Virtual Society by Herman Narula

Author:Herman Narula [Narula, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Now that we’ve defined a metaverse—and defined how value is created within a metaverse—we are faced with a very exciting opportunity: the chance to chart a course for a society that wholly embraces the value of a metaverse. How do we qualify the stages of maturation of such a virtual society, and how might we reasonably predict what the future could hold? I’m a big fan of the Kardashev scale of civilizations, devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. The Kardashev scale tries to dramatically simplify the process of evaluating the advancement of a society by looking at its ability to harness energy. Kardashev civilizations come in three types, beginning with present-day society and culminating with a theoretical civilization that’s able to harness the entire energy output of all the stars in a galaxy.

Inspired by Kardashev, I’d like to propose a different scale, one intended to simplify how we might understand the progression of a civilization’s ability to create other realities that can improve people’s lives. While we can’t know specifically how a civilization might implement its version of a metaverse, we can predict the big milestones of its development trajectory. Let’s define the levels of the scale as follows:

A Level 1 virtual society is what we’ve experienced until now: a civilization in which other realities are explored purely in words and ideas. Rich universes of religion, sport, and culture offer avenues for enhancing the meaning of individual lives while creating entirely new dimensions of the economy and improving social cohesion. In these societies, ordinary people can add to the narratives of these other worlds, but meaningful participation is mostly restricted to the elites. While you can’t have a viable religion without thousands of acolytes, ultimately it’s up to the priests to conduct the prayer services.

The dawn of mass media allowed us to visualize these other worlds and tell immersive stories about them. Interactive forms of entertainment can make it feel like these other worlds actually exist and actually matter, but the consequences of anything that happens on the silver screen or in World of Warcraft are unlikely to directly influence your life. This society can “dream” of other worlds very effectively, but those worlds remain escapes because there is no substantive network of meaning linking those worlds and our own. World of Warcraft is fun, but it isn’t part of society in any meaningful sense.

A Level 2 virtual society is where we can see ourselves going over the next few decades of development. Technical advancement toward the metaverse means that massive virtual worlds can exist not only as self-contained diversions, but as part of an interoperable economy of digital assets, identities, and experiences that can directly impact your real life. This shift will create profound changes in the structure of society. Everyday individuals will have more opportunities than ever to add to the stories of these other realms, make or lose real fortunes, and conduct important relationships—all within other worlds mediated by technology. In a Level 2 society, the real

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