Revolution After Revolution

There is a modern tradition where when new technologies (or primitives) emerge they are accompanied by a chorus of people who are prepared to assert in good faith or otherwise that the game has changed.

The game in this context is not the confidence game referred to in my last post, instead it will refer to one or more aspects of software production that will be disrupted. What will or won't be disrupted depends more specifically on what the capabilities of the technology at hand.

For instance, in the early 2020s we were invited to imagine a new way to experience digital spaces that in many ways more closely resembles how we experience the real world than anything we had seen in the decades that came before. This was referred to as web3 and the Metaverse. Historically, digital assets have been confined to isolated private ecosystems owned by large technology companies. This is most apparent in digital games but it is prevalent across all kinds of digital products. When there are bridges between these ecosystems they are specifically engineered by representative parties, a project-level and business-level version of the handshake agreement. You can sign-in to a website with because both Google and the website allow that to happen.

Proponents of the Metaverse asked us to imagine a future where we can take anything we have purchased to any digital ecosystem, which would be facilitated by a newly popular technology (a source of truth) that did not have to be exclusively and carefully managed by a single caretaker in digital space. For most people who consume digital goods, this problem of restricted ownership will be familiar in one way or another. If you purchase the film La La Land via the Apple TV ecosystem, you are unable to watch it via the YouTube ecosystem without also making a purchase there too. In the imagined theoretical future of the Metaverse, we would be able to take our media catalog with us wherever in digital space we choose to spend our time.

There's a gap between the anticipated outcomes of this imagined digital product and how digital media ecosystems perpetuate themselves today. The status quo is not only realised through technology, but also through the project, which in this context exists to serve a commercial interest. To maintain our existing array of digital ecosystems and also facilitate the honouring of purchase agreements made anywhere there would have to be a social re-organisation that is far from ensured.

To predict the future with any level of confidence we need to understand the present.