, yeah, I guess it will. It will be more difficult to build something cutting edge without people who can work on cutting edge. Yeah. I mean, Uber, Uber found that that's why they ended up closing down there.

One of the reasons their self-driving car division, right, is they started having this massive brain drain where people who are moving to all the competitors, because it was no longer, no positive. Interesting. Well, I guess we will, we will see how that shakes out. . I like. Your ideas kind of though. I think, I think those, those worlds are more aligned than they realize. And I think that was, that was the original.

Thought, and that that'll be interesting to see those worlds either come together or, or not. And if not, then, then what happens. So, yeah. Interesting stuff. Thank you so much, uh, for, for, for coming on and having this talk and thank you everyone for listening this far, and then listening to our, our pontification about, uh, the, the new, the new, uh, metaworld that we may find or.

Thank you. And until next time.