What is farming to designers and hackers in the Metaverse?

The dystopia is both heaven and hell

All the buzz around metaverse got me thinking the question around sustainability, like imagine if you’re a denizen of the information age, riding around the Metaverse with your NFT bike, what is the economy like? What are the primary, secondary and tertiary producers in the Metaverse? To draw a parallel in our world, our primary producers tend to be farmers, who then gets their produce processed by secondary producers who either repackage the product or cook it to form new products, or for example miners and their secondary producers the blacksmiths. Understanding primary economic producers is important because it’s what you, as a human, can do without worrying about how the economy is like. Say if you’re farmer on your own land, if you are self sufficient, you basically give zero fucks about how the economy is like, unless you want something that you’re not self sufficient in, like shiny necklaces or a watch.

Since most of us live in cities, say you’re a teenager leaving school for work, what happens when you lost your job because all the jobs have been filled? The city is running smoothly, all the products are being created and replaced at the same rate, so there’s really not much for you, a newcomer to the city, to do. In this perfect world, you don’t have the need to exist. Economic stagnation isn’t really kind to individual people, unless you know what is the last resort for you to sustain yourself. Since the Metaverse is touted to replace Reality to some extent, there are still many unknowns, but we can explore these unknowns if we can use some guiding principles from another reality. Just treat the Metaverse as a multi-universe.

So now, we are in the Metaverse. It is a universe where one does not need to eat, drink, sleep or any of the physical limitations we have with the original world. We can have multiple personalities or Avatars in the Metaverse, and each could have a distinct personality, just like how we have different personalities for work and play. Basically, the Metaverse takes all the metaphysical, psychological stuff and make it physical. In Reality, farming and mining are primary producers because they sustain our physical bodies. In the Metaverse, something else is needed to sustain our “psychological” bodies, and that something is self-sustaining and an ingrained need within our brains.

I’m sure some of you know or have heard of the Maslow’s hierachy of needs. We can use it to guide the discussion somewhat. Since we can assume there are no physiological and physical safety needs in the Metaverse, the next items that drive human behaviour would be psychological safety and security, social and romantic needs, personal ego and self actualisation. This is getting rather interesting, no?

Psychological safety and security would be rather important in the Metaverse since it’s basically lawless in there because most existing laws apply to physical entities. If you own 10 Avatars, and you commit a “crime” in the Metaverse with one of them, are all Avatars affected? In fact, is it even a crime since everything is virtual? Killing someone is a videogame does not kill a person in real life, so if you destroy the Avatar of another person in the Metaverse, it’s currently not a crime. In Neal Stepheson’s book, Snow Crash, the Metaverse is regulated by a bunch of good willed hackers while the real world is fragmented by corporations. The way we are going, it’s the other way around. The internet has been guarded by good willed hackers for some time, but the Metaverse is looking to be fragmented by corporations. How do we regulate or protect ourselves against attacks in the Metaverse? Thus begins the questions of cybersecurity or even mind security like the type in Inception, to protect one’s psychology and minds from attack.

Moving up would be the realm of social media and entertainment. Physical drugs have no place in the Metaverse but there’s no regulation on hallucinations caused by audio-video sensory input. Likewise for porn or videogames. Since this is all virtual, there’s no space constraint. Everyone could play God in the Metaverse, it can hold more than one universe. However notice the common element behind all these items: they require creative creators and people who implement them, aka designers and hackers. In fact, this might push for more tools to lower the bar for the activity, like how you can buy seeds and tools to grow your own vegetables. When the Metaverse arrives, there will be a need for creation tools ala Minecraft and Terraria.

The key takeaway is this: designers and hackers will be the farmers of the Metaverse, and security, social media, entertainment will be the farming of the future.