It’s time for a precise look at what we really mean when we talk about the “metaverse”. No more hand-waving. Let’s bring it into focus.
Alas, banana
Your government declares itself a banana republic and announces that all bananas are the property of the state. Accordingly, they will begin confiscating bananas. You, a banana lover, lock your last banana in a safe, memorize the combination, and destroy any physical record of what that combination is. The combination is now your exclusive thought-property. It is inside your mind, and nowhere else.
State agents of the banana republic arrive at your home and barge in. Seeing the safe, they suspect you of stashing a banana inside of it, and demand you open it. You refuse. They ask for the combination. You refuse.
If you are prepared to face torture, even death, rather than surrender the combination to the safe, there is nothing these banana republicans can do about it.
Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten,
sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger sie schießen
mit Pulver und Blei: Die Gedanken sind frei!Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
They fly by like nocturnal shadows.
No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them
with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!
[1]
All physical property is effectively owned by the most violent interested party, since that party can claim ownership by taking it from its current owner through violence. Thought-property is different. If the owner dies, the property dies also. This fact allows a determined owner of thought-property to defend that ownership against any level of violence, including that of the state, giving rise to what has been called “independent property rights” [2].
You explain all of this to the state agents, but they can’t hear you over the sound of the drill they’re using to open a hole in the side of your very physical safe.
The problem with thought-property
You believed that the safe created an equivalence between the property that you did own (the combination) and the property you did not (the banana). But since the equivalence (the safe) was physical property itself, the state, as the most violent interested party, could own it, and could hence destroy it.
As they’ve said all along, all bananas are the property of the state. Not just the banana, but the safe as well, and in some sense, all physical property.
Your secret revealed, you are beaten mercilessly by the state agents, handcuffed, and hauled towards the truck that has been waiting to take you to banana prison. Through bruised and swollen eyelids you glimpse the smug face of a state agent peeling your recently-confiscated banana, and mutter at him through broken teeth:
Und sperrt man mich ein im finsteren Kerker,
das alles sind rein vergebliche Werke.
Denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken
und Mauern entzwei: Die Gedanken sind frei!And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon,
all these are futile works,
because my thoughts tear all gates
and walls apart: Thoughts are free!
The agent comes towards you, takes a bite of the banana, and crouches down to speak into your ear, still chewing. You can smell the odor of banana on his breath when he says to you:
“Can you eat a thought-banana?”
Yes, alas, if only the banana, the object of your desire, were a thought. Then you could own it, as you owned the combination to the safe. Then no state, nor anyone else except the rightful owner, could ever claim it. But it is as the man said. You can’t eat a thought-banana. Or can you?
The rise of the Hyperreal Economy
The thought-property of the combination had value because it (supposedly) secured the ownership of a physical good, from which it inherited its value. Can there be thought-property with intrinsic value, not connected at some point to the physical world?
We live in an age where this may be coming true. The physical world is
embedded in a vast cloud of reflections, duplications, and retellings of
itself. In this soup, the philosopher Baudrillard saw the potential for these “simulations” — signs representing or anchored in the real — to lead to the rise of “simulacra” — signs which precede the real, forming a “hyperreal” which he called the simulacrum.
Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. Cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms. [3]
Bitcoin heralds the true coming of the simulacrum. It is not merely a ‘reflection’ or ‘echo’ of something. It is not a simulation of reality. It is not a shadow on the wall. It is a unit of the hyperreal itself, not anchored in physical reality.
Why the Bitcoin has value; how it gets it and keeps it, is not as important to understand as the fact that if it has it, it can be exchanged for other thoughts within the hyperreal. My thought-banana for your thought-apple. It can be borrowed, lent, leveraged, spent. But most importantly, it can be owned. It is thought-property from beginning to end.
The internet unleashed the hyperreal, but the hyperreal as we have known it until now — a free-for-all, arranged around trust and norms, charity or passion, or convenient abstractions or representations of physical goods, is being replaced. A true economy of thought is forming, within the simulacrum itself: the Hyperreal Economy.
The significance of the Hyperreal Economy
The potential abandonment of physical property — even in part — would be a historic divergence from the way institutions of property, law, and power have operated throughout human history.
When an individual holds property on a blockchain, their right to that property is not guaranteed by violence, nor by a law enforced through a state’s monopoly on violence, nor guaranteed by anything in the normal sense of the word. Their right is a mathematical fact. The right is intrinsic, and requires no guarantor. This is a major reason why decentralisation — cooperation without a central institution — is possible on the blockchain. There is no need to police a mathematical fact, no need to argue it in a court, and it is not possible at any rate for it to be violated. It stands on its own, beyond human interference.
It will be interesting to see how states integrate this into existing frameworks that have operated and been built upon for tens of thousands of years. Those old enough will remember the strong push from governments to deny the use of cryptography to the public. I think it is not because the state desires to read your emails, but because no amount of police, prison time, batons, guns, bombs, will ever change the fact that certain numbers can’t be computed in less than trillions of years. The state wants the option to read your e-mails, as its monopoly on violence gives it the option to do anything else, and cryptography completely reverses the power dynamic, locating the optionality with the individual, rather than the state.
This lack of coercion, replaced by of incentives and voluntarism, is the other half of what makes blockchains so fascinating. It is not only new kinds of property, but new kinds of coordination that are forming within the hyperreal. This is why DAOs, smart contracts, and tokenomics are not merely a playing-out of some game, they are vital and new and necessary, and I believe that we are only beginning to realize the potential of what we could soon unlock.
New property, new societies, new rights. These are profound and go to the foundation of humanity’s oldest institutions. What have we created? Where are we treading now? The hyperreal economy is growing, and it’s about more than just cool art, a fun lifestyle, and better chatrooms.
The Metaverse is dead. Long live the Hyperreal Economy.
Bibliography
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei
[2] https://medium.com/@hasufly/bitcoin-and-the-promise-of-independent-property-rights-8f10e5c7efa8
[3] Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
