#001

Gm / good afternoon / good evening. This is Cybermonk #001. If you're forgetting how you've arrived here, as a quick reminder, Cybermonk is my personal newsletter about interesting storylines in the world of emerging technology (me = Ryan Duffy).

CM #001 concerns the reigning business + tech buzzword of our times. I’ve bleeped out every single instance of the word, except for its mention in the title. Riding buzzwordy clout for SEO? Couldn’t be Cybermonk.

Next Sunday, #002 will arrive in your inboxes with part deux of the three-part series. Following #003 — the final installment — we will move on from the m-word topic once and for all. Thanks for tuning in.

Without further ado....

The rhetorical floodgates have flung open and the virtual worldbuilders are off to the races. The m-word is coming, we’ve been told ad nauseum.

From Delaware C-Corps to DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), plenty of organizations can credibly lay claim to some aspect of m-word worldbuilding. But beware of the narrative bandwagoners; They are legion and they are loud.

The m-word broke the sound barrier over the summer, bouncing between corporate strategy docs, earnings calls, technical whitepapers, Jim Cramer soliloquies, Discord servers, Twitter feeds, and NFT project roadmaps. If you squint hard enough, you can already see a cottage industry of m-word consultants spontaneously assembling on LinkedIn. Per this professional expert's technical analysis, the m-word has experienced a hype correction. It’s due to hit buzzword bottom soon:

With m-word hype eventually poised to recover to a productive equilibrium, a word of entrepreneurial advice from my former boss:

I know it when I see it

If you haven't become acquainted with the m-word, congrats for not being Very Online. Seriously. For the uninitiated, the portmanteau combines “meta” (beyond) and “verse” (universe). Neal Stephenson, who coined the term in Snow Crash, described it as a “computer-generated universe.” More context from contemporary architects of m-word precursors:

• “A phenomenon that transcends gaming...a real-time, computer-powered 3D entertainment and social medium in which real people would go into a 3D simulation together and have experiences of all sorts.”—Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO/founder

• “A digital place where people seamlessly get together and interact in millions of 3D virtual experiences.”—David Baszucki, Roblox CEO/founder

No quick explanation does the full definition justice. Below is a handy list of qualities to be expected in a true m-word, from the m-word prophet Matthew Ball himself:

• An interlinked network of worlds and simulations, spanning digital and IRL worlds

• Always-on, persistent (can’t be paused), and real-time (not played back).

• Objects, positional and orientation data, characters, and environmental information are synchronous and shared. The modern web, by contrast, is mostly experienced asynchronously and discretely.

• Immersive (3D content via augmented or virtual reality). Modern media, by contrast, is mostly experienced through glass rectangles.

• Cross-platform and interoperable (ie, using non-proprietary currencies, owning your skins/goods/assets, and taking them from one place to another)

• Massively ‘multiplayer’: All users can participate in the same instance. If I was writing an S-1 prospectus for the m-word, I’d list this as the biggest risk factor. The “concurrency infrastructure” required for ubiquitous co-location in a shared version, rather than being divided into sharded servers, is far, far beyond anything we can do today.

• Not just a game or third place. The m-word has its own fully functioning economy, where users can make a living, invest, buy goods/services, execute short squeezes against AI-controlled hedge funds, etc.

Recently, Ball updated his seminal m-word opus with a pithy definition:

The coming free-for-all

Though it’s still a bit definitionally muddled, what constitutes the m-word is getting directionally clearer. But who should build it and how it should operate are still open questions.

Different schools of thought exist. Two currently rule the take sphere.

In one camp, we have who we’ll call Web 3.0 punks. This term is used endearingly FWIW. Paramount priorities in the punkverse include irrevocable property rights, self-sovereignty, and a fully interoperable, decentralized network of networks. No single point of failure or corporate kill-switch should exist.

If this vision sounds familiar...that’s because it’s already proliferating widely. NFT marketplaces, decentralized game makers, dapp devs, ethereum builders, and the bitcoin OGs are animated by these principles. Axie Infinity and Decentraland are a virtual game and world, respectively, imbued with the punkverse principles. And they already have viable, functioning economies.

Where the punks are going, there won’t be centralized intermediaries, gate-keepers, or rent-seeking ‘megacorps’ that sit atop critical m-word infrastructure. Megacorp is the term that many punks and allies have taken to calling the internet giants. As the punks see it, these companies lord over walled gardens, proprietary services, and otherwise closed ecosystems that are anathema to Web 3.0. They’re innovative leaders, sure, but anticompetitive at best and monopolists at worst.

Concerning the internet giants: They’re victors of Web 1.0 and 2.0 and the world’s most successful, well-run firms to boot. The GAFAM companies are $1+ trillion market cap megacorps (thus, they’ll henceforth be referred to as the 1T club). Having made their names in consumer electronics/mobile, search, e-commerce, and social, the 1T club brought genuine value and innovation to billions.

Now, they find themselves on the receiving end of the revolutionary disruptor narratives they once propagated.

The 1T club hasn’t felt the need to dignify the punk’s slights with a direct response. If and when the 1T discusses tenets of Web 3.0, such as interoperability or data portability, true believers aren’t taking it as anything beyond lip service.

What can’t be doubted is that the m-word has high C-Suite mindshare in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redmond, Seattle, LA, Santa Clara, etc. In the 1T Club, there’s an obvious mandate to play to win in whatever comes next.

In search of ever-more growth, the 1T club’s members are seeking to expand their spheres of influence. And since their fiefdoms are increasingly overlapping, frequently pitting these companies head-to-head against each other, they have no love lost for one other.

But they do have common ground. This is the 1T club, after all, where user bases are counted with three commas and R&D budgets tower above (almost) anyone else’s...and nation-states’ GDP. The 1T club is off to a running start with crucial m-word building blocks: cloud computing, AR and VR hardware, wearables, smart home devices, edge/ambient computing, voice assistants, AI/ML, data, etc.

It's unclear how all the various building blocks cohesively fit together to form the successor to today's internet. It's also not a sure bet they will fit together. But there's a strategic imperative, or maybe even a fiduciary duty, for the 1Ts to form a unified framework for how all the expensive R&D could somehow fit together.

It's all narratives?

Narratives are powerful but they don't tell the full story here. While “Punk good, megacorp bad” is a good rallying cry for the former and an even better storytelling device for sci-fi authors, the Manichean framing does no favors to a more textured reality. This probably isn’t a story with a binary ending, but rather one with a vast spectrum of possible outcomes. Some observations to that effect:

1. A true, full-feature m-word is a longggg ways away (see: concurrency infrastructure). We don’t know what tech philosophies, products, and power structures will look like a decade or two from now.

2. The m-word is a hell of an expensive undertaking. Presumably, build-out costs will be shouldered by megacorps. Big Tech, but also big telco, big submarine cable layer, big ISP, big satellite constellation provider, big chipmaker, so on and so forth...

3. Early adopters may have stronger feelings on these quite real philosophical differences. But! The impasse won’t necessarily be a dealbreaker for the m-word’s “next billion” users, ie, everyone else in the adoption curve.

4. 1B users assumes the m-word will even exist, or that people will want it. These are assumptions, not predestined outcomes.  

5. Each camp is not a unified front with a perfectly homogeneous set of interests. There are corporate technologists genuinely driven by pushing the boundaries in, say, holographic rendering or wave optic displays, not a north star of maximizing shareholder returns. On the flipside, there are NFT traders out there who aren’t decentralization maximalists, per se, but high priests of ‘number go up.’

6. Neither group will develop the m-word alone or determine its fate by themselves. A vast array of key players don’t fall neatly into the dueling set of camps. There is a big ole messy middle.

To be continued....

That's it for now. Cybermonk does not intend on bombarding readers with a 5k-word thought piece this lovely Sunday, nor churn out half of you on send #001. Next week, we'll talk about the messy middle, and then, where all of this could be headed.

The voice, vibe, and other elements shaping Cybermonk's creation = A work in progress. Expect iterations and deviations week-to-week, especially in the early days. Feedback, intellectual sparring, and any other reactions or recommendations are welcome. Just reply to this email and let me know what you're thinking.

A special note of thanks to Matthew B. and Donnie D., who both read an earlier version of this essay and provided substantive, thoughtful feedback.