Building Communities in The Metaverse with Athena Demos - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP31

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Reimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society. This podcast is part of my new book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book, I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse. The investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview I interviewed Athena Demos. Athena co founded Big Rock Creative, a successful XR content creation company that won the Producers Guild Award for Innovation, the Aurea Award for Creativity, the Noprocentium Audience Choice Award for Best VR Experience of 2020, and most recently the Hermes Platinum Award for Creativity. She uses over 20 years of producing iconic events and in 2020 created the virtual Burning man experience on AltSpaceVR. During the interview we discussed how brands can contribute to the Metaverse, how governments should embrace the Metaverse to develop public virtual spaces for everyone to enjoy. Enjoy the conversation.

Can you tell you a bit about your background and how you are involved with the Metaverse?

Sure. In my opinion, Burning man has always been a type of metaverse and it started 35 years ago and that will lead us into what I think the Metaverse is. So I started going to burning man in 1999 and took on leadership roles and got really involved in community organizing and community building. And in 2020, when the pandemic caused the major short down and Burning man was forced for the sake of public safety, to cancel the event, the community scrambled for a way to gather, create their art and burn, embody the principles. And that's where I stepped in. I had been organizing the community for many years, especially in Los Angeles. I was one of the Los Angeles Ambassadors to Burning man or Burning Man Ambassadors to Los Angeles. And it was just like a natural progression for me. I had worked with someone in our community on a digital version of the playa back in 2015 and it was created, but it was still single user and it was more of an archival tool and so it didn't really have any legs. And here we are, Fast forward to 2020 and we still had the digital version and we were able to put it up on a Platform called altspace, whose community very much had the principles of Burning man baked into their community standards. So it was a natural progression. It fit really well. The communities fit together. We, in a very short period of time, in like two months, we taught numerous artists how to digitize their art, how to put it on the platform, how to create a world out of it, help them create that world, put all those pieces and all those pieces of art together, create a digital twin of the Blackrock city with all the art, and then onboarded over 10,000 people onto the platform so that we could all participate in our burn week together. And that was the beginning of my experience in the digital metaverse. But I likened my experience to have started in 1999, when I started to go to Burning man with the Metaverse. The metaverse, to me, is a general area that we are all connected to physically, digitally, consciously. It's where we plug our consciousness into, and that's the metaverse. At Burning man, you have the Black Rock Desert, and it is just a flat plane where nothing exists. And then we all come and we set up theme camps and art installations and art cars and just everything and anything that a community of people, a group of people would come together and create and then gift and share with someone else their radical self expression, and they share it with other people as their gift. So you go into an experience somewhere on the Black Rock Desert, and it could be jazz at the duck Bar, it could be a circus, it could be bunny march, you know, and in protest against the carrots. And all that happens at Burning man. And all those experiences created by groups and then shared with others are the spokes of the metaverse.

Yeah.

And then we just take that, put that in the digital realm, and how we connect it to the physical. Is the metaverse of Burning Man.

Yeah, yeah. So basically you say that the various experiences are sort of the various metaverse spaces that you can enjoy and can hop from one to another. That's quite interesting.

Yeah, but you have to ride your bike across the playa in order to go from one to another, whereas in the digital metaverse, you can just portal from one to another. And right now you have to do it within one platform, but you can portal from experience to experience. So we had the digital twin of the Black Rock City, and we had 150 portals that took you to theme camps and art installations and art cars. So. But you had to portal between them, just like you would have to bicycle between them. The true metaverse will exist when we can portal between platforms and then portal from the physical into the digital. And that's when we finally integrate AR into our VR experiences. And I believe that's going to be the bridge between the physical and the digital.

Yeah. Where we get this digital overlay that will help us do whatever we need to do. I guess so. I think you sort of explained what the metaverse is, according to you. From my research so far, I've noticed a lot of brands are entering the metaverse as well. What do you think that brands should do to become successful in this space?

I have an interesting outlook when it comes to brands and how brands should present themselves to the communities within the metaverse. Because of my experience with Burning man, we have a principle of decommodification, which says that we need to remove logos and sponsorships and promotions. All the ways in which a brand sends a signal to you and says, you're not good enough, you're missing something, therefore, you need to buy what I have. We don't have that at Burning Man. We have a principle that has taken that away. In order for gifting to be pure, you have to gift without expecting anything in return. You have to decommodify that gift. If you expect something in return, you've commodified it. Whether you're expecting a thank you or you're expecting a gift of equal value, which is barter, you can't expect anything return. You just give for the sake of gifting. So decommodification keeps that pure. So my belief is that if a brand wants to be strong in that space, they need to decommodify themselves. They need to give the gift of the creation of the space, but not plaster it with all the ways in which you're not good enough. And therefore, you need this brand and you should beholden to them and buy their product intrinsically. If their product is good and it's necessary and needed, then I'll buy it, but I don't want it thrown in my face. I think the principles of Burning man belong in the metaverse as a foundational fabric for creative collaboration. I think it's important that we have some form of principles. Matthew Ball, he's written a lot about the Metaverse, and I'm sure you've read his stuff through your research. Talks about the seven core attributes that make the metaverse. And I believe he hit them. Hit them right nail on the head. The seven core attributes are states of being, but the 10 principles are the states of doing. And you achieve being through doing. You can literally use the principles to create These states of being that lead us to the metaverse, where all of humanity can come together. We can uplift society to become humanity by utilizing these principles and these core attributes.

Yeah. So related to that, you might have heard about Nike and Nikeland in Roblox. Is that then the good or the bad according to you?

It depends on how they use Nike Land. If they use it for building community, that's great. But if they're going to tell people that if they don't have $5,000, then they're insignificant because they can't participate, because they can't buy these things, then we're just back to the same bad practice of white man colonization where the rich get to participate and everyone else wishes they were there. And I don't think that's fair. I think the metaverse needs to have decommodified spaces, and everyone that participates in the metaverse needs to create decommodified spaces. You can have your commodified space, you know, but we do this in cities. There are stores, there are concert halls, there are places you go where you're going to spend your money and you're going to buy your things and there's going to be billboards up and it's going to tell you to buy things. But you know what else we have? City parks, state parks, national parks, and all these parks everywhere, all over the road, we're all over the world are decommodified. There's no sponsorships. You can't buy or sell anything. Maybe firewood if they allow fires. But there's like, you can buy eyes to keep your food fresh. It's like public safety sort of thing. But there's Nike's not there. Nike can sponsor the plot of land to take care of it. And there might be a little sign that says care of this land by Nike, but not, you know, buy these shoes and buy this digital thing and NFT this property and. No, there needs to be decommodified spaces where humanity can come together, share ideas, socialize, get together public parks, exercise, walk around, enjoy nature and not be bombarded by this constant message of inadequacy. Yeah, I mean, that's what advertising is. All of advertising says either you need to bandwagon and join this group that are all doing the same thing, you know, you want to be included, or you're missing out on something and in order to be happy, you have to have this thing. Like every advertising technique in some way tells you you should be depressed about life.

Yeah. And that, that can only be amplified in the metaphors, because you can.

Which is why I believe that a principle like decommodification is super important. No, not the entire metaverse. I get it. We gotta make our money. You know, the Internet was all about getting things and receiving things. The Internet is completely transactional. Now we have the metaverse. It's a place where we can be. It will be persistent. You know, we can be a creator, we can be radically inclusive and be radically expressive and, and have all these states of being. And it doesn't have to be purely transactional. And I think what's going on right now is everyone is taking what they know about the Internet and saying, well, this is just like the 3D version of the Internet, so it's transactional. And I'm going to sell digital real estate. Which again, I feel like is this colonization rich colonization of the metaverse and doesn't leave opportunity open for everyone. I believe that the metaverse should not be purely transactional. I think we are missing a incredible opportunity by only looking at the transactional nature of it. I think NFTs are essential to the exchange of digital goods, but that exchange of digital goods can be a gift. It doesn't have to be transactional. There doesn't have to be an expectation of a return. But we do need to figure out a way of transferring a digital good. We give things to people at Burning man all the time. I want to figure out how to do it online.

Yeah, that's a good point. And so from a branch perspective, I understand that, but from an enterprise perspective, how do you think that the enterprise can benefit? You mentioned you created sort of a digital twin of Burning Man. How can large manufacturers or other companies benefit from the metaverse?

The metaverse is a place where the greatest minds from all over the world, with no location based barriers can come together and share ideas with just an Internet signal. That the way we share ideas at Burning man and the growth of the art for the sake of art has influenced technology, innovation and invention. When people have enough money and time, money to survive and then extra time, the number one thing they do with that time is art. They just create for the sake of creation, not create art for the sake of selling it. So that they can create, they create art for the sake of art. And at Burning man, we believe in communal effort, where you make something bigger than you could possibly do yourself. So you need to bring in more people to be part of this project. And that is communal effort and participation. All the principles feed into each other. Participation is also a principle so communal effort is allowing for more people to participate than just one person creating it. If you look at a company like Nike, there is no one person can make those shoes. There's research and development and there's marketing and then there's the actual manufacturing and there's the design and there's all these departments and there's a ton of people that work for this company, and that's communal effort. A large company coming into the Metaverse now has an opportunity to connect their divisions that are all over the world and maybe bring in more consultants into the communal effort to spread ideas and allow them to flourish. Creative collaboration flourishes in an environment like the Metaverse when it has a foundation. When you say, okay, how can this be? How can we create more communal effort? How can we create more radical inclusivity? How does this answer the call to immediacy? All those little like, how can we help people be more radically self reliant? That's what we did when we created our platform, is how can we help people be more radically self reliant so they can create this stuff themselves. And now we have people that were hammer and nail artists that are making a living through the pandemic because we taught them the skills to do it digitally.

That's awesome. That's really cool. So, and from then, I think the final pillar in society is governments. How do you think governments can benefit from the Metaverse? Do we see like virtual public squares or what's your idea around this?

I think the cities and the states and the countries need to lock down their public spaces. They've always been the ones that have gifted us the public space where we can come together and meet the town square, the Zocalo, the city park. The place where we can go and be in awe and wonder and share it with our friends and our family. But now we can do it without having to be locked into a location. We are free from our location based barriers. I can get together with my mother who lives in Houston, and we can do it within the Metaverse. I can get together. I have friends now all over the world. I have people I work with all over the world that I've never met in person, that I literally only know as avatars. And that's only possible because of the Metaverse.

Yeah, that's actually quite cool that you say, because we all think that the Metaverse should be created by startups or by big tech. But basically what you say is, if I understand it correctly, is no, the Metaverse should be created also by governments. Who can create these public squares where there is no advertising because it's a public good and you can just be. So it's basically Meta's Horizon world without Meta being involved, that sort of thing.

Yeah, it's Facebook, it's okay.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

I can't call them Meta. I'm sorry, I'll call them Horizon. I'll call it because Horizon is their three dimensional platform. But there were like four or five companies called Meta before they decided to change their name and all of a sudden they're Meta.

Arrogancy. I don't like Facebook.

Unbelievable amount of arrogancy. Just unbelievable. Unbelievable amount of arrogancy. I'm just going to call them Facebook. So we need tools to build with and the people, the companies that build the tools that are most accessible and easily accessible are the ones that are going to create that foundational fabric of the, of the Metaverse. Microsoft is getting ready to unleash their tools this year. I'm very excited to see what, what they're going to bring to the table. You have companies like Niantic who created an AR development platform for everyone to be able to create little AR objects that you can geocache yourself somewhere and bring that together in augmented reality. Nvidia also has a set of tools that they're unleashing and they look really interesting and I'm very excited to get my hands on those. And then there's the two main platforms, Unity and Unreal Engine. Most VR platforms that exist now are Unity based. But this is the thing I love about these two companies. First of all, they both believe the power should be in the people. They both believe that Unity, their name, Unity, it's all about unifying, about bringing everybody together. Unreal has said time and time and time again, Tim Sweeney has said that this should all be based on principles and that the power of creation should be in the people's hands. That's why they created what they did. You can build in Unreal and then export that file into Unity. You can build in Unity and then export that file and put it in Unreal. They don't necessarily work together, but they're not walled gardens. Facebook is a complete walled garden. You can only create from the tools that are in that platform. You can't upload anything else. Altspace, which is a Microsoft VR platform, you can build in Unity, build a blender. Pretty much you build it Unreal and you upload it through their Unity uploader and user generated content. Anybody can build anything and Put it up on that platform, other people can interact with it. That is Metaverse. A walled garden is a walled garden and a 3D environment using a program language that doesn't work. This is not interoperable with anything else. That's a walled garden. That's not part of the Metaverse.

Yeah, and I completely agree with you, especially the use generated content is going to be crucial for everything. If you want to make sure that the Internet has always been use generated content, now that will explode. But I guess there are also some dangers linked to that because with web2, the user generated content has caused all the problems that we have at the moment. All the polarization, all the misinformation, because people can say and do whatever they want. On Twitter, you can say whatever you want. How does that reflect on in the metaverse? If we have, you know, if you can build anything you want and you can upload it, then people can build also the bad stuff.

You gotta have them both. Like you can't have heaven without hell. You can't have good without bad. All of it is also a perspective. I'm sure, like you and I probably agree on what's good and what's bad. But I guarantee I can find you people that we wouldn't agree with that would, you know, today's January 6th, the one year anniversary of the insurrection on the US Capitol. And I guarantee all those people, some of them are in the metaverse, some of them are making 3D environments and they're going to say what they're doing is good and what we're doing is bad. All we can do is build on a set of principles and all believe in those principles. I truly believe that with all my heart. If we could all get behind that, we need to be radically inclusive. We need to have radical self reliance, we need to follow the principle of immediacy. We need to leave no trace. Leave no Trace is an interesting one. In the Metaverse. Normally we think, leave no trace, don't throw your garbage on the ground. But Leave no Trace actually says, leave a place better than as you found it. So, you know, leave no Trace can also be emotional traces. You know, are you going to go into a space and because there's no repercussions to molesting somebody, you know, taking your hands and putting them through somebody's avatar and grabbing their boobs. Happens in the metaverse, I can't turn around and slap somebody. I don't even know they're doing it until the person in front of me tells me they're doing it because I'm not a solid being. And if you practice the principles, those behaviors melt away. They're against the principles. You can still have your opinion that you don't like the US Government and how it's functioning, or any government and how it's functioning. And you can organize and share that opinion with like minded people. But your ability to hurt the people you don't agree with goes away because you're radically inclusive. So they need to be in the world with us. Yeah, it's a really hard thing for people to wrap their mind around. I have family members that absolutely love everything that Trump has done and did and think that he's the best president that the country has ever had. And I fervently disagree with them. But their opinion belongs just as much as mine does. I'm right, they're wrong. But their opinion belongs just as much as mine does. And they will say the same thing, that they're right and I'm wrong.

Fair enough. So that makes sense to me. I think it's important and maybe you can reflect it also to how Burning man works, or how the Burning man economy works. How do we create this rich and vibrant economy in the metaverse and how important are NFTs for that? And maybe can you shed some light on that?

I think it's a balance. We need to have a balance in order for an economy like what Burning man has created, an economy of creativity, a gifting economy, economy of free thought. But it needs to be a balance of transactional commerce and open creativity. They both need to exist. We need to pay for our lights, we need to pay our rent. We need to pay to put food on our table. We don't live in a purely barter society. We're not growing all of our food. We just don't live like that anymore. So within the system that we have right now, and it's not going to change anytime soon, we need to create, consciously create a balance between our transactional life and our gifting life, our commodified life and our decommodified life. We have paid time and we have free time. We have the time that somebody pays us for to write a book or to be somebody's secretary or to process these papers or to check somebody out at a store. That's the paid time. And then we have our free time, our decommodified time. What do we do with that? Do we go for a walk in nature? Do we create art? Are we going to go play a sport with our friends? Are we going to put on a VR headset and go into the Metaverse and go on adventures with people from all over the world that we've never met before and share ideas and learn about that? The Metaverse gives us this unbelievable opportunity to learn about different cultures and different peoples, and the more we learn about them, the less we fear them. And the less we fear them, the less we hate them.

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

So if we can balance our commodified life, which is essential, with our decommodified life, which is just as essential, we need to have our free time and our paid time in order to survive in this world.

Yeah, that makes sense. So look a bit more forward. What kind of dangers and ethical challenges do you foresee for the Metaverse in the coming years?

It's such a fine line. The biggest danger that I see is we try so hard to protect our children from the creepy, the evil, the molesters, the one that. The people that steal the innocence of our children, and we try to protect them. And unfortunately, the Metaverse also gives those people free reign to our children. So there's regulations already in place. There's the esrb, which is the video game rating, and they said all VR headsets are 13 and over, but there's no scientific backing as to why they picked that. I've read that the headsets don't really fit ahead smaller. I've read that developing brains. The brain is still developing, and by putting them in a VR headset, it can actually cause problems understanding reality, or problems understanding virtual reality versus physical reality and changing how the brain works. And yet we're using VR to consciously change how the brain works, changing people's phobias. You know, if you have an irrational fear of flying or heights or snakes or spiders or rats, or you just name it. Whatever you're scared of, you can do a therapy in VR that'll get you over that fear. I mean, they're using VR for stroke victim. So you don't. You have limited mobility in your arm or your face. You have difficulty talking, and you go into VR and now you're like this whole person, and you have both arms. And then they do therapies where they move your arm and your arm and VR moves, and your brain starts to rewire and goes, I can move that arm, I can move that arm. And next thing you know, the person's moving their arm. Crazy, insane neuroplasticity stuff is going on in VR. Can you imagine what we could consciously do if we had the science we knew what we were doing with neuroplasticity, a malleable brain like what a child has. We could, I don't know, teach them how to fly. Teach them a greater eye hand coordination, fix stutters. I have dyslexia. I've had dyslexia my entire life. It was a problem when I was a child. I've learned to live with it as an adult. That could have gotten fixed with VR. So I'm not so sure that saying VR headsets 13 and over, let's kind of look at that. But you talked about a danger, and I turned it into positive. The children in VR, it's a worry. I don't know if it's a danger, but it's a worry. You know, I read an article recently, I can't remember who wrote it, about the new trend of trolls and molesters and creepy people and pedophiles in the metaverse, and it was disappointing, and it angered me a little bit at the same time, because the problem isn't the metaverse. The problem is that that is just a problem in mankind. That is just a problem with us as society, is that we have these people. It's a mental illness. We're not addressing mental illness. And we need to. So it's a problem in us as society, and we need to become humanity. This is my big soapbox. I believe we're on the precipice of the most amazing evolution because we have evolved physically pretty much as far as we're probably going to go. And now we have this gift of a prefrontal cortex, and that prefrontal cortex gives us conscious choice, and we can choose to evolve from society to humanity. Humanity. Society is a group of Homo sapiens, and we compete and we kill each other, and we do whatever we can to get ahead. That's society. Humanity is a group of human beings. Okay, well, what does it mean to be a human being? We know what it means to be a Homo sapien. We're really good at that. We killed off all the other hominids. There is only one Homo sapiens, the thinking man. We came from Homo erectus. We know that history. What does it mean to be a human being? To me, it's very simple. Very, very simple. We're humane, right?

Yeah.

Isn't that the core root of the word humane? Human. If you're humane, you're human. You want to be human. Be humane. Be humane to each other. Let's start with the people in our immediate circle. Be humane to the people. You can See, be humane to the people you interact with on a daily basis. Be humane to all the people on the planet. Be humane to all living things. Just be human. And then we will be a humanity. And that's my soapbox of we have this opportunity right now. Covid gave us this little flame and made us stop what we were doing. All of society stop and look at our lives. We had nothing else to do but examine our lives and examine the world around us and what made us very fearful. And because we were so fearful, it amplified hate. When we have fear, the band aid on fear is anger. Fear is vulnerability. If we show fear, then we're vulnerable. In the animal kingdom, if you show fear, the predator will attack you. They sense it. So from just a biological standpoint, when we feel fear, we tend to cover it and mask it with anger. We get violent, we show hatred, we defend ourselves against the fear. But there's nothing wrong with feeling fear and there's nothing wrong with being vulnerable. We don't live in that animal world, but we still have those instincts.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think we, I guess a long way to go to achieve that.

I don't think we have a long way to go. I think we're at a precipice. I think we're at that turning point. And I think if we decide to do this as a society, we can pull it off in just a few years, like maybe five. And the metaverse will make it easier because now we can connect with people that are very different from us and not know it. Because we can be behind avatars. And then our instinct that it like split second instinct, that always happens before our prefrontal cortex, before that conscious self, that instinct looks at somebody and immediately assesses me, not like me. Me not like me. But when I'm an avatar and I see a purple avatar and I'm a yellow avatar, my brain just doesn't compute it at all. That me not like me isn't even a process that happened because there is nothing in the metaverse like me. All these people that are trying to make photorealistic avatars need to stop. Honestly, I don't think we should do that. I think we should have radically expressive avatars and be whatever we want.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. But that also includes people who want to be hyper realistic themselves.

Yeah, if you want to be great, go for it. That's what you want. And then I think absolutely, the biggest danger we have in the metaverse is the complete loss of our self control. The complete loss of who we are. We can consciously become something else, but sometimes we don't do it consciously.

Yeah.

Like, people lose themselves in the video games they play. They lose themselves in the digital worlds that they've decided to live in. And so the biggest danger of the digital side of the metaverse is that we lose connection to the physical side of the metaverse. The metaverse is. Is both. If you've read Matthew Ball's article, he talks about the metaverse span digital and physical. It's how we are between both. The Internet was just the digital. Now we have this opportunity to bridge it all together. But if we lose our connection to the planet, to the people, to the physicalness of what we have, then we've lost. And the greatest danger I see in all of this is that we dive too much into the digital and we lose sight of the physical. And that dystopian future in Ready Player One, in the Matrix, in Snow, Crash in, and I could just list them off. Become a documentary and not fiction.

Yeah.

And we don't want that to happen.

Yeah. Okay, As a final question, how do you think that the future of the metaverse will look like?

That's a really hard question. How do I think the future of the metaverse will look like? It's not a look like. I think that's the problem. It's like asking me, what do you think the art's going to look like at Burning man next year? I don't know. It's going to look like everything and nothing I could ever imagine. It's the minds of many make the most beautiful. I couldn't tell you what it would look like. I can tell you what it'll feel like. It'll feel like connection. As a human being, we desire connection. We want to feel like we belong. And the metaverse is going to give us that feeling of being connected.

Yeah. That's a great ending. Thank you so much, Athena. I really appreciate your input. This is awesome.

You're welcome.

And that wraps up the conversation with Athena Demos. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is that in the end, humans want to feel that they belong to. To a community. And the metaverse can help people achieve that from wherever they are. This is an interesting perspective, and I believe that communities will play a major role in the metaverse, which is why in my new book, To Step into the Metaverse, I discuss the role of communities in the immersive Internet and what decentralized autonomous organizations have to do with that if you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you will be notified when any of the other other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the metaverse.