Verso Newsletter
Is the metaverse human-grade?
Constitute interviews Greg Sherwin, an expert at the intersection between Web3.0 tech and human experience
[CONSTITUTE] I want to welcome our guest Greg Sherwin to the Verso Newsletter. Hi Greg, tell our Constitute community a little bit about yourself.
[GREG] Much of my interests have started with more of my engineering background, mostly in electrical. I got into satellite communications and control, entered a bio-engineering PhD program, went into higher-energy physics, worked with software, got into the internet business, and started working more with people.
Later, at Singularity University, one of the things I liked was its multidisciplinary focus and how these intersections happen. How there is a creative fertile area that happens when these things kind of come together. Since then, in the last four years, I’ve been in Portugal working for Farfetch and an experimentation practice for the global company.
[CONSTITUTE] Most of your work has been around human-centered technology, but how do we get there when most of the conversations are being driven by investors or even just tech people? Can we make these new technologies and Web3 to be human-centered? How do we make sure that we, even in the metaverse, will continue to be “fundamentally human?”
[GREG] Well, I guess the first fundamental thing that gives me confidence is that you and I are having this conversation, right? The challenging questions often are “Are we as humans the product?” or “Are we feeding the beast in the service of things?.” Or are we actually using technology and serving ourselves? And being, maybe, more human if possible and less like robots in response to the more robotic controls that our technology, particularly digital technology, sort of tries to put on us.
I have some windows of hope when I hear that there’s people like Vitalik Buterin, who is probably one of the last [individuals] who hasn’t been tainted yet by the Web3 industrial complex as much as some of his other Ethereum co-founders. He’s still looking at ideals. Early this year he came up with this idea of “soul-bound” items, which is something taken from World of Warcraft, and there was this idea of “how do we center from the things that we’re supposed to collect and represent ourselves to more people”. As long as we’re asking these questions, that’s a good sign.
[CONSTITUTE] Let’s be optimistic for a second: what are some of the most interesting and useful ways in which Web3 technologies are having an impact in our public and private life, whether currently or has the potential to do so? For instance, what about DeFi?
[GREG] With DeFi, you don’t even have to be USA-centric in thinking about how these impacts can play out because, obviously, statistics have shown that — proportionately — there’s more BIPOC people who are essentially participating in it because they’re often the under-banked, the under-financialized. Whether it’s a question of trust, whether it’s a question of access, whether it’s a fact that they’re put through things that are always looking at their skin color, or what their background is, or the accent they might have. I mean, there are unmet needs for these groups that I think is positive that we could potentially help serve [through Web3 tech], but at the same time know we’re going to have to balance it out because not all people are the same and not all have the same interests.
[CONSTITUTE] Do you have any specific organizations or companies that you think are really taking the essence of what Web3 was meant to be and do, any fun uses and cases?
[GREG] At the grass-roots level, I have friends who are just kind of like data-nerds and kind of scientists/entrepreneurs and they’re doing some really neat things. Like, for example, looking at how we could better do sustainable agriculture and support biodiversity through commons that are typically exploited but by now kind of tokenizing them. Sort of playing with how we might work with the economics to allow us to be able to better support those things and then be able to report on them and then add transparency to it — those are some of the better patterns.
And, in a number of environmental spaces, I’ve seen some good things. On a larger scale there are examples like the CarbonlandDAO, which uses the Web3 approach to nature conservancy, much in the same way of preventing deforestation, preserving biodiversity, but then also given the people who commute and participate access to outdoor spaces and things like that.
There’s also Treejer, which is from Iran, that does this thing like [explaining] how do they plant trees and transparently make it so that the people who want to fund the planting of those trees can get to remote the rural areas where people can actually plant those trees. Because, as we know, a tree in one part of the world isn’t necessarily the same net-carbon efficient as it is in another. So there’s a few things like that I think are kind of pretty cool.
[CONSTITUTE] Let’s move on to something a little bit more practical. You are currently working in Lisbon as a senior principal engineer at Farfetch, which is a leading global platform for the luxury fashion industry. Obviously, the fashion industry has dived head-in in trying to be a part of the gold rush of using the metaverse for a variety of activations, selling digital products. Based on your experience and your current rule on the tech side, what are some of the interesting use-cases of emerging Web3 technologies, specifically for the fashion industry ?
[GREG] Well, I actually would like to give props to our CEO on this one because he’s well bought into it, but I love the way he got there. This is like the “Google question.” It’s not so much that you have the right answer, it’s how you came up with the answer. And, in his case, the answer he came up with is Web3 is going to be big for the fashion industry, and his motivation wasn’t because of any specific tech. It was because he said, “Now there is a community of enthusiasts, of intelligent desired people who are going to make things happen and that, in itself, makes it worth checking it to”.
I’m more interested these days in this idea of decentralizing and democratizing the creative forces behind fashion and who influences them. Now, we can probably talk quite a bit about NFTs and what they’re good for and not so good for. But the fact is that NFTs are not about art, but how it opens a window into the art world for example (which is often connected to the fashion world). [Art and fashion] are sort of these exclusive clubs, and there are gatekeepers. Now with NFTs, maybe there’s an alternative way that these can be promoted, encouraged, funded, etcetera, outside the role of those traditional art or fashion establishments.
[CONSTITUTE] How can someone, who does not have a technical background be involved in this Web3 space?
[GREG] Well, you kind of pointed out earlier and it’s absolutely true: a lot of the tech is predominantly driven by mostly men in their 20s-30s and are mostly white. But there’s a lot of things that people outside of that “atmosphere” who can really be of great influence, and that is just the fundamentals of building a sustainable business. These [tech geeks] are people who don’t know business models; people who don’t know how to connect everything — from looking at lifetime customer values and onboarding conversion rates, and what your spending is, and how do you think about it, and making it in a sustainable way. We’ve all seen what happened with Celsius and then shutting things down because of people pulling out of the market. How do you build a business that can kind of withstand all of them, a four-seasons business? This is what’s important in addition to the tech side.
[CONSTITUTE] You’re also an active mentor to various startups. Do you see in this younger generation trying to make sense and really running fast and becoming billionaires, multi-millionaire even shorter period than even Mark Zuckerberg went to in the Web2.0 era?
The truth — as we’ve seen both with Web1, Web2 and even Web3 — is that if you look at the early-adopters, they’re usually driven more by the idealism and the possibility. Because the money typically doesn’t necessarily follow. Granted, like you pointed out, Web3 probably followed faster because they went through monetization first, as opposed to later like Facebook. But it’s usually in those second and third waves where you’re more likely to see the human interest that says, “How can I buy more property and become a slumlord by using crypto?” and that stuff usually happens two or three gens afterwards.
[Constitute] We’re coming to an end but I leave you with one question that we proposed to all our guests. As we said, Web3 is still very complicated and a bit overwhelming: do you have any practical tips for our meta-curious to learn more about the metaverse or Web3, whether again it’s a specific resource or community that you would like to propose?
[Greg] I’d say for resources there’s a lot of stuff, but what I think it’s worth looking at is the whole of a16z [Andreessen Horowitz]. It has all sorts of stuff because they’re heavily promoting it. But you have to take it with a grain of salt because, obviously, they are a part of that financially-leveraged interest and making sure that if anybody makes it in Web3, it’s them first. But it’s still a good place because there’s good focus and attention, just kind of “knowing the source”…
I like your community coaching — what we talked about — and that is sort of finding your tribe, finding people who share your own values and are looking at how to use the technology. Be skeptical of it in the right ways, and sort of work with it and sort of invest in it.
[CONSTITUTE] Greg as always thank you so much for sharing your expertise, your insights in this space. Thank you for bringing it to a human centered conversation. I appreciated it.
[GREG] Thank you, and look forward to future conversations.
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