The contents of this guest blog were first published as separate records on Yngvar Ugland their LinkedIn profile, about metaverse and about web3. We reproduce the posts as a guest blog courtesy of Yngvar Ugland.

What is the Metaverse?

I intentionally write it with a capital M to emphasize that it makes no sense to talk about a metaverse and in any case not about the metaverses.
The Metaverse, to me, is the Meta-Universe. Just as a metaroman is a novel about a novel and metadata is data about data, one can think of the Metaverse as a universe about our physical universe, a meta-layer that sort of encircles it without separating the complete layer (as opposed to an independent parallel universe).

From 2D to 3D

For decades, the Internet has been represented on two-dimensional screens.
The metaverse is either

• the internet that one moves in (with VR glasses, you know these diving mask-like things that have made us seasick in recent years) or
• the internet coming out of the screen (through AR glasses, think: the creepy glasses that everyone in Silicon Valley walked around wearing in 2014 until someone realized consent was a thing, but which become the living rooms; or in the form of holograms)

In all cases, it will be in 3D, which, after all, suits us humans naturally well. At least when it comes out of the screen, it remains to be seen how well we can withstand VR in the long run. Identity, assets, currency, etc must work everywhere in the Metaverse and it is this necessary interoperability that means that the Metaverse does not yet exist, but is in a shaping discipline.

If this were hard to imagine, perhaps the easiest way to imagine the Metaverse is the way Disney presented the internet in Rive-Rolf crashes the internet.

What is web3

What are web1, web2, and web3?

• web1: READ
• web2: READ WRITE
• web3: READ WRITE OWN

In web1, content production was left to a few web editors. In web2 came social media and mobile internet and we all became content producers on the platforms we used. The platforms made sure to take care of identity and information about friends and behavior. In web3 we own our own identity and our own behavioral data ourselves. We decide what to use them for and they work across all user sites (=platforms in web2).

Identity in web2 and web3

Web2 is equivalent to having to create a separate identity with Joker to buy beer there, and another identity with Vinmonopolet to buy wine there. Think: create account with Facebook to log in to Facebook and another with Google. If you are allowed to use the same identity with Menu and Kiwi as with Joker, this is equivalent to “log in with Facebook” on websites other than Facebook. In web3, one would instead have one and the same identity that works at all alcohol outlets. But you don't have to show all the information on your driver's license or passport, as you do today; you only need to prove that you are old enough ☑️

(A web3 citizen) moves as himself (identity) across the entire internet and he behaves the same and carries Vanilla everywhere he goes (behavioral, profile, and social data), unlike the Joker example above. ↔️

We need to fix web2

To be successful with the Metaverse, we also need to fix some stuff that hasn't gone so well in web2:

• Photo sharing services make us feel uglier.
• Search engines are making us dumber
• And who would have thought that with only 140-ish characters at a time one can make an excellent platform for bullying and harassment
• And not least, social media has become a danger to democracy

We need to fix the problems with web2 in web3, because I'm concerned about web2 internet's health condition
Clearly concerned...

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