Nomos The Evolution Code from Metaverse to Autonomous World

Nomos The Evolution Code Connecting Metaverse to the Autonomous World

Author: Jingyi.xyz Source: X (originally Twitter) @SulaXyz

The metaverse is an eternal space, and Autonomous worlds are complete worlds that include narration and Nomos.

With the resurgence of the Lootverse ecosystem, the concept of Autonomous worlds supported by Mud is increasingly appearing in the public eye. On one hand, skeptics may think that this is just a new bottle for the metaverse, but on the other hand, we feel the strong driving force and vitality of the AW native community, while more people choose to wait and see. This article will explore the cultural roots of AW from the development logic of human society, and why we believe AW is the inevitable direction of evolution for the metaverse.

1. Metaverse: Still cutting-edge?

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Looking back at 2021, the metaverse once captured the imagination of the world.

At that time, we were trapped in the physical world ravaged by the pandemic. The metaverse promised to save us from it, with the help of virtual reality technology and enhanced hardware, by whisking us away into a bright, futuristic digital world, like a breath of fresh air. McKinsey estimated that its value would reach $5 trillion by 2030. Facebook even repositioned itself as Meta and changed its stock ticker from FB to META. In the founder’s letter on October 28, 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg defined the metaverse as:

It’s an experiential internet where you’re not just looking at it. We call it the metaverse, and it touches on every product we build.

He singled out “existence” as the defining feature of the metaverse. In the metaverse, people will be able to connect with each other through their digital selves. He envisioned a future where physical things – TV, offices, games, etc. – will be replaced by holograms. Humans will no longer be limited by physical space. He proudly declared:

From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.

Then, fast forward two years, the development of the metaverse seems to have stagnated, and investors’ interest and capital pursuit have also stalled.

As the COVID-19 pandemic gradually receded, people returned to the embrace of reality, indulging in restaurants, returning to offices amidst crowds, sweating on sports fields, busy with business trips, and of course, dealing with traffic congestion after work. The memories of that locked-down period gradually faded away, and although Zoom meetings lingered, Wall Street bankers still preferred lunchtime interactions rather than just engaging with virtual idols on screens.

So, are humans destined to be bound by physical existence? Social media gives a negative answer.

Most young people register on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, contributing a significant amount of time and attention, and even social relationships, to online dating, live streaming, and video software. While Decentraland has only about 38 active daily users, Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are full of young people and active communities.

So why isn’t it the metaverse then?

Because only culture can strengthen collective behavior, and consensus is the foundation of culture. In addition to the spatial infrastructure, holographic projection, and digital avatars provided by the metaverse, we need more to form consensus.

II. Nomos, Narrative, and Community

Sociologists have been studying the complexity of how humans construct communities for many years.

Communities are products of social construction, contrasting with the forces and order in the natural world. The fire, wind, thunderstorms, and other awe-inspiring forces in nature reveal a natural reality with innate order and rules. At the same time, human communities provide a completely different social reality- one that needs to give meaning to organization.

Social reality must have meaning, which means it needs to organize and explain our experiences to better organize relationships and interactions within the community. This process is called “Nomos,” a cognitive and organizational way of understanding social reality. Through Nomos, people can establish social norms, cultural values, and social relationships to shape the structure and behavior of the community.

The concept of Nomos was introduced by sociologist Peter Berger, famous for his groundbreaking work on the sociology of religion in the 1960s, “The Sacred Canopy”:

If it is proposed that the world of social construction is first and foremost a sorting of experiences, this view is now less difficult to understand. Individual experiences and meanings impress a meaningful order, or Nomos. To say that society is a project of world creation is, in fact, to say that it is an activity of ordering or Nomosizing.

In other words, constructing a world means creating a Nomos. Having only spatial infrastructure, digital avatars, and beautiful pictures is not enough to create a Nomos. The metaverse is just a space; it does not constitute a world. The problem is not that people don’t want to interact, but without underlying order and rules, there are no social supports, no world of Nomos, and people won’t stay.

In the dawn of human history, ancient people constructed their Nomos based on their understanding of nature (i.e., the universe). In other words, Nomos is formulated based on the order of the universe, and it is seen as a part of the natural order in society and is considered legitimate.

Nomos and the universe seem to complement each other. In ancient societies, it was seen as a microcosm reflecting the universe, displaying a world related to the inherent meaning of the universe. Although this micro and macro pattern is typical in primitive and ancient societies, it has undergone transformations in major civilizations.

In ancient civilizations, it is not surprising that Nomos generally had a religious nature. From Egypt to Mesopotamia to China, priestly culture held a prominent position. Even in modern society, when religion itself is no longer the center of human activities, Nomos still retains a religious aspect.

Time and time again, they restore continuity between the present moment and social traditions, placing individual experiences and social groups in a history that transcends them, whether real or fictional6.

People rush to the battlefield, also placing themselves in a world composed of prayers, blessings, and spells, in the river of life7.

Therefore, to construct a world in which people interact, space alone is not enough, time is also essential. Here, time is not only the time in the natural universe, but also the time in society, namely the history and traditions of the community, such as our calendars, holidays, customs, and so on. Without these elements of time, although physical existence remains, social life becomes meaningless because mere existence itself cannot give meaning to social life.

The secret to creating time in a social sense lies in narrative. In the famous “Nomos and Narrative”8, the late scholar Robert Cover from Harvard Law School observed:

The codes that relate our normative system to our social constructions of reality and to our visions of what the world might be are narrative.

Therefore, it is not a coincidence that ancient religions were built upon narratives. They are actually stories about connecting mythical fantasies and human behavior, creating a timeline for the gods and providing the community with foundational myths and origin stories. Ancient history, when traced back to its origins, always evolves into mythology.

Without narrative, there is no complete Nomos. That is the greatest difference between the two; the metaverse is an eternal space, while autonomous worlds are worlds that fully incorporate narrative and Nomos.

Robert Cover further explains the educational and maintenance functions of Nomos. Education is imparted by the community’s foundational narratives or myths, such as the laws given by God to Moses. As the community grows and changes, Nomos will face pressure and challenges. For example, the Israelites were defeated when they saw their temple destroyed by foreign powers like Babylon and Rome. These events shook Nomos, requiring further narratives for its maintenance.

As human history unfolds, modern science eventually replaces religion, not because of a philosophical doubt in the existence of God or gods, but because it revealed that religious texts such as the Bible are not actually divine. These texts were not immaculate words carved in stone by God or the gods, but rather human stories. We have entered a modern society, an age of technological civilization and massification.

Through massification, which is the process of liberation from religious and totem domination in certain areas of society and culture9.

Religion no longer dominates human activities. In the long period of human history, there has never been such a diminished relationship between gods and humans. Modernity has triumphed, but the Western world’s Nomos has suffered a spiritual crisis.

We are hollow people

We are filled people

Tilt together

Filling the heads with straw. Ah!

Our dry voices, when

When we whisper together

Quiet and meaningless

like the wind on straw

or the sound of mice on broken glass

in our dry cellars

– T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

At the same time, this sentiment is reflected in Edward Munch’s famous painting “The Scream.” Ironically, the scream is always silent – because it appears on the canvas.

Are we originally hollow people, or have we become hollow people? When Nomas breaks, we tell stories to fix it. When Nomas breaks beyond repair, we tell new stories.

Three, Autonomous worlds: reshaping narratives

Modern society cannot do without mass culture. From pop music to Hollywood movies, popular culture constantly seeks to explore new Nomos with the comfort similar to religion. Events such as the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and the annual Oscars ceremony echo the special rituals of ancient and medieval revelry. The Hollywood walk of fame and rock stars are similar to the gods of Greek mythology, and people feel both unfamiliar and fascinated by these modern “deities,” while the media, hungry for consumer preferences, deliver various stories to the public.

Our early myths were collaborative creations. Even works by a single author usually draw on early or contemporary oral traditions. “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” “Beowulf,” and “The Song of Nibelungs” all have this characteristic. In a sense, a single author is not the sole artist in the modern sense, but rather the sole compiler of the story. Who can say that Homer did not use early stories in his epics?

Religious texts are even more evident. The Bible and the Vedic texts are almost certainly the result of multiple authors writing over a long period of time. The earliest “original” legends about rings are found in “The Song of Nibelungs,” a medieval High German poem written around 1200 AD. German composer Richard Wagner used the ancient Norwegian variant of the same myth, rearranging the story into his monumental opera “The Ring of the Nibelung,” also known as “The Ring Cycle.” The plot revolves around a magic ring that can rule the world. The composition took 26 years, from 1848 to 1874. Decades later, a British author retold another ring legend, but this time he drew heavily from ancient English poetry from the Exeter Book, creating a new mythology. He told the stories of heroes, hobbits, elves, and the story of the magic ring that controlled them. His name was J.R.R. Tolkien.

The popularity of online and on-chain games sharing many of the same themes is not accidental, but deeply rooted in our traditions. The emergence of decentralized technology has broken these technological barriers, effectively reducing the cost of maintaining myths. In the deployment in the Web3 environment, an autonomous world is born.

As mentioned before, “collaborative storytelling” is the origin of myths and represents the initial state of story development. Before the recording of history, narrators were hidden behind stories, and each narration grew and evolved at an immeasurable speed. In this dynamic reenactment of history, the final formed plot lines formed the tribal narrative system in the eyes of the people at that time. This is a permissionless primordial world, and everyone can participate, and stories can merge with each other.

In a tweet, Timshel defines Loot as a “large-scale multiplayer collaborative world-building experiment,” a form of collective narrative experiment. A key element in collective storytelling is the “narrative device”.

Creating NFTs largely involves creating a “narrative device”. Loot has been described as a “perfect writing prompt” that provides a minimalist starting point for storytelling with its defined eight categories and five eras. They mostly present a statement of being “mundane but carefree”. In contrast, text-based NFTs leave more space for interpretation as they lack a statement. When creating a narrative device, rich media may not necessarily be more effective. It may convey stronger information but may not be more inspiring. Just as the revolutionary impact of the oral “formula” concept in the study of Homeric epic (Milman LianGuairry), Lootverse also has the potential to form a unique narrative “formula” as a supporting structure for future storytelling.

It could have been a fascinating modern (retro) epic story, but from the beginning, the script didn’t go as planned. Before internal narrative issues were resolved, the Lootverse in the real world was fully listed and entered the speculative market. In the market, the elements of the story first became speculative targets and then became part of the scenes in the story world. This “core story” gained corresponding asset value.

For more on AW narrative and culture, please refer to our previous report.

Essentially, an autonomous world carries an open layer of content, building its own narrative and Nomos, and the autonomy of the content allows the autonomous world to function even without any developers. Game companies no longer control virtual items, characters, progress, player virtual properties, and most importantly, the foundational narrative of the game. Games have complex intrinsic logic and governance rules, and compared to traditional forms of entertainment like movies or pop music, they are closer to a fully constructed Nomos. Games usually encompass a complete myth, generating many stories, just like the Star Wars universe.

Decentralized technology has overcome barriers in tracking stories, tracing myths, and modifying rules. Thus, it not only enables collaborative creation in storytelling, but also in maintaining collaboration in Nomos. Stakeholders can retell stories or create new ones. They can also expand existing myths or create a completely new Nomos. They no longer need to overcome traditional technological, legal, financial, and business barriers to build their own myths. Technology pushes cultural opportunities to the limit.

The stronger the interactivity, the stronger the players’ sense of participation, and the more people will remember the story, making the story more important. In terms of interactivity, games are better than IP-style NFTs, and the latter is better than pure textual descriptions. Bibliotheca DAO initially viewed fully on-chain games as an “ever-ongoing game,” as can be seen from the naming of “Eternum.” Games without the possibility of “clearance” have profound narrative seriousness. The entire game’s development is also open for community collaboration. Web3MQ, as an application chain and L3 infrastructure provider, has also completed the construction of the communication module in the Eternum world. In such a community with a brand new Nomos, developers not only take on a role of tool development, but more importantly, design products based on cultural and community understanding.

“Moving Castles” deeply explores the relationship between content producers and consumers, as well as the role of authors and community interests. They are conducting innovative experiments using participatory flow formats as the main object of the experiment, with the aim of creating “permanently open texts.” Unlike previous “explicit, completed information,” this text is open to everyone, and everyone has the right to interpret, add to, delete from, and build new narratives based on the existing foundation.

We can understand the content layer of the game as an autonomous world: A permanently open game is not actually a game, but a text that is forever open. Imagine an online document called “Contemporary History,” which has evolved from very limited writing permissions (grand narrative) to now where everyone has writing permissions, and this document is constantly being transcribed into a movie: everyone is an actor in it. We can consider the term “fully on-chain game” as a way to describe this future scenario, which has obtained the highest consensus.

The development of the Web3 field has brought about a transformation in cultural creation and sharing. AW and decentralized technology are changing the way we build and maintain Nomos. It provides greater space for collaborative creation and lowers the threshold for maintaining the Nomos. However, this also brings new challenges that require us to think about how to handle threats and abuse, and how to ensure inclusive and fair cultural opportunities.

In the Web3 era, we may see vibrant communities and more collaborative creation, a new cultural form growing outside of a fragile, uncertain physical world.

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