Parallel Pseudonymity in the Metaverse

Only having one physical identity, that I didn’t even choose, is a bug of physical reality. As we enter into the metaverse, we can create multiple, pseudonymous identities and live new, parallel lives (“parallel identities” is an idea first explored by Sherry Turkle in the early 90s - more on that later). My pseudonymous metaverse identity is additive to my physical identity, not zero-sum. Why should I only have one identity? One career? One life?

Why would I want to create a new, parallel life in the metaverse (besides the ability to live multiple parallel lives)? It allows me to choose my identity. It’s what Santiago Santos calls “Identity 2.0”; identity by choice, unique and digitally scarce, and a representation of values and beliefs (rather than physical identity as a genetic lottery with emphasis on physical traits that’s prone to bias and prejudice).

PFPs have allowed us to easily bootstrap a new pseudonymous identity in the metaverse. It’s easy to see and amplify something in the PFP that either reminds you of yourself or represents something you want to be. And given that all of them are randomly generated traits, as a human I feel better about “adopting” the avatar as a representation of “myself”. (Indeed Pak goes even further, describing his poets as being “birthed”.) Identity in the metaverse is necessarily disembodied. Your parallel, pseudonymous identity therefore is not bound to any physical world limitations in appearance (even the human form could be seen as skeuomorphic in this infinitely creative world? Thanks drain for the inspiration).

Parallel pseudonymous online lives is not new; Sherry Turkle wrote about this phenomenon way back in 1984 in ‘The Second Self’ and again in 1995 in ‘Life on Screen’. The latter documents extensive research on how certain early internet users created new identities in MUDs. Reading through ‘Life on Screen’ again in 2021, there are remarkable similarities to the burgeoning NFT community (and the metaverse as a whole): MUDs allowed users to “construct new selves through social interaction” and they were spaces to “navigate, converse, and build”. Turkle describes your identity on the computer as the “sum of your distributed presence” where the real world is “just one more window” (and quoting a MUD user the real world “usually not my best window” - well sure because we can control so much more of our online/metaverse identity and experience).

As a final note, it seems like there’ll come a time where we question the implicit assumption that the pseudonym for your identity in the metaverse is in fact the “fictitious” part of your identity.

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Listening to, as writing: Massive Attack - Angel

Creating Rival Digital Cultural Artifacts

NFTs finally allow digital cultural artifacts to be made into rival goods, allowing artist and creatives to capture appropriate and meaningful value from their work. NFTs are the final piece closing the loop for ‘networked cultural production’ (theory here is heavily influenced by Yochai Benkler’s ‘Wealth of Networks’).

People have had the tools (and creativity) to create cultural artifacts in a decentralized way (think of all the artists that uploaded work to the internet like The Weeknd and Justin Beiber). They also had the network (social media) to distribute or “advertise” their work. But they had no appropriate way of capturing value directly from it. There were two ways of making a living: 1) fall back into the “industrial” information economy (sign with centralized IP management, record label, TV / movie studio - see the Radiohead example below) or 2) hack revenue via your individual brand through sponsored content and on platform advertising.

Radiohead famously released their 2007 record In Rainbows on the internet and asked the user to name their price (including $0). Per Thom Yorke: “We [had] a moral justification in what we did in the sense that the majors and the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans... Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash."

We didn’t have is the marketplace for creators of cultural artifacts to capture value and be appropriately rewarded because previously all digital cultural artifacts were non-rival, that is extremely right-click-save-able and downloadable. With NFTs this digital non-rival good has become rival, which allows people to own it and allows the creator to capture appropriate value from the artifact itself not the advertising around the artifact.

Rival digital cultural artifacts are a big deal. Are we going to spend more or less time interacting with them in the future? Are we going to spend more or less time online in the future?

The Big Picture

There is a decades long shift towards decentralized cultural production, catalyzed by the decades long decrease in the cost of computation and communication. What does this mean: because everyone is connected, with open source creative tools, SaaS tools, the iPhone, the internet, Twitter, Discord - more people can create, share, find, trade, and own culture (memes). This is very different from the previous way, where a large centralized organization would choose someone, a small group, a band, and spend a lot of money to create a cultural artifact (a record, a magazine, a movie, a TV show) and spend even more money to generate the “preference” for this cultural artifact from a large, relatively unengaged group of people. Another major difference: the unengaged audience could never economically benefit from any upside.

Internet meme culture is a reaction against this (what Yochia Benkler calls the) industrial information economy. Anyone can create new forms of culture, very cheaply and have a large, relatively engaged community interested. The shift has already been demonstrated - some of the biggest recording artists (Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, and others) are using CryptoPunks as their social avatars, not the other way around. We’re shifting from centralized demand preference to decentralized, networked preference. It’s no surprise that in this “networked information environment”, the preference from the decentralized network is the cultural artifact born of this community, the NFT. NFT memes just take this even one step further.

“The networked information environment offers a more attractive cultural production system in 2 ways: 1) it makes culture more transparent and 2) it makes culture more malleable” The Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler

For something written in 2006, this holds up incredibly well. Transparent - immutable, on chain, created by community on Twitter, Discord etc. Malleable - memes, creative commons CC0.

What does this mean: toadz are the new Disney. This is the way.

Read: The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.