by Gabriel René
Each of these individual definitions of a protocol are designed to address various aspects of our biological, social, and technological lives. None are designed to replace the other nor interoperate or communicate with the others. This begs the question, what is the ideal intercommunication protocol to connect our biological, physical, and digital universes and turn the Convergence into a Network? We think the answer should be: a protocol that is designed specifically for the multi-dimensional needs of our future. Not the 30-year old protocols of the World Wide Web.
WORLD WIDE WEB LIMITATIONS
I n 1997, in an article entitled “Realizing the Full Potential of the Web,” the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, shared his thoughts and hopes for the Web:
“The Web was designed to be a universal space of information, so when you make a bookmark or a hypertext link, you should be able to make that link to absolutely any piece of information that can be accessed using networks. The universality is essential to the Web: it loses its power if there are certain types of things to which you can’t link.”
This quote highlights both the larger potential and persistent limitations of the original Web protocols. The limitations are inherent in the definition of the Web itself as a universal “information space” designed for interacting with text and media on pages. Its greater potential is best reflected in an easily overlooked section of the quote where he says “universality is essential to the Web: it loses its power if there are certain types of things to which you can’t link.” Whether intentionally or not, this sentence suggests that for the Web to reach its true potential, it must enable anything to be linked to it, not merely text and media. But 20 years later, the existing Web protocols still do not easily enable certain types of “things” to be “linked.”
As a testament to the original architecture and agnostic design of web addresses, web links or URLs can be assigned to pages of content as well as to “things.” These things can be things we use daily like smart speakers, appliances, wearable devices, and connected vehicles as well as industrial devices or objects like those used for smart factories, and shipping and logistics (collectively referred to as the “Internet of Things” or IoT).
However, web domains and URLs have a very significant limitation. They do not provide for any reference to where things are located, spatially. The Web was designed to locate text or media on pages, not things or people in places; there is no way to search, access, or move people or things between various “spaces”—across the physical world, in games and apps, or across virtual worlds. This lack of a spatial domain or spatial address makes it difficult to manage how people, robots, or content operate within a space, in any authenticated or compatible way.
The HTTP web protocols were limited in their scope and ambition to connecting computers, documents, and media. Given the limitations of its era, the design did not include universal standards for user accounts, asset IDs, security, permissions, or transactions. Furthermore, they are file-based, not spatially-based.
Whereas HTML and other web programming languages let developers create page-based interaction and transaction rules, there is no spatial programming language to create the use policies and user permissions for interactions, transactions, and transportation of digital or digitized physical content or objects across real-world or virtual spaces.
The World Wide Web and its protocols are missing many things we now realize we need for connection in the 21st century. For example, the existing web protocols do not handle or validate data storage, consider location-based rights protection, asset ownership, or transaction authentication. There is no built-in reliable method for identifying and authenticating people, places, or things and the activities between them. Because the vast majority of our data is now owned and controlled by third parties, we are constantly faced with security threats. The incentive for companies to capture data and centralize it in silos in order to monetize it is clear, but the problem is that the bigger the silo, the bigger the honeypot is for malicious entities. Centralized systems by their very nature are susceptible to being hacked, corrupted, altered, acquired, bankrupted, or even destroyed.
The World Wide Web technologies and user interfaces were designed for interactions with 2D text (hypertext) and the navigation of pages for digital information, not digital experiences and actions. They weren’t designed with Spatialization in mind and so are an insufficient foundation upon which to develop the next generation of Spatial Web applications that must enable interactions and transactions with 3D objects and user navigation within and across 3D spaces. We need a Spatial Web.
Let’s take a closer look at the key features that are missing from the original web architecture and lacking from the current definitions of Web 3.0.
The Web today lacks a native identity or account infrastructure. This forces users to authenticate themselves with each and every service provider to access a provider’s service. This requires users to have separate accounts for different interaction modes: browsing, communicating, sharing, buying. As a result, all of the value of the data associated with such an account is owned, controlled, and monetized by third parties. This is the case with nearly every service on the entire Web.
The Web today lacks an open spatial browser, built on a standard spatial protocol, that all users can access. There is no support for multi-user interoperable searchability, viewability, interaction, transaction, and transportation of users, assets, or currency within or across physical or virtual spaces.
The Web today provides no reliable real-time validation of users, assets, and spaces, or their identity, ownership, and permissions for various interactions and transactions. Because of this, the risk of virtual asset and environment alterations is significant. A hacker can edit AR content in the physical world or change the value of an item in a VR world for their own benefit. They can change all or a part of an augmented or virtual scene, delete or edit or change the accuracy of critical display information at a nuclear plant, deface or damage environments, move objects, take over automated drones, vehicles, or robots, or inject inappropriate or even psychologically harmful software or content. They can impersonate a person, their agents, or avatars; all of these instances can occur with both virtual and real-world objects, content, people, and locations.
WEB 2.0 PROBLEMS
Hackers, Trackers, and Fakers—Today’s Web is not secure.
B ecause the web was not designed with a shared database in mind, and because it has no login, it keeps no record, log, or “state” of our activity.
But as we browse the web, shop online, read posts, chat with friends, go for our morning jog, or park our car at night, our various digital and physical activity has been tracked and collected by various parties and this data has been stored on their servers. Weekly headlines across the planet continually report on how the largest and presumably most secure organizations in the world are regularly hacked, leading to identity and asset theft of an unprecedented scale. Even when not hacked, our personal data and activities have become a new kind of natural resource to be mined and sold to the highest bidder. Sadly, this has also led to the promotion of fake news and other counterfeit information posing as genuine articles. The monetization of our online and offline behavior actually promotes false stories over true ones because they fuel more user engagement. False rage “sells.”
We have all been swayed by fake news in ways that have impacted us personally, professionally, and politically. As a global community, the full impact is yet to be truly understood. This is not merely a by-product of our gullibility or tribal affiliations, although both are arguably up for review. It is because the quantitative economic incentives to monetize the web by tracking our browsing activity, social relationships, and location history in order to better sell us products and services outweighs the qualitative moral implications to our society. The problem doesn’t lie solely in the relentless pursuit of a dollar; but in the insidious nature of a kind of technologically-mediated m
onitoring and behavioral programming that lacks the appropriate level of care and concern for the psychological, political, or environmental cost-per-click. This is what happens when the invisible hand of the market is silently guided by an “all-seeing-eye” that remains blind to the effects its actions have on the world around it. The result? Surveillance capitalism.
But if you are a public company that must answer to your shareholders, whose only metric for success is your quarterly earnings or stock price, what do you do? If the DNA of your company is a by-product of a profit-by-any-means-necessary culture, how can you hope to change this?
Many people increasingly feel as if they are under a digitally-enhanced microscope that routinely tracks their most basic desires, and then targets these to make their fulfillment easier, more efficient and more effective—whether they want that or not. This is what happens when you apply Digitization to anything. You get exponential effects. Of course, this means that we can get exponentially good or exponentially bad effects. Which leads to another question: Are we applying Digitization correctly?
In an August 2018 article titled “The Man Who Created the World Wide Web,” in Vanity Fair , the founder and inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, discussed with writer Katrina Booker the shortcomings of the Web’s fundamental design and the crisis this produced in the Web 2.0 era.
“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places.” The increasing centralization of the Web, he said, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”
Maybe this is why it feels like the dystopian version of our future is imminent. We know deep down that something is very wrong and can see all of the signs playing out across our screens and slowly seeping into our daily life.
We can sense that a new era of the Web is approaching us like a hidden universe that will soon breach the veil of our current reality. And it is that feeling, the digital background buzz of anxiety, that leads us to a critical choice.
WEB 3.0 CRISIS/OPPORTUNITY
I n 2018, we reached 50% Internet connectivity on the planet. That is nearly four billion people all digitally connected and online, sharing everything from daily activities to political views to DNA information. Over the next decade, billions more will come online. But that’s not all. In Web 3.0 everything comes online—trillions of objects—every appliance, every device or piece of equipment that runs or operates our farms and mines, our water and electrical plants, our cities and streets, our stores and homes, our forests and parks and our schools and government buildings will come online. Even our accessories and apparel, the watches and glasses and clothing we wear, are coming online. And billions of cameras positioned on every street light and building across our cities and on every drone in the air above us and every vehicle in the streets around us will also be in the hands or on the faces of our fellow citizens, every one of them with the ability to recognize who you are, what you are doing, how you are feeling, and maybe even what you are thinking.
In Web 2.0 we are often asked by developers to grant our mobile phones and apps the right to use anonymized diagnostic or location data in order to improve the performance of their app or services. According to the Dec. 10, 2018 article, “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret” in the New York Times , “at least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States—about half those in use last year.” There are databases out there with close to a billion profiles. “The database reviewed by the Times —a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company—reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.”
One dot shows a woman as she “leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day…The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s house.” Even though the records didn’t disclose the woman’s identity, the Times reporters easily connected her to the dot.
But what happens when many “dots” about you are being collected?
What level of information can be gleaned about you when someone is able to connect these dots as thousands of data companies and data brokers are doing across an entire shadow economy of Web 2.0?
In a 2019 Washington Post article titled “It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?,” the author Geoffrey Fowler reviews a privacy experiment that found 5,400 hidden app trackers operating on an average iPhone over the course of just one week. These various trackers shared personal details including address, name, email and cell carrier, location data as well as device name, model, ad identifier, memory size, and accelerometer data with third parties creating a treasure trove of personal data to be used for advertising, commercial, and political messaging. Most of this data was gathered at night when we are sleeping. Although some apps require tracking to be on in order to function properly, the experiment raises serious concerns about the transparent collection and use of consumer data. This is especially shocking given the strong stance and messaging regarding consumer data that Apple has taken.
The wearables, fitness apps, and connected home appliances of Web 3.0 will be reporting back far more information about us. Your devices will report details such as the number of cups of coffee you had at home, the content of your refrigerator, your mood before and after retrieving and putting back the ice cream container. Your toilet could tell the amount of fiber in your diet and so on. Your smart door could tell the exact time you leave and arrive home. While these various devices may collect genuinely relevant data for optimal performance of their particular app, or “app”liance, the collection and sale of that data and its potential enrichment when correlated with other datasets brings up unprecedented ethical and privacy concerns that industry and governments cannot ignore.
Wearable technology does offer amazing benefits and can revolutionize the healthcare industry. It enables us to use data to become more aware of our health in order to improve our well-being and prevent future health risks and illnesses. Fitness wearables address step tracking, sleep monitoring, and heart rate tracking, and even more complicated metrics such as diet, posture, skin temperature, and respiratory rate. They collect data regarding weight gain or loss, blood oxygen levels, and stress, which can be used to highlight potential risk factors or even alert others in real-time if life-threatening changes occur.
For both preventative and protective reasons, wearable technology will continue to be adopted. Apple has indicated that “Health” is their new frontier, and that is good because, where Apple goes, the rest of the market tends to follow.
However, the potential misuse of wearable health data for inappropriate monitoring, tracking, and classification increases the risk of discriminatory actions by insurance providers, employers, and governments and further allows these companies to exploit user data through third-party sales.
In a 2017 report in Intersect titled “Wary About Wearables: Potential for the Exploitation of Wearable Health Technology Through Employee Discrimination and Sales to Third Parties,” the authors write: “There also remain ambiguous characterizations of wearable health devices as either electronic communication services or remote computing services and wearable health data as either content or non-content under the Stored Communications Act (SCA).
So is it content or speech or intellectual property or private property? At present, no one knows. The regulatory frameworks are far behind the market, chasing the problems that occurred half a decade ago or more. How
will they protect us from the problems that will certainly arise in the decades to come?
All of this “lifestream” data can and will be mined for different outcomes. Together, we will feed trillions of bits of data into Web 3.0, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.
Consider the near limitless analytical capabilities of AI applied to these kinds of data sets. With the ability to classify and comprehend the interactions between people, places, and things, it seems almost inconceivable but something like a “God View” of reality will be possible in Web 3.0. This could enable AI to make fairly accurate predictions about what might happen next in nearly any situation with a very high degree of certainty. As worrisome as this idea may be with its ethical and privacy implications and hints of Minority Report , this scenario would still be merely checkers to the chess game of reality when AI and Quantum Computing reach their full maturity.
The converged power of AI and Quantum Computing would not only be capable of analyzing and making sense of any real-world scene but will be able to virtually recreate any scene imaginable and enable us to experience it. Don’t like how yesterday turned out? You could re-experience it with a different outcome or even simulate a future tomorrow—in this world or any other where the people, places, things, and all the possible interactions would be computer-generated and could include simulations of the actual people in your life or imaginary ones. It would be like a choose-your-own-adventure for “reality” played out in a virtual reality that may be mediated by wearable glasses and haptic body suits or via a neural lace apparatus that connects directly to the brain. And all of this would be completely interactive and reactive in real-time.