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Preface

On October 28, 2021, the digital world stopped when Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was pivoting Facebook from a social network to the metaverse—the future of the internet. At the same time, he claimed the next iteration of internet and rebranded Facebook to Meta. Although Zuckerberg said all the right things—we need an open, interoperable* metaverse powered by the users—few believe him. In fact, there was a Forrester survey that showed 75 percent of the 700 respondents not trusting Zuckerberg with building the metaverse.¹ Research by WSJ showed that of the 1,058 US internet users interviewed, 72 percent do not trust Facebook much/at all. This matches my own simple survey on LinkedIn, where 78 percent of the 469 people indicated that they do not trust Zuckerberg with building the next iteration of the internet.² Time will tell how successful he will be, but if users and content creators can choose between a world owned and controlled by one person or a world owned and controlled by those creating it, I think I know the answer.

In the past months, I have gone down the rabbit hole of the metaverse. As part of my research for the book, I have spoken with almost 100 creators and creatives all involved in building the metaverse and another 133 completed a long survey about the metaverse. They are the pioneers of this new internet, and they are all building an open, decentralized, inclusive, and interoperable metaverse.

I hope you will enjoy this journey as much as I did uncovering this magical world where we are only bound by our own creativity. In this book, I will share my vision for the metaverse, what it can become, and how it will change our identity as well as how we play, socialize, shop, and work. If we manage to develop an open metaverse, the trillions of dollars generated will be shared with all creators and creatives. But beware, there are dangers lurking on the road ahead that we need to think carefully about to avoid making the same mistakes as we did when building Web 2.0 or the social internet. I realize that every chapter of this book can be an entire book by itself as there is so much happening when it comes to the metaverse, and the world is constantly changing. However, I tried to keep it brief while covering as much as possible. I will start with offering a glimpse of what the future might look like when the metaverse is here, in 2032. Enjoy!

Note

1 * Interoperability is a crucial aspect, and I will discuss it in-depth. It basically means that you can take your data and digital assets from one platform to another, something that is not possible today.