Into the Metaverse: Ours or Theirs?
Facebook’s recent announcement to change its name to Meta has brought the term “Metaverse” into the forefront of news. Metaverse was initially coined in 1992 in the sci-fi novel “Snow Crash” by Neil Stephenson. It depicts a dystopian future where people live in reality and the virtual world as an avatar. A word of caution: The whole point of the book is to highlight how susceptible the virtual world is to corruption. More recently we see similar battles taking place in the Matrix films and Ready Player One. This is why the decentralized web will be critical to privacy — a metaverse where you own the outcome and all your data that comes with it.
Facebook’s transition to Meta could be the beginning of a battle between the closed and open metaverse. Once centralized and closed, the other decentralized open. We’ll follow up on the differences between the two in the next post, but it’s clear that the potential of Web3, the crypto web, and its many use cases is powerful. We are at a critical moment in Internet history that aims to make it decentralized, verifiable, and more secure. Foundations are being built that will impact our future abilities to create and control our personal data — foundations that are principle to our future in the virtual world. That’s why I am thrilled to have recently joined the Cortex App team.
Cortex will supply the infrastructure to control all your assets, notes, projects, blogs, and wallets in one location. Better yet, it will allow each user to own a low-cost human-readable domain name for life. This domain name acts as your central location for all those assets, crypto, and NFT’s. Completely private, the user decides who can view what. You get to own the relationships that are created. A “like” or comment becomes something that belongs to you.
With Web2, we live in a world controlled by corporations. Your data is saved and used to market to you. Privacy is non-existent. Most of us have spent years interacting on social media and typing questions into search engines. All to guide us to make purchases. What did it cost us? Nothing. If it was free, then we must be the product. At Cortex, we believe users should get to decide how these algorithms work for them.
Most of us use some form of note-taking application or software for daily use backed by companies that can decide to use your data whenever they choose. With Cortex, we aim to give the power back to the people. We are starting with tools that will allow for sharing and collaborating on Web3. The initial version will be note-taking style channels that are simple to use with Markup that anyone can learn. This will enable you to own all the content you create and collaborate with whom you choose.
With crypto built into the core, your domain is your wallet. A place to hold all your crypto and NFTs. Cortex also acts as a wiki for endless collaboration opportunities. Each domain name you own becomes a tradable asset. This is just the foundation — the strength needed for a canvas of possibilities. The use cases are endless. What will we create in our Metaverse?
Written by Krystal Van Pelt.
