The Problem with Facebook Owning Their Own 2nd Universe
"True digital ownership" is a just a few more leaps in technology away, but Facebook has it wrong already.
What’s a “Metaverse”?
Mark Zuckerberg has announced the building of something they call the “Metaverse”.
The word Metaverse is a blend of words meaning “2nd universe” and is pitched as a customizable digital space in which you can work, play, and communicate.
The keynote address of the Metaverse gave an in-depth view of what we can expect:
Social Connections
Entertainment
Gaming
Exercise
Commerce
and more
All of these features can be accessed through Oculus’s Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR).
VR → full digital environment immersion
AR → digital objects “exist” within the physical world
Facebook Wants Central Ownership of Your Digital Items
Facebook owns the Metaverse. This means they own their own universe. This is a huge flaw.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all eyes and ears for anything VR related, but I’ve skeptically observed the disconnects between what Facebook “says” and actually “does”.
Facebook recently acquired the company Oculus, a VR technology company, and they’ve used their technology as a foundation for building the Metaverse on top of.
What Facebook doesn’t tell you is that Oculus users with fake user names are at risk of losing access to the content they paid for.
Facebook requires in their policy that you login to their platforms using your Facebook account, which includes your real name. They technically have the greenlight on enforcing this policy within Oculus since they own it.
This means Facebook has the power to delete what we own.
So does this mean we actually own what we buy on tech companies’ platforms?
No.
Another prime example of “fake ownership” is when Apple was sued for deleting $24,000 worth of content from a man’s iTunes library.
Fortunately, as blockchain technology progresses, we’ll have some options for establishing “true digital ownership” within something like the Metaverse.
How to Establish True Digital Ownership Within the Metaverse
As we’ve established: “Facebook owns their own universe.”
So whatever you decide to buy and store inside of that universe, technically becomes theirs. In the real world, things don’t work that way, you have physical ownership of items, and they can’t be taken away by “infringing on policy”.
The problem with digital items is they can be reproduced infinitely, but can simultaneously be deleted infinitely. This allows the centralized owner of the universe to do what they like with anyone’s digital items and artificially disrupt the value of said items by either infinitely producing or destroying.
To establish true digital ownership, we need to decentralize the ownership of the entire Metaverse (or something like it). We can do this by using the functions of an NFT to verify the existence of not only one digital object, but all perceivable objects within our 2nd universe.
An NFT or (Non-Fungible Token) is a technology that verifies the originality of digital objects.
Since the word NFT denotes the verification of a singular object, I’d like to coin a new term for the verification of an entire observable 2nd universe:
NFU (Non-Fungible Universe) → a decentralized, self-verifying 2nd existence.
An NFU is literally The Matrix. We’re closer than you think.
Want to Hear More?
I’ll be writing a set of more detailed articles on the theoretical establishment of a mainstream NFU that will dive deeper into:
the flaws
the benefits
possible cultural shifts
the economic implications
possible opportunities
and much, much more
If you would like to read those all-encompassing articles as they are released, follow my Medium or become a member of Medium to gain unrestricted access to all my content and other Medium authors’.