CHAPTER 2
DIGITAL PRIMITIVES AND EMERGENCE - A CASE FOR DIGITAL SELECTION

As I write this, we are at the initial phase of Metaverse adoption, in the stage that I describe as a digital primitives era. The digital primitives are the initial use cases for a new technology or medium and are closely linked to existing use cases that appear in other pre-existing forms.

A good example is the websites created in the 1990s, which were little more than glorified brochures. They were very limited in terms of the value they provided, especially in comparison to the use cases for the Internet at present. Using the Internet, today, you can buy goods, plan a holiday, find love, hail a cab, order food and even find out what song is playing in the background. All of these activities were technically possible in the early days of the Internet, but nobody realised them, because some of the technical requirements were not yet matched by the technology of the time, or simply because nobody had realised these were valuable use cases for this technology.

As I explained in the previous chapter, use cases in any new medium also tend to imitate the look and feel of use cases available on previously existing mediums or technologies - a phenomenon also known as skeuomorphism. Do you remember when the iPhone was first released, and its Notepad app looked exactly like a notepad? That's a perfect example of skeuomorphic design, because they based their design for this new medium entirely on an old medium. While this isn't necessarily bad practice, and in many cases can be a natural way to introduce users to a new medium, it may not necessarily be the best way to take full advantage of that new medium.

When it comes to the Metaverse, we are currently in the midst of this digital primitives era. We're scratching the surface of what's possible, because we're still trying to work out what the Metaverse could be and what we can do with the technology that's behind it. At the moment, we can see some rather innovative use cases for blockchain, virtual worlds and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but what use cases will we discover in the future? How will these evolve as we develop interconnectivity between these worlds, portability of these worlds and as digital content starts to bleed into the real world? What kind of use cases will be possible then?

During this digital primitives era, various use cases will bubble up, and, through a process of natural selection directly related to the business generated, the truly transformational use cases that will also be the most successful business-wise will emerge. This is not only true of the technology itself, but also of businesses that are popping up to use that technology. Innumerable start-ups are created during every wave of technology. We saw it happen with the Internet, mobile technology and, even as I write this, it's happening again with the Metaverse. Every time, only a few of these start-ups go on to become truly successful businesses. Why? Because there are certain use cases that are more refined than others. This leads to what's known as emergence, as I explained in the first chapter.

Natural selection in a digital era

Emergence is when one or multiple use cases become considerably more successful than the other use cases that are around at the same time. This leads to a form of natural selection within the digital world. Emergent use cases for mobile devices include social media, the gig economy for taxi rides and streaming services for music and movies.

We don't know what the emergent use cases will be for the Metaverse yet. We are very much still at the digital primitives stage when it comes to the Metaverse, and we haven't really begun to explore its full potential. Take NFTs as an example. An NFT is a digital certificate of ownership. It's a smart contract that certifies that a user owns specific rights, a specific item or specific intellectual property (IP). Therefore, attaching a jpeg or piece of art to an NFT sounds to me very much like the basic websites we saw being developed in the 1990s. NFTs, for jpeg art, are a digital primitive. They are the first use case of this new technology, but, as we will discover, this has far more potential.

Generally, it takes between 5 and 10 years to understand the potential of new technology, the right user experience and the right business model. This is the point of emergence I talked about in the opening chapter of this book - technology, user experience and business need to converge in order to create a transformation use case. This is the real recipe for success.

To come back to NFTs, at the time of this writing, it's still cumbersome to create an NFT wallet, and the technology still feels very clunky. There is friction around the access to the technology required. The business model is, at best, still rather cloudy and fluffy. There are a lot of questions that remain - what value does purchasing an image attached to an NFT really have?

For example, the Bored Apes Yacht Club (an NFT collectable series living on the Ethereum blockchain) released NFTs in 2021. If you purchased one, you gained access to certain events, and you became part of an exclusive club of people who could put their Ape as their profile picture on Twitter. But what did that really achieve? It allowed you to show off that you purchased a Bored Ape when they sold them, but this really makes the NFT little more than a status symbol. It's no different from buying and wearing a Rolex. We are still waiting for the transformational use case to emerge, although we'll explore some potentially ground breaking use cases for NFTs as we move through this book (there is much more to them than Twitter profile pictures, I assure you!).

Emergence is a process that happens naturally as we experiment with new technology and new mediums. In the early 2000s, for instance, there was an invasion of reality TV shows, starting with the likes of Big Brother and then moving on to Love Island and The X-Factor. In the 2020s, we are seeing these programmes dying out and new waves of shows emerging instead, such as the multitude of documentaries on streaming services covering everything from true crime to the natural world - move over Simon Cowell, the conversations are about Joe Exotic now!

It is a form of natural selection, which is based in part on trends, as well as on the people who are using a specific medium, how people's values align to a specific medium and how society views that medium - but it is also directly linked to measurable business results.

When we're talking about a specific medium, the target demographic is also very important. For example, the target demographic for linear TV is people aged 55-60 plus. The majority of younger adults watch shows on streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime or YouTube. Teenagers are more focused on watching content via social media such as Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Emerging use cases are therefore influenced by the success they find with specific demographics within society.

The Metaverse will be a new infrastructure, and this will lead to the emergence of new use cases that spawn directly from that infrastructure and the platforms that operate within it. You could say that the way in which it will evolve is much like natural, biological genetic mutation and adaptation. Just as we see, in humans, greater diversity in populations where there is a bigger and more diverse gene pool, so too, with technology, we will see more varied use cases evolve when we are working with a broader pool of technological innovations. Sooner or later, some of the use cases that emerge will out-compete others and become more successful.

Eventually, we will see those successful ideas intertwining. We've already seen this in certain areas of mobile tech, for example, with Uber and now Uber Eats developing. Where in the digital primitive stage we were defining use cases based on pre-existing mediums, once we reach the emergence stage, we start associating new use cases with those that have already been proven to be successful. When you can anchor an idea to another one that is already emerging, your idea has a greater chance of succeeding.

From the familiar to the impossible

There are two main reasons why we often start with skeuomorphic design in the world of technology. The first is because this leads to the creation of something familiar to users, which makes it easier to use and understand in that technology's early iterations. Let's look again at the notepad apps on our mobile phones. The first notepad apps looked like notepads and, as a user, I understood what I could do with it (make notes). When I made text notes, they even appeared in a font resembling handwriting. From a usability perspective, this made it familiar and therefore less off-putting to new users. However, did this type of notepad app deliver the best user experience? That's unlikely.

Another great example is the evolution of mobile website design. The first mobile websites were very similar to desktop sites. Then developers realised that the user experience for mobiles needed to be optimised for touch devices - this is when 'burger' menus started appearing on the top left or top right of websites, making it easier to navigate using your fingers and thumbs. Other small features, like the back button, got added...