OverwriteXR

DOWNTIME:

The world of XR is limitless but far more fragile. Downtime at one point meant there was a broken conveyer belt at the factory. Today it implies devices and servers are no longer communicating correctly. 

When Twitter or Instagram go through downtime various users inevitably panic. Still, there’s a bit of a wall between us and the platform. We hear the dings of notifications and see the colorful interactive animations but it’s all often on a tiny little rectangle in our hands. The meatspace surrounding us is still more influential on our senses.

As the XR industry becomes more immersive, downtime will become, in a sense, world-ending. You’re having a meeting with top executives from all over the world, and suddenly your mouth stops working because the space is buffering or completely shuts off.

Our very reality is dependent on all systems working right, and that means we’re dependent on the engineers and designers making sure there isn’t any faulty code or mechanical failure. These sites could have a 404 error (when their particular environment isn’t found by the server) or perhaps a 451 error (when their space isn’t loading for legal reasons).

Anxiety could heighten for people who spend enough time in virtual reality that it becomes an integral part of their existence. A daily mundane routine could literally freeze in place or your surrounding environment might not load correctly.

It’s appears inevitable that sooner or later there will be parts of the population who spend more time in virtual reality than in our meatspace. The only time these individuals will be leaving is to go eat, go to the bathroom, or panic when there’s downtime. 

A priority of these XR companies above graphics or immersion technologies will be making sure downtime is as rare as possible.

STORAGE:

On March 18, 2019 MySpace announced that due to a faulty server the platform had lost much, if not all its content prior to 2016. Over a decade’s worth of user uploaded content gone.

Content creators need only see the internet as an invisible entity with endless cloud space that pops up on subscriber’s gadgets. We put our videos, art, photos, music up on sites that are supposedly boundless. But the internet is a network of networks and all those cat videos are being stored somewhere. 

Google “cloud” space has physical data centers which store the increasing amount of data being added minute by minute. Google-owned YouTube has 500 hours of video data uploaded to its servers every minute. Facebook, along with other social networks constantly receive tons of user data. 

While society has become more concerned recently on how this data is monetized with regards to privacy, many people don’t put as much thought to where it’s all stored. 

Even with digital data the physical holder (servers, flash drives, discs, etc) will break down over time. The digital data eventually becomes unreadable as well. Today, we’re too dependent on digital data but engineers and researchers are looking for alternatives.

A major alternative could include quantum devices, which would have mechanics governed by quantum laws. Instead of our familiar binary bit system for storage (the charge of an electron), quantum devices could take into account the spin of an electron as well.

The WayBack machine is an alternative archive website. You can see current and closed sites and see how they looked at certain time periods.  The archive is storing petabytes of data and plans to archive the internet far into the future as well. It’s our best internet time capsule to date.

Online memorial summary alternatives for the deceased will become more of an established expectation. Facebook has had an option for years to memorialize account pages for those who are deceased. Users can pick a “legacy contact” to look after the account after it becomes a memorial page. The memorial account keeps private messages secret even from the legacy contact. Options like this should become more sophisticated as the years continue with uploaded memories or mind signatures.

And, of course, there are the hoarders. The people who scour the internet and store memes, photos, texts, and more from various websites and often stick them onto their own personal storage devices. A Reddit forum called “DataHoarder” (https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/) has users sharing tips on building home data servers and which cloud services are best for backing up files. As the internet is really just a collection of interconnected servers, hoarder practices will immortalize information in the event of a large server collapse like what happened with MySpace.

Would we eventually live in a world cluttered with data centers holding YouTube videos from decades’ past? Would we start doing a global data cleanse, only preserving “historically significant material”? Will ephemeral content become more popular to save space? Could we develop even more advanced methods of storage compression that could drastically reduce the sizes of existing data centers with quantum storage? Could servers be migrated to other celestial bodies?

IDENTITY

In the analog world, you can still prove who you are without a digital trace. Birth certificates, physical signatures, a network of friends and family who know you—it’s messy, but it exists.

In XR, identity becomes entirely mediated by systems you don’t fully control. You are your avatar, your encrypted keys, your login credentials. If those are corrupted, stolen, or erased, you effectively cease to exist within that space.

What happens when your primary social circles, your job, your hobbies, your personal history all live in a metaverse server? What happens when someone spoofs your avatar and walks into a meeting looking exactly like you, speaking in your voice, sharing files you never created?

Even now, deepfake technology blurs truth and deception. In a future where XR interactions feel as “real” as physical life, identity theft isn’t just about stealing a bank account—it’s about hijacking you.

We’ll likely see new legal frameworks around “digital personhood,” but even laws won’t prevent existential dread. If you lose your digital identity, who do people believe—the flesh-and-blood version shouting that wasn’t me or the perfectly rendered digital doppelgänger?

In a centralized XR platform, there’s also a kill switch problem. If you’re banned, censored, or accidentally purged from the database, your entire digital self can be wiped away with a single administrative click.

The scariest part? You might have no recourse, because you were never truly in control of your own digital existence.

OWNERSHIP

Owning something in XR sounds straightforward—buy a virtual house, a designer avatar skin, maybe even a digital car. But who actually owns it?

In a centralized metaverse like Meta’s, you don’t really “own” anything. You have a license to use digital goods under the platform’s rules. If Meta changes its policies or shuts down servers, your luxurious VR condo and curated wardrobe disappear overnight.

History already gave us a taste of this. People spent thousands on apps, music, and films on platforms like iTunes or Google Play, only to see them vanish when licensing deals expired. That was just media. Now imagine the same applied to the entire space you live in.

This problem extends beyond personal property. Imagine running a digital business inside a centralized XR hub—an art gallery, a consulting agency, a VR café. You’re not on your land; you’re on their rented platform. If the platform decides your business violates some obscure policy, you can lose everything instantly.

Decentralized metaverse models using blockchain promise to solve this—digital assets recorded on-chain, transferable between worlds. But decentralization has its own problems: scams, hacking risks, and still an ultimate reliance on physical servers that someone owns.

So what does ownership mean when your home, clothes, tools, and even memories live on someone else’s server? In XR, you might never own anything—you’ll simply be renting access to existence.

HARDWARE ACCESSIBILITY

To exist meaningfully in XR, you’ll need hardware. Not just a VR headset—but gloves, haptic suits, neural interfaces, and a stable high-speed internet connection.

Right now, the entry price for a decent VR setup hovers between $500 and $2,000. Add in monthly subscription fees for software, cloud storage, and platform access, and the cost of maintaining a digital life becomes comparable to rent.

As XR deepens its hold, we risk creating a new class divide—not just between those with money and those without, but between those who can participate in the dominant reality and those who can’t.

Imagine living in 2035, where job interviews, social events, education, and even basic civic participation happen in XR. Without the right hardware, you’re excluded—not just from entertainment, but from economic and social life itself.

This could also create digital debt traps. Companies might offer “XR hardware loans” to get people online—locking users into permanent dependence. Like payday loans but for your existence.

And even for those who can afford the hardware, there’s the planned obsolescence problem. Today’s $2,000 headset may be unsupported in five years, forcing you to upgrade just to stay visible. You could find yourself living a kind of digital homelessness—present in meatspace but locked out of the shared virtual spaces where everyone else is.

The question becomes: how much will it cost to exist in the future? Will there be a basic right to XR access, or will the metaverse simply mirror—and even amplify—the economic inequalities of the physical world?