This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse - Issue #8

A weekly roundup of what’s happening in the digital land(scape). Metaverse ethics, governance and interesting trends from crypto, gaming, AI and regulation.

What's going on:

Niantic has begun rolling out Campfire, a social app that will let users chat with their friends, join groups of like-minded mobile wanders, and arrange major events like Pokemon Go's raids..

Here's another contender for Web3 is going just great, the satirical website that documents each new disaster related to the ongoing blockchain-based reinvention of the internet. In its own words

As cybersecurity threats and cybercrimes increase in the physical world, criminals look to expand their crimes into the metaverse.

Tencent, has announced the creation of its own metaverse-driven division, the extended reality unit, to amalgamate its metavers efforts.

Facebook parent faces backlash from developers, accusations of "hypocrisy" over VR store terms.

The WTF award of the week goes to...

More South Africans are exploring the metaverse. This also includes in-game environments with virtual worlds.

I might be as confused as Travolta...

Please don't ask how the phone is actually related to the metaverse. Just go with it.

"The "Vive Wallet" lets you view all those NFT pictures you definitely don't regret buying." Standing ovation to this reporting!

Gaming news:

Law firm Hausfield is announcing a proposed $90 million settlement against Google for anticompetitive practices with its app store.https://www.pcgamer.com/owner-of-itchio-accuses-newly-launched-alternative-w3itchio-of-theft/

Twitch wants to make it easier for creators to pull guests into their livestreams, talk show-style — and everybody gets to be a creator. The company is announcing Guest Star, a new feature that will tie into existing streaming software, allowing stream hosts to bring up to five guests into a stream and swap them […]

Supermassive Games' The Quarry will drive you mad with choices as you try to make the right decisions to save a group of teenagers.

Interactive horror bridging movies and games is a very interesting space to observe how frontiers between media are blurring, and could be a blueprint for some experiences in the metaverse.

I Am Not A Robot: AI news

Google's latest image AI Parti generates images from particularly comprehensive descriptions. This allows the results to be controlled even more precisely.

NFTLand:

Bored Apes and the metaverse feel silly. But there’s a reason the promise of crypto and Web3 and NFTs work — because so much else feels broken.

Ruja Ignatova, the woman also known as ‘Cryptoqueen,’ is being added to the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted fugitives for allegedly swindling millions of investors to send her at least $4 billion in the OneCoin cryptocurrency company she founded.

The testing of NFTs on Facebook follows a series of pilot integrations on Instagram in May.

Meme corner:

Continuing with the GTA vibe: "ah shit, here we go again"...

Ending nugget:

"Category is: Night of 1000 MonaLisa's"

Could OpenAI's DALL-E give a glimpse of what a "metaverse of abundance", led by user's creativity, could be?

Lately, as we share in Discord and Twitter with other DALL-E users our creations,  I started to think about this community as the foundation of  a new kind of creative social network, one that transcends the pettiness where scarcity leads to. The server has become a collaborative space, with suggestions for improvement and some emergent social codes on sharing our findings.

Is an environment of abundance, where techniques, shortcuts and prompts are shared. Is a collective movement of awe, knowing that each "semantic brushstroke" will lead to potentially infinite results, each one different. Some are puzzling, some bizarre, and others extraordinary. Is an iterative dance with the machine, an exploration of the possibilities of digital abundance, and a report back to a community not driven by likes or metrics of pseudo-fame.

I know this moment in time might not last, that is a contained experiment limited to those of us fortunate to have access to it. OpenAI can (and possibly in the near future, will) restrict access or start charging users.

But as the embracement of DALL·E mini demonstrates, the movement has already started. Cat is out of the box. The appetite of users will lead to the emergence of other services and alternatives.

Access, a culture of sharing and unleashed creativity would be a nice version of the Metaverse to live in.

The gates will eventually open to other users, and the emergent governance of this polite community can disintegrate under the crushing weight of big numbers. But the blueprint to build on is here, and might be worth exploring for a future metaverse based on abundance, just the opposite of what is being sold off by the corporate visions of it. One where words are your only constraints to build whatever you want, as the opposite of one where you will only be as free as you can afford to pay...

As a copyright scholar, I found fascinating how creativity manifests in ways that defy the traditional rationales of IP law. "If you don't limit and control the uses of given work, granting the exclusive exploitation of its economic benefits,  authors will not continue to create". Wrong. Those are the logics of scarcity, that don't adapt well to some of the dynamics and uses of an online society where being replicated is a form of success, as long as you can trace back attribution. DALL-E does this well, with a "public gallery" to share works, allowing it to be linked with the creator of the image. And here lies some of the most interestings points on how technology can provide ways to remix creativity while preserving authorship. Is it far fetched to think that copyright can be irrelevant in some version of the future?

I have more questions and intuitions, than answers.

Meanwhile, I continue to research the fascinating intersections of AI and creativity where the best of both worlds intertwine: human and machine, past art and present, masters and amateurs coexisting; one that reinvents #MonaLisaInTheStyleofDalle with surprising results.

All, while doing a mental toast and a secret prayer to the ghosts in the machine, for a bountiful future of creative abundance. Cheers"

Micaela Mantegna, July 2022, pondering on the future of creativity, and the opposite tension of artificial scarcity, while sipping coffee on a bench of Winthrop Square, MA...