What is the Real World?

What is the real world?

It is tempting to define the real world as the physical world. The stuff that we can touch and interact with using our physical bodies.

The advent of computers and the internet challenges this definition.

What about the digital world? Where does it fit into the real world? Is everything in the digital world fake, or fictional?

The digital world cannot be categorized as fake or fictional. The numbers in our bank accounts are digital, but they are not fiction. They certainly aren't fake. You could posit that it is only pixels on a screen, but it is more than that, it is a shared reality since the digital information points to something real: like, can the rent be paid or not?

web3 = consistent digital reality

Blockchain brings a new level of consistency and consensus to the digital world. We may have shared the realities of digital ecosystems in the past, but we had no control over the worlds of PayPal or the Runescape auction house.

Hive and other blockchains are next-level foundations for the digital world. They allow for consistent shared reality with consensus rather than centralized control.

Now the digital world is clearly not separate from the real world. It is intertwined with the physical world. Your digital status has an impact on where you are allowed to go and what you are allowed to do in the physical world.

digital gatekeeps physical

Want to pick up an order from the restaurant? You show them a QR code on your phone, they scan it, and the phone shows a green checkmark. This tells the staff you're the person who ordered the food, so they give it to you.

If they scan the QR code and it says no, you aren't getting the food. The digital world is gatekeeping the physical world!

It works the other way too, like the Ready Player One quote, the physical world is the only place you can get a good meal. Our bodies, our physical ability to interface with computers, gatekeeps our access to the digital world.

Both of these worlds, the digital and the physical, are parts of the Real World. It's like the yin and yang, with one half being the digital and the other half being the physical. They are separate, but also mixed together on the border.

a new dimension of reality is a challenge

There is a generational gap in how people understand this issue. Those born around the mid-1980s and later seem to be able to grasp it... with people born in the 2000s intuitively understanding this idea from birth, it has always been their reality.

Those born before the mid-1980s will mostly struggle with understanding that the digital world is part of the real world. For them, born in a pre-internet era, it's such a shift that it will be tempting to simply give up on understanding it all and become out-of-touch with culture and society.

For the decades to come it seems like the digital world will be an ever-larger piece of the real world.