I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?
Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.
It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.
We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.
Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators.
I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part.
Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?
More importantly, do we actually want to try and cement a system of perpetual ownership or revenue in an abundant digital world? Doesn't this go directly against our goal of encouraging creators to keep creating?
I think that one of the downside of current content models based on IP and access rights are that many companies (from Disney to Nintendo) have discovered that they can augment their revenue streams basically in perpetuity by locking down decades-old pieces of content, preventing other people from building on that content or sharing it, and then endlessly reselling and recycling it. Because they have the ability to restrict even normal people from building on their work in even non-commercial settings, they have no real competition or incentive to keep iterating on their work or to be responsible stewards of their IP. This is not the outcome that we wanted from IP law, and I feel very hesitant to try and cement it into a technology.
> from transfer of ownership
I think an important concept to get about the Internet is that content ownership isn't scarce. We have moved into a world where I can give something to you without losing it myself. There is no "transfer" of ownership at all, in the digital world there is duplication of ownership. This is a giant shift from how the real world usually works; and with our laws/businesses, we have made a deliberate choice online to ignore that paradigm shift and instead try our absolute hardest to make sure that "ownership" continues to be an exclusive right that can be transferred.
It's understandable why we've gone down this route, but it is nevertheless a complete denial of what an interconnected digital medium is and what it's capable of. I hope that as we move forward and continue to iterate on the Internet that we gradually get closer to embracing the Internet's strengths rather than hobbling them.
Ignoring all of the other criticisms of NFTs for a second, the underlying goal of NFTs as a technology is to undo the existence of digital files. It's to undo the invention of copyable data and to step backwards out of the Internet back into an older world where when you handed someone a CD you no longer had the CD. I think that even if all of the other problems with NFTs were fixed, that's still just not a goal that's worth pursuing.
I don't think it'd be controversial to say that the world would've been poorer for it - and George Lucas too. If the goal is financial success for artists, mass distribution always beats selective exclusion, and if the goal is broad cultural impact the case for mass distribution is even clearer.
Humans want to enforce certain forms of scarcity. Trying to be utopian about it just ends up creating unintended externalities.
That's not necessarily true. In fact I don't think that holds at all. They've bought smartphones and laptops for hundreds and thousands of dollars and pay many tens of dollars every month to access the Internet. People are already paying quite a bit to access content on the Internet.
The problem with paying for most types of content is the content is not worth the amount of money it's practical to charge for it. Charging money on the Internet is expensive and has lower bounds below which no one will even conduct a transaction. That lower bound is about a dollar and so many transaction fees come out of it a seller is not going to end up with a whole dollar and the buyer will end up paying more than a dollar.
A blog post, gif, or YouTube video is not worth a dollar. For most people they're not even worth a whole penny. They're certainly not worth an up front payment sight unseen.
In the early days of the Internet charging for content was even less practical and more expensive than today.
Advertising on the Internet, like advertising in other media, is a way to "charge" users some fractional penny to access some content. In aggregate the content creator can make money based traffic. While AdTech has reached asinine levels of intrusiveness the concept of advertising isn't necessarily bad. It also doesn't exist just because users are cheapskates.
You're correct to criticize advertising, but I also want to push back a little bit on the "utopia" of paywalls as a funding method for the web.
There's a difference between paying for content creation and paying for content itself. Content creators and their time are actually scarce resources, even online. Content itself is not a scarce resource; once something is created it becomes abundant. So both IP laws/paywalls and advertising are attempts to monetize and artificially restrict/control some other abundant and/or uncommoditized resource instead of engaging with the actual scarce resource/activity that we care about incentivizing.
As such, both advertising and IP-enforced pay-for-access models have negative externalities that arise from them being indirect monetization models. With advertising, we deal with negative externalities such as privacy violations and clickbait. With pay-for-access models, we get externalities like DRM, SaaS, endless content recycling, and a general lockdown of culture itself.
With both payment schemes, we are ignoring the actually scarce resource that is actually in real demand by the market: creators and time. But instead of trying to come up with schemes to monetize that and instead of trying to imagine what a market based on creative/useful output would look like, we've instead become obsessed with making other resources artificially scarce or artificially commoditized. We fight against technology and human nature itself instead of thinking about how we can fund the real scarce resources that still remain.
This could be a longer conversation; there are multiple theories about how to pay for creation, and a lot of debate about what models are sustainable there. Too long of a conversation to get into right here. But the really short version of this conversation is that you are very correct to look at advertising as an imprecise, indirect way of measuring value, and you are correct to point out it has a lot of negative externalities. But you're making an assumption that pay-for-access models haven't had their own negative externalities, and I don't think that assumption holds up. I think we've seen a lot of suppression of innovation and general culture because of our current funding model for IP. Of course a theoretical Internet where people paid for content access would have turned out different; but would it have been better? I don't think that's a safe assumption at all.
At its worst the current pay-for-access model sometimes decreases the creation/availability of content because it incentivizes recycling and restriction of existing content, and restricts other creators from building on top of and preserving existing content -- essentially denying a universal human instinct that has been around for almost as long as humans have existed.
There isn't an easy answer about how we should remake a content economy in a world without digital scarcity (ask Open Source devs how hard this is), but recreating digital scarcity and pretending that we're still in the old system probably isn't the right way to move forward. We should try to consider how people can more directly pay for the resources that are actually scarce: not content itself or the bits on your computer, but instead content creation and maintenance and the people who are able to make the things we care about.
The more directly we monetize resources that are actually scarce and the less that we rely on indirect models of monetization, the fewer surprising/negative externalities we'll see in the long run.
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.
Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory?
One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.
Because as Second Life demonstrated we don't seem to have many good ideas for incentivising creation otherwise.
Any system implement artificial scarcity would be a DRM system. In order for you to able to "wear" virtual Nikes (because you paid for them) and me not be able to "wear" them (because I didn't) the metaverse could not be open and federated.
In order for me to see your virtual Nikes I'd have to retrieve the mesh and texture files for them. My system would have to be locked down such that I couldn't pull those files out of my local cache.
From your side of the issue, would you (the hypothetical royal you) pay for virtual Nikes if I could tell my client device to ignore remote resources? What good are your virtual Nikes if people can choose not to see them?
Obviously replace Nike with any IP holder even down to the smallest of small time creators. A metaverse with artificial scarcity would be the walliest of walled gardens with a giant moat on the outside. The only way to make that work is to have a completely locked down and closed system.
Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/
Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.
I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse".
I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse.
It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, by recording transfers of avatars and assets between the "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think)