Metaverse is Centralized Technocracy

I do not intend to discourage the use of technology, but to inform about its contraindications. Any excess tends to be harmful.

This article is a look of caution.

The metaverse is an environment where humans interact socially and economically as avatars, through a computer medium in a cyberspace, and is generally composed of multiple, shared, three-dimensional virtual spaces.

The metaverse acts as a metaphor for the real world, and with new relationships and economic rules unique to the ecosystem, many of which are not applicable to our physical reality.

A science fiction metaphor that is possible today, and where reality surpasses fiction.

The reality exceeds fiction

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU George Orwell narrated in his work “1984”, published in 1949, which describes a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that differ from the corporate state. Individual freedom does not exist and advanced technology has become the engine of the surveillance society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subjected to the Thought Police who deal with those guilty of thought crimes.

dependence on Internet-connected gadgets and gadgets prepares us for a future where freedom is an illusion.

The CIA’s MK Ultra project sought during the second half of the last century, between the 1950s and 1970s, to achieve mind control through all kinds of illegal activities: LSD, hypnosis, electroconvulsive therapy, torture. In total, almost two hundred researchers from eighty institutions collaborated with the 149 projects of the program. There was no Facebook or Google then, of course.

Metarverse Data Promises a Million Dollar Business

Mark Zuckerberg’s company currently has 2.9 billion people between WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook itself (source Statista ), and growing.

Increasingly, children, adolescents and young people (and many adults) spend many hours connected to internet platforms where they not only play, but also interact with other people.

interesting opportunity, as it was 20 years ago, betting on companies like Google or Facebook.

“The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.” Warren Buffet

Just do a Google search on a type of food, shoes, cars or books, and the following ads have this theme. The invasion of privacy begins with the collection of data when we browse. But it is also enough for BIG BROTHER to know our tastes, fears and weaknesses so that they send us false (or designed) news so that, for example, they lead us to vote for a certain candidate. That is part of the Technocracy.

Thus, the concept of metaverse is used globally to describe a digital life parallel to real life, but in the case of cryptographic projects, the metaverse goes a little further.

Blockchain Metaverse transform the big tech business model that we’ve all come to know and dislike. Rather than operating services designed to extract monetary value from users, Web3 innovators create platforms that aim to empower people. Truly autonomous creations where the users are, if not the owners in the traditional sense of the word, then the beneficiaries.

The only way to think of the ideal metaverse is through the building blocks laid by decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. The world is only just waking up to the transformative power of DAOs, which have made headlines for attempts to buy a copy of the US Constitution, crowdfund legal fees for Julian Assange, and lower the barriers to entry for real estate investing. In the decentralized finance movement, DAOs are now the norm rather than the exception, and now that they’re beginning to penetrate the mainstream, it’s only a matter of time before this model extends to other platforms and protocols, too. How can we be sure of this? Because from the users’ perspective, the DAO model offers unbeatable value. We all know that in the traditional social media model, we – or rather our data – are the product that generates value. Each update or “improvement” simply attempts to extract more revenue from our data. However, users don’t see any of this value – instead, it’s funneled back to shareholders.

A social network based on a DAO upends this model to return value to those who generate it. Users have an ownership stake in the platform, and assuming it operates using the same ad-based revenue model, the user will receive a share of these revenues as a reward for their engagement.

Unparalleled network effects

The network effects of such a model would be unparalleled because the incentives are aligned. Users – let’s go crazy and just call them people now – will want their friends and family to join so they can also participate in the rewards and make the network a better place to hang out. The more people join, the more developers want to build third-party apps and services to tap into this growing community of active, engaged people who are happy to be there, and the positive cycle continues.

What’s more, thanks to the underlying blockchain infrastructure, people own the assets and benefits they accrue on any given platform. In the Web2 model, we don’t own anything so we end up tied into platforms and services simply so we can benefit from the work we’ve put into them over the years. Closing a social media account means losing followers, closing a streaming service means losing playlists and access to streaming material, closing an online marketplace listing wipes out a carefully-built customer directory.

In the Web3 world, we own our assets, so we can carry them with us across different platforms without fear of being penalized. This also has the potential to make assets exponentially more valuable than they are in the Web2 world. For instance, Spotify has put the world’s music library in our pockets, but the cost of doing so has reduced the value of a music track to fractions of a cent.

But if a piece of music is tied to an NFT that can be owned and played on any platform or device, it becomes worth more to the listener – and the artist is the one reaping 100% of that extra value.

Decentralization is the only viable model Coming back to the tension between centralized metaverses and decentralized ones, it’s unclear how the two can co-exist. Following Twitter’s lead, Meta is rumored to be rolling out NFT support for Facebook and Instagram and even launching its own NFT marketplace.

It’s hard to imagine who would want to mint NFTs that only work in a closed ecosystem, but it’s even harder to imagine Meta, or any of the other big tech firms, launching NFTs that permit interoperability with the established blockchain infrastructure.

So big tech has a choice. Embrace the open, decentralized nature of the future in the metaverse, or continue operating closed ecosystems that are only designed to extract value at the expense of their most valuable assets. Because once people begin to understand that Web3 empowers them to own their data, their follower counts, their customers, all the value they accrue online and take it with them, the “Web 2.0” business model is no longer attractive or sustainable.

In The Matrix, the popular science fiction film, computer programmer Thomas Anderson, alias Neo, is awakened from a virtual sleep by Morpheus, a freedom fighter who seeks to free humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by by hyperadvanced artificial intelligence machines, which depend on humans as a source of organic energy. With their minds connected to a perfectly designed virtual reality, few humans realize that they are living in an artificial dream world.

Neo has to choose: take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, and remain immersed in his virtual world maintaining the powers that be. Most people opt for the blue pill.

Current events show us that the blue pill is a single ticket to a life sentence in a technological concentration camp, and that it has been coated with the honey of usability to mask the bitter taste.

We’ve been given the blue pill through superfast internet, 24/7 streaming, cell phone signals that never miss a call, thermostats that keep us at the ideal temperature without us having to lift a finger, and entertainment that can be streamed simultaneously to our televisions, tablets and mobile phones, and then home devices.

In the near future, with a chip in our body. Big Data is core power. Fact Check: quantum dot dye technology does not feature microchips

We saw it in the last “ pandemic “ (Covid19), fear generates power for those who instill it, and wealth… Billionaires got 54% richer during pandemic, sparking calls for “wealth tax.”

The closure of our individual physical freedoms is part of the metaverse experiment.

However, we are not only in the hands of these technologies that were meant to make our lives easier, we have become their slaves.

Look around. Whichever way you look at it, people are so addicted to their Internet-connected display devices — smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs — that they can spend hours immersed in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through technology.

Is that freedom? No, it’s not even progress, but involution towards transhumanism It is the technological tyranny and iron control exercised through the surveillance state, by corporate giants like Google and Facebook, and government espionage agencies like the National Security Agency , or any other similar organization in any country.

We are so engrossed in the latest technologies that we have barely thought about the ramifications of our flight forward, into a world where our abject

But the metaverse is not limited to electronic games. For Zuckerberg, the push into the metaverse will come from the merging of the digital and physical worlds. Instead of consuming the internet through mobile screens, the metaverse will be accessed through hightech virtual reality or augmented reality glasses, which will project realistic and interactive images onto our physical surroundings.

On Friday, October 29, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced the conversion of his company Facebook into META whose slogan says: “The metaverse will be social”

But BIG BROTHER is much more than Facebook and the complaints of bad practices regarding the privacy of its users’ personal data, which also affect other technological giants, such as Google.

The gratuitousness of the service leads us to the fact that we ourselves are the product. There are no free lunches. Have you heard of Big Data? (large flows of information that are useful for predicting behavior).

The Power of the Technocracy

“You will have nothing and you will be happy. Anything you want to rent, a drone will take you home”, is the first of the 8 predictions for the world in 2030 of the World Economic Forum.

The political Establishment has understood the power of that technology. Technocracy is a path we are traveling .

Governance is not only based on traditional political power, but through companies, where the technocracy takes shape with the Corporatocracy , since otherwise it could not be implemented.

American companies are not the only ones who want to be part of the metaverse and thus of economic power. Several Chinese companies, such as Tencent, Netease and Baidu, are also taking an interest.

At BlackRock and Fidelity (two large global investment funds) they are clear that the metaverse is such an

The crypto economy is a new ecosystem, but it is growing rapidly. People interact in it without the need for permission, without the need for trust. The right setting for the metaverse. A blockchain metaverse is a virtual universe, made up of shared 3D virtual spaces, generated within a chain of blocks.

In this virtual universe there is its own economy, actions that simulate to be jobs, its own currency, digital assets, avatars and numerous monetization opportunities. The metaverse in blockchain creates a complete parallel life, because it adds economy to social roles.

Decentraland is the most popular space among blockchain metaverses based on the Ethereum blockchain. On Decentraland, you can buy virtual goods known as LAND that are stored on the Ethereum blockchain in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).

To get your own lot of EARTH on Decentraland, you need to get Decentraland’s ERC-20 fungible cryptocurrency, called MANA.

Pavia the first Cardano metaverse project officially launched as the first Cardano Metaverse in January, was named after Pavia, Italy, the birthplace of Gerolamo (Jerome) Cardano in 1501. There are already over 22,000 owners or holders of unique portfolios of NFTs.

Similar in style to Decentraland, but based on Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain technology, each parcel of land is a uniquely numbered Cardano NFT (CNFT) based on coordinates within Pavia.

Final Words

Combine the metaverse, the crypto industry, artificial intelligence and the power of quantum computing , and if you understand the deep meaning of this article, you will start to feel chills.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I do not intend to discourage the use of technology, but to inform about its contraindications, the excess is harmful.

I do not mean to alarm you, but to inform you.

(Article and image via Medium Coinmonks.)

The current state of screen time across the US

Data from Optimum

Counteract Digital Addiction

Social media and digital platforms have bombarded our daily lives with all kinds of information and media contents. We are so used to having unlimited access to these platforms, that we never realize how addicted we have become.

As Metaverse becomes mature, it will most likely become ever immersive and of course addictive, our project will tackle on the addiction and mental health issue in this digitalized future.

The goal of big corporations in investing hundreds of billions in Metaverse is profit-driven, that means, metaverse will repeat social media’s success by focusing on creating engaging and profit driven activities, and toxic environments to attract users to stay longer, and eventually become centralized just like social media. Moreover, digital platforms will continue to curate the contents we are exposed to, control information transparency.

Studies and survey has been conducted indicate excessive screen time and an increasing population having digital addiction since 2017. Addiction to digital environments as Metaverse prevails will be much more serious and demand our immediate attention.

For a healthy and long-lived lifestyle, how can we counteract the addiction issues in the future of metaverse?

We believe the answer lies within community and metaverse. The mechanism of addiction is through dopamine which gives brain the happy signal and train the brain to look for more of this addictive events. But dopamine can also be triggered from a wide range of activities, for example – positive social interactions and positive digital media interactions, which we hope to promote through the combination of community space and virtual interface.

National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS): 2020

Data on Substance Abuse Treatment Facilities

Treatment #1: 12 Step Facilitation

Treatment #2: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Treatment #3: Brief Interventions

Mountainside Treatment Center Canaan, Connecticut

Mountainside Treatment Center is a nationally acclaimed behavioral health network specializing in individualized alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs and services. We respect each client’s recovery journey and for over two decades, have proudly served thousands of people in need of holistic addiction treatment. By combining innovative clinical and complementary wellness therapies with a data-driven approach, we empower our clients to completely transform their lives and achieve long-term recovery.

(Via Mountainside Treatment Center website.)

Journey, Method, and Environment

Recovery Unplugged multiple locations

Recovery Unplugged helps people enter recovery from a place of empowerment, strength, and passion. We work with our clients to envision and build the life they want without drugs or alcohol.

Everyone connects with music, and most of us turn to it during our hardest times. Recovery Unplugged uses this connection to build trust with our clients and help them embrace lifesaving care.

(Via Recovery Unplugged website.)

Looking for the Answer in the Past

Case Study of Walking City by Ron Herron [Archigram] , 1964

To understand the urgency of metaverse platform, we looked at Archigram’s Walking City as precedences.

Archigram challenges the idea of static city and the format of citizenship. It creates a machine-oriented society in which machines and artificial intelligence will determine the way people live and social. It envisions a type of citizenship that is not fixed to the geographic location, but rather associated with the moving structure itself.

Likewise, in metaverse, one’s citizenship is determined by the rules and policies of the platform. However, while walking cities enable a flexible and modularized social structure as the mobile pods can be aggregated or detached from each other, current Metaverse platforms have this potential, but lack of the flexibility to engage with other platform due to their centralized nature and massive scale.

Similarly, in recent years, social media, introduced an unprecedentedly intense and complex mode of communication. But it has also gained control over the way we live, censor and curate the media content we see. They can even erase the existence of events and people.

Walking City inspired the way we look at the evolution of the metaverse. We hope to tackle on the infrastructure of metaverse platforms, and enable a decentralized infrastructure by empowering modularized and customizable metaverse platforms at a smaller scale, beginning with community or a neighborhood.

With this Community-Owned Metaverse as an initiation, we want to curate our own Metaverse that works collaboratively with the physical environment to create a nourishing but not addictive environment to better counteract the temptation from the digital world.