In an exclusive interview with Dr. Mark van Rijmenam

Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is a Dutchpublished author, International keynote speaker, and future tech strategist. He mostly explores and helps the world understand how we can benefit from emerging technologies like big data, blockchain, AI, and AR/VR. Besides, he is also the founder of Datafloq and co-founder of AKVO. Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is recognized globally as a speaker on the future of work and the metaverse, as he has spoken in >20 nations across the world and collectively inspired more than 100k executives. Notably, Dr. Mark’s keynotes focus on the future of work.

In his latest book, “Step into the Metaverse,” Dr. Mark van Rijmenam gave an astonishing idea of how the internet will unlock a trillion-dollar social economy. The thought leader in delivering a looming insightful discussion about how the immersive internet will fundamentally change the physical world, impacting our life experiences, firms, and societies.

The Coin Republic has recently interviewed Dr. Mark van Rijmenam. The session covered several exciting topics about his latest book and the Metaverse. Furthermore, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam also explained how he is inspiring businesses as a future tech strategist

Mark van Rijmenam has created several volumes dealing with the digital ecosystem

I have been in the space of emerging technologies for over a decade now. I call myself a Future Tech Strategist as I think about how ’emerging technologies’ are changing organizations, society, and the Metaverse. And my first book that was Think Bigger, published in 2014. And basically, since then, I’ve been doing keynotes around the globe, helping organizations understand at that time what big data was.

A couple of years ago, I did my Ph.D. at the University of Technology in Sydney here in Australia. And while doing my Ph.D., I wrote my second book called “Blockchain” about how we can use blockchain for social good because, at that time, it was the time of the ICO hype and scams. I wanted to get it with Dr. Philip Ryan about how we can show that blockchain can be used for social good, and this is a foundational technology that really can have an impact on society.

My third book, “The Organization of Tomorrow“, is basically a management book of my dissertation because who reads dissertations? They’re boring. So I thought I was making it easier to read the book published in 2019. And then, of course, the pandemic hit. So obviously, unfortunately, I was not able to fly anymore to do my work. So I had to reinvent myself. And having talked about digitalization for over a decade, I thought, why don’t I digitize myself? So I did that. I created The Digital Speaker. I created an avatar for myself. I created a hologram of myself. And I started doing keynotes and conversations like that.

My avatar has its own show tech journal where my avatar covers the digital world from inside the digital world. And that’s how I sort of stepped into the Metaverselet’s just say before, Metaverse really became hype when Mr. Zuckerberg announced Meta, obviously in October, and it’s been exciting.

And in October, I was asked to write a book on the Metaverse, and I took a deep dive. I talked to about 100 people stakeholders who are building the Metaverse, investors, creative creators, collectors, and artists. I did another survey with 150 people to really get a very broad perspective of what’s happening. What is the Metaverse, and where is it going? And how can we create a Metaverse that’s beneficial to all of us? And yeah, the rest is that the book was finished a couple of weeks ago, ready for publication, and will become available also in Mandarin and Korean. Hopefully, a few other languages.

What is “Step into the Metaverse” all about?

I’m happy to talk about the Metaverse because it is the coolest kid in town at the moment. And industry. Everyone is talking about what the Metaverse is. And the Metaverse is coming online in the next, and I would say, one to two decades. But it’s happening today already.

And yes, I’ve written a book called “Step into the Metaverse,” as you mentioned correctly, and this book is all about how we can create an open Metaverse, how we can create a Metaverse where we control our assets, where we control our identity, where we control our data, and it’s actually beneficial to society. And in the book, I cover, what it is, what it can be, and what it does to, as you said correctly, identity to being human.

Metaverse meaning by Dr. Mark van Rijmenam

That’s a very good question! And the interesting thing I mentioned is I’ve spoken to roughly about 250 people, and I got 250 different definitions of what the Metaverse is, which basically shows you how abstract a concept it is. I used all those definitions I received to sort of craft my own definition. And for me, what it basically means to the shortest version is that it’s a convergence of the physical and the digital world, where we bring the digital world into the physical world and within the physical world into the digital world.

What is very important is that the Metaverse is so much more than virtual reality. Now often, people think that the Metaverse equals Virtual Reality because that’s how it’s portrayed in Snow Crash. And that’s how it’s portrayed in the ready play. I think virtual reality is only one channel, the Metaverse, and I think Augmented Reality (AR) is going to be a much bigger component of the Metaverse in the years to come. But I think it’s important that the Metaverse lives there where the divert to the physical and digital world are converging. And once that happens, you get all kinds of new and cool opportunities; you get the opportunity to create a virtual world that allows you to have an immersive experience that we are familiar with, virtual Reality, or with meetings in virtual reality.

It also allows you to bring in that virtual world, the physical world, for example, using digital twins, which are, you know, exact replicas of the physical world. And when you can interact with the physical world in Virtual reality. Obviously, we also have Augmented Reality, where we bring the digital world into the physical world and add layers to Reality. And that gives us a totally different perspective of what Reality is. And I think that’s sort of what the Metaverse is, but we really early stage might say, it’s like the 90s the end of the 1990s compared to where we are with this next iteration of the internet. And you also hear a lot of people say that the Metaverse equals Web3.

While I wish that would be true, I don’t think that is true at the moment. It doesn’t have to come true in the future, but it’s certainly something that we should strive for. But from that perspective, the way I look at it is no one else is writing the book is we should focus on sort of achieving this hybrid web where we use centralized technologies for streaming and do what centralized technologies can do well, and use decentralized technologies, such as blockchain to make sure that we own our own assets, we own our own identity, we own our own data, we have interoperability, and that we have transferability of assets. And I think that’s very crucial. So a long story and the Metaverse is upon us. We are the dawn of the Metaverse. There’s still tons of work to be done. But it’s certainly going to be a wild ride.

And this is also going to be something of our creationism.

Metaverse is for the people, not for institutions

I want to stress that there is absolutely no guarantee that this is going to be a democratized version of the internet. It’s very well possible that we continue to build the, the Metaverse with Web2 technologies. Basically, the follow-up of the Web to where it’s owned and controlled by several companies will become billionaires, if not trillionaires. And they own our data. They own our assets in their own identity.

There’s absolutely no guarantee that we will build an open Metaverse. But we should do whatever it takes to make sure that we will end up there because, for me, the Metaverse is, as I write in my book, a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity in the next decade. It’s an endless blue ocean of opportunity. But if we don’t do it correctly, that endless growth of opportunity will end up in the hands of the few. While I think we should put it in the hands of the creatives and the creators. My main focus is on how to build an open metaverse. That’s there for us and not for big tech.

Could Metaverse be a closed-off world created by big players?

That’s definitely one of the dangers, and if that happens, the case will end up in its no-crash world or in an oasis. But then probably far worse. And I think that now we should know that in the metaphors, we will know if you think that today’s Internet collector collects a lot of data that will be nothing compared to what they can collect in Metaverse, and it will be 10 or 100 times what they can collect today.

Today we already have a toxic recommendation engine. We have polarization. What you have deep fakes with misinformation. In an immersive internet, all those threats will only extrapolate to get worse. We see it’s already happening. There’s already abused as already sexual harassment. We have to really think carefully about how we’re going to construct the Metaverse if we want to make sure that this Metaverse has a positive effect on our society.

Everyone talks about Meta, obviously. And Zuckerberg did one thing right: kickstarting the movement of Metaverse. Everyone is aware of the Metaverse, and all organizations want to know what the Metaverse is. A reminder of requests that I get from organizations that helped me is that this is a lot and which is good. Now people are becoming aware of this. And hopefully, the result is that just like we slept, walked into the interweb, we’re not going to sleepwalk into the Metaverse because if we sleepwalked into the Metaverse, we’d make the same mistakes as we didn’t have to. We’ll get addicted to free services. We’ll get our data as good as getting it being pulled and sold and shared and analyzed and abused and misused by big tech.

We really should have this beautiful opportunity where we sort of have a blank canvas where we can create the Metaverse basically from scratch, with the beautiful technologies that are out there that are being built by the community. But let’s think carefully of how we’re going to build this, and let’s not sleepwalk into a surveillance Metaverse because that would certainly be dystopian.

Misuse of personal data is scary in Metaverse

That’s very scary, you know, and the Metaverse of the internet will become so pervasive it will just be like the air we breathe and the energy we use. It’s there to interact with. And if all that data is being collected by one or several companies who misuse and abuse that data. I think that’s truly scary, and we should really do whatever it takes to not have that happen.

But that requires responsibility for all of us, those building it but also those consuming it and those using it to do the right thing. Because if we build it in the correct way, you know, we will have a fantastic era where real magic will happen on every corner of the streets where you know everything will be truly an immersive and amazing experience that will benefit humanity.

The Metaverse can be something absolutely truly amazing. Or it can be something truly dystopian, and I hope we’ll get the first.

How NFTs and crypto are part of a Metaverse?

If you read my book, you will have a nice surprise at the start of the book. What Metaverse will look like, and I’m not going to say too much because it needs to be surprising when you open the book, but it will be quite interesting.

I think cryptocurrencies are what will make the Metaverse go around, and they will be absolutely crucial. And NFTs will be sort of playing a fundamental role in their Metaverses because, for the first time, NFTs enable us to own a digital asset truly. And just like in the real physical world, the moment you can prove ownership of an asset, you can start to monetize it. If you can prove the ownership of your house, you can then start to put it out as collateral, and you can get a mortgage against it, you can get money, you can grow, you can invest it.

The same applies to NFTs for the first time, and we can prove that we own a particular digital asset. And we can then use that to monetize it. NFTs Yeah, well, the hybrid NFT is about daypack, selling for millions. It’s a gold rush. But that’s not what NFTs enable. That’s not really what an NFT stands for. And as they stand for it, you can own, you can earn, you can when you can, you can collect, you can get you can, whatever, a particular asset in a particular world. And then you can start using that, in other words, using the interoperability that’s so important for the Metaverse.

And once you have that, let’s say you’re an artist, creating these amazing digital images or paintings. If you’re a really good artist, you can start selling those paintings as NFTs and start to make money. And then, you can also keep those NFTs and borrow against them, and you can put them or use them as collateral so that you can get more money. And then you can produce more work, which you then can sell. And you get a sort of vicious circle where you can use the technology of decentralized finance (DeFi) to increase your output and increase your way of living to make more money.

I think it’s very democratizing all of a sudden, anyone without relying on intermediaries can be responsible for their life, and you can make a living, monetize that you can use it in ways that have never been possible. So I think from that perspective, the Metaverse, it actually did cryptocurrency didn’t have enough to our true enabler for an infinite amount of money, additionally, for global GDP, I think, to have a big impact on our global economy.

That’s where my power lies in NFTs, being able to own a particular asset, which comes with a certain utility of whatever the utility is, but then you can prove ownership of that. And I think that’s an amazing invention that we have been able to get from the Web3.0 community and that we can now use to change how our society runs completely.

Is decentralization dangerous for us?

That is part of the dangers if you have completely decentralized cryptocurrencies. It means that no centralized entity can have control over it. This whole idea of decentralization, which many countries don’t like, is why you also see many centralized cryptocurrencies and central bank currencies being developed, with China, definitely leading the pack here. Because that gives you the benefits of cryptocurrencies from a government perspective but doesn’t get you downsides from cryptocurrencies from a government perspective. And I think that is a challenge.

I think that technology has its pros and its cons. You know, fiat currencies also have a lot of cons to them. So, where’s the balance? It’s a very philosophical debate, and I don’t have the right answer for where what is right, what is wrong here? I just look at these technologies of what they are capable of.

I see that Russians can indeed use Bitcoin to evade sanctions. But then again, at the same time, we all think that cryptocurrencies are completely anonymous, and that’s also not the case. I’ve recently heard the names of the criminals who stole $4.5 billion, which was 120,000 Bitcoin, in 2016. Eventually, they were caught five years later, despite them using as many tools to remain anonymous. So from that perspective, how Anonymous is Bitcoin? So maybe there are other ways to go around it, but it’s a very philosophical debate, and I don’t want to go into directions that are not difficult to see where they are going. But it’s, I guess that’s just, yeah, the pros and cons of technology.

The exponential function

The function is called f(x)=e^x, which is the Exponential Function. And as you know, because I talked about emerging technologies, I always tell people we live in exponential times. The world is changing faster than ever before. And we’re only coming from the bottom of the hockey stick at the moment, and the world is going to change so rapidly in the next decade.

That’s why I chose the exponential function for my newsletter. That’s a bit nerdy, but I thought it was quite funny. And, yeah, what I tried to do is, help people organizations, but also governments, try to understand, what does it mean that this the world is, now we see this converged technology at the moment, and that’s why it’s going too fast.

For example, artificial intelligence is having a major impact, but combine artificial intelligence with the enormous data that’s being collected, combine it with quantum computing, it’s coming out waves, and all of a sudden, this convergence of these three technologies will create an explosion of what’s possible with technology. Now, humans are not made for exponential thinking. And, we’re very lateral thinking. We think it is going to be a continuation of what has happened in the past. But suppose you know the story of the second half of the chessboard. In that case, we know that it’s very difficult to imagine, think exponentially, and how long it takes to double every step, which is what happens with extreme integrity. I’m trying to help people understand what happens with exponentials.

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