"Inner-View" With Notorious Metaverse Futurist and Wello Horld Co-Founder Jerry Paffendorf
March 04 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: The Web Year: 2008 Month: Mar Rating: 11
A high-school drop-out who boot-strapped his way up to becoming
one of the world’s leading Metaverse futurists,
Jerry Paffendorf has become notorious in 
leading-edge
tech circles. Guided by a multiverse-sized sense of curiosity,
Paffendorf’s uncanny knack for sniffing out the next big thing has
led to such craziness as guiding Electric Sheep, curating
Accelerating
Change, road-mapping Virtual Worlds
and, most recently, stacking Turtles at his stealth start-up
Wello
Horld.
It was my pleasure to throw some intellectual curveballs at this
6’ 7” foresight juggernaut who, incidentally, 
crashed on my tiny West Hollywood couch for a few months during
2005. He of course rose to the occasion with typically great
answers, some sound advice for would-be futurists and a bit of
evasive maneuvering around the topic of what exactly it is that
Wello is
hard at work building.
Here are some of the choicest snippets from my extensive and thought-provoking internet ‘Inner-View’ w/ JPaff :
A: What do you do and how is that related to the future?
J: It’s fair to say that I have three revolving sides: artist, futurist, and entrepreneur. Sometimes I don’t tell the difference between them, and I think that adds value [laughs…in text…then cries because the internet is broken]. Currently I’m co-founder and creative director of a very Web Different startup called Wello Horld where I put all three sides into action, helping build the product I can’t yet talk about that I hope many many millions will one day enjoy and have their minds blown by.
A: Please, what is Wello? Our Future Blogger readers need to know! :)
J: What Wello is building is still a secret (shhh!), but you could say it’s a rather ambitious virtual worlds-inspired play to make the internet live up to some of its promises.
A: How did you get involved in futurism?
J: I did everything out of order. The super short story is I dropped out of high school when I was 15 and went to art school after a couple years of community college. What I did and thought at art school is a completely different topic. When I was 18 or 19 I got my hands on Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines and it had a real impact on me. It was the first time that I’d really seen the story of the universe and human history and really the computer revolution laid out in time maps, along with a well-defended and totally exciting theory about what the 21st century will be like. It was like suddenly all the history and everything I learned at school and in life had a context that had been missing.
A: How did you discover the University of Houston program?
J: I remember firing off a bunch of emails asking where someone ‘without a formal science, technology, engineering or math education could go to learn to think about tech, social, and global change in the 21st century’ (or something like that in my words then). I think it was someone from the Foresight Institute who got back to me suggesting the Studies of the Future program at the University of Houston . I checked out the site, made a phone call to the department head, Peter Bishop, and a few days later I was on an airplane. Good times. Much like a school of software, release yourself early and often.
A: Please define the term futurist.
J: Futurists are like the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five: they see in four dimensions while “normals” do not. Kidding. I guess I’d say that what futurists have in common is thinking about how and why things have changed to get where we are in the present, and from there considering how they could change in the future, and what we’re attracted towards. Shocking, no?
A: How did studying futurism change your view of the world? How do you see things differently?
J: Good question. Little picture (just me) I don’t really think I see a moment so much, I see a flux moving towards or away from this or that thing. Big picture I think changes in how people live together (or don’t) and understand the world (or don’t) sit on top of a long-running series of trends in the falling cost of communication, and those trends sit on top of a series of trends in computation, and those trends come from an interestingly efficient interface between human intelligence and the possibilities of the natural world. It sounds really nerdy and I find a lot of people don’t like to think about things that way, but I think it’s a strong model, to view human change and technological change pretty much one-to-one. Thomas Malone lays out the communication trends and impacts in The Future of Work, and Ray Kurzweil lays out the computation trends in The Singularity Is Near, if anyone wants to read.
A: What is the Metaverse? Why is the Metaverse important to everyone?
J: It’s a framing idea and to me it means the next level of integration between the digital spaces and networks and data of the Web and the physical spaces and people and systems of the World. In the first leg of the Metaverse Roadmap project we whittled down a metaverse model connecting Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging, so we could finally talk about these things and how they’re being developed and used today in a way that makes sense going into the future. It’s simple and it makes a lot of sense. To ramble through it you have these virtual world technologies that are capable of simulating anything real or imagined and filling them up with people doing stuff, you can point these virtual world technologies at simulations of the real world so that the planet and the real things and people in it can be mimicked and expressed visually in mirror worlds, you use these bases to bring information from the virtual and mirror worlds out into the real world on phones and screens and other devices and now you’re augmenting reality with new layers of information and fantasy wherever you go, and the process of living and leaving trails and entering information intp these mixed web-world environments is lifelogging.
A: How did the Metaverse Roadmap Project come about?
J: The MVR project evolved from my being a community and research director at ASF from 2004-2005 and helping curate the Accelerating Change Conferences at Stanford, wrangle the Future Salon Network, and keep up with John Smart , and you, on your couch in West Hollywood (West Hollywood Metaverse School represent! though you know we do it in Brooklyn AKA Silicon Ghetto now :).
A: How are opportunities for entrepreneurs evolving?
J: To snag a phrase from John Smart I think it’s possible to do more, better, with less. If you come up with an idea and can build a team around it with enough technical and business talent to keep the wheels on the car, the market of people on the internet who hear about it or try it will start to reward you if they like it and then there’s always a way to get money and resources to take things further. Basically there are lower barriers to start, more allies in the network, and its easy to get feedback. Depends on your business, though! I’m coming more from the straight digital side.
A: Any advice for entrepreneurial start-ups?
J: If you want to get involved more directly, try organizing conferences and meetups. I met so many people from the futures and technology worlds when I was working on the Accelerating Change conferences and the Future Salon Network, including a virtual Future Salon I used to do every month in Second Life back in the day, and then more recently a Metaverse Meetup we still sometimes do in New York, which is really fun. When I got out of school I had extreme interest but very little experience and very few contacts in those fields, but I found that bringing people together around conversation and getting to know them personally was the best real life crash course for getting more of both. You learn a lot and you meet a lot of people, which tends to be a pretty virtuous loop.
A: Thank you mein freund.
J: Thanks, Alvis. Looking forward to more in the [drum roll] future. My couch is always open to you, good sir. I owe you one.
