- The metaverse hype bubble has burst, but the vision lives on, argues author and entrepreneur Matthew Ball
- Author and futurist Karl Schroeder says we need to think differently about the internet, reaching back more than a half-century for new networking models
- Underlying data networks need to be more resilient and powerful to meet emerging requirements
Remember the metaverse? That was a silly idea promulgated during the pandemic, and by now, we're supposed to be living as legless avatars floating in a universe owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
Clearly, this was foolishness promoted by tech business leaders who had gone batty from being confined to their homes in lockdown and subsisting exclusively on DoorDash Taco Bell.
Thank goodness we’re done with that metaverse nonsense, right?
Wrong, says Matthew Ball, an entrepreneur, investor, TV, film and video game producer, and author. Ball has a new book with a clunky title: “The Metaverse: Fully Revised and Updated Edition: Building the Spatial Internet.” It’s an update to his 2022 book, “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.”
The 2022 book, published at the peak of metaverse hype, is redolent of the very early 2020s, the way leisure suits and orange shag carpeting are redolent of the 1970s.
In an interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Ball argues that the metaverse, or “spatial Internet,” is still the future of the internet. The metaverse isn’t an alternate world into which we disappear using face computers; it’s a 3D version of the internet.
“The major players — Meta, Fortnite-maker Epic Games, Roblox — are all still plugging away at the idea, albeit gradually. While Meta and Apple go head-to-head on hardware, the gaming companies whose engines make the 3D internet come to life are still working on some of the core technical ideas — like interoperability and what combination of AR and VR consumers actually want,” writes Nilay Patel, The Verge’s editor-in-chief.
What will this spatial internet look like, exactly? I don’t know, and I suspect nobody does today. We’ll see it emerge as it evolves, just as we saw with the World Wide Web and the mobile, smartphone-powered internet.
Ball pairs the spatial internet with “digital twins” — virtual representations of objects in the built world, such as fiber networks, buildings, factories, bridges or even whole cities. Digital twins can grow as big as you can imagine. NVIDIA announced in March that it’s building a digital twin of the whole world, to model climate change. These tools help predict failures, direct where maintenance is needed, and provide valuable information for strategic planning.
Using the spatial internet, users can navigate through and interact with digital twins that influence and inform users about the real world.
After the internet
Ball’s argument complements discussion by Karl Schroeder, a science fiction writer and professional futurist, in an essay titled “After the Internet."
“There is no ‘online world,’” Schroeder wrote. “That was always a metaphor, and as it turns out, a bad one. But what can take its place?”
The idea of an "online world" — the metaverse, or cyberspace — is a flawed metaphor created by science fiction in novels and movies such as "Neuromancer" by William Gibson, "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, and the Matrix movies. This metaphor has shaped our understanding of the internet as a place where offline laws and rules of behavior don’t apply.
Instead of viewing the Internet as a place, we should explore new concepts that focus on practical interactions in our daily lives. By moving away from the outdated notions of cyberspace, we can envision alternative networking models that better serve society, Schroeder said.
The nation of Chile gave us an example of alternate model for networked systems in its “Cybersyn” project, which according to Wikipedia was “aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy.”
Schroeder said:
"From 1971 to 1973, Chile organized its government-owned enterprises via a system called Cybersyn. We laugh at it now, as computers were huge and expensive back then and Chile only had a warehouse full of teletype machines to implement [the] vision of a cybernetic state. Yet … more information does not make decision-making any better."
Schroeder continued:
"Cybersyn wasn’t a poor man’s Internet; it was not designed to heave vast amounts of data around, only exactly what was needed to generate awareness of a situation and shape a response to it. Cybersyn was a cybernetic network in all the ways that the Internet is not: sparse, efficient, fast, and aware of the nonlinear responses that networks of agents can surprise us with….
Cybersyn promised a "third-way" alternative to capitalism and communism, where the network wasn't a vast pipeline for flooding the world with books and accounting data and emails and pornography; it was just the lightest nervous system needed to support a just and free society.
It didn't fail on its own. It was violently suppressed."
The Internet can't keep up
Both Schroeder’s and Ball’s visions of the new Internet have a serious problem: The underlying data networks of the Internet aren’t fit for purpose. Today’s networks are fragile, slow and expensive, even for the tasks we’re using them for today, as illustrated by this well-known cartoon:
The recent CrowdStrike fiasco demonstrated the internet’s fragility by showing us in real-time that today’s networks are not up to real-world demands, let alone the even greater demands posed by emerging technology and business models.
That CrowdStrike update snarled less than 1% of the world’s Windows machines — and that was enough to make a mess of air travel, hospitals and more.
CrowdStrike was a single point of failure for the internet. Other single points of failure include monopolistic services such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, which can lock users out of access to vital communications and personal records for any reason, without due process, according to writer and activist Cory Doctorow.
And, while the CrowdStrike incident was an accident, it could just as easily be an attack next time, Doctorow notes.
We need the smart cloud
The internet needs an upgrade. It needs a “smart cloud” to serve as both foundation and engine. The new, global internet will require underlying data networks that are self-healing, self-optmizing, self-defending and self-aware.
The smart cloud is an ongoing focus of our new Fierce Network Research unit. In a recent report, Telecom Automation and AI: Let’s Get Real, we reported on how communication service providers are already well underway in implementing artificial intelligence and automation to build smart cloud-enabled networks for the future. Upcoming reports investigate transforming telcos with cloud-native OSS, optimizing network design to meet the demands of AI, and breaking down network silos to integrate networks for 5G monetization at the edge.
These smart cloud-enabled networks will serve as the backbone of the next-generation Internet, ensuring robust and reliable connectivity for emerging technologies and business models.
Our focus at Fierce Network Research is to explore and report on these advancements, guiding the transformation towards a more capable Internet that’s ready for what the future throws at it.