Thomas Webb is the artist who wants to reshape the internet

“In my games, I get to build my own world,” explains Thomas Webb over a seven-course dinner at the restaurant in the five-star hotel he lives in. At the height of the 2020 lockdown, 15,000 people went to the 30-year-old’s exhibition, which took place within his video game, Worldwide Webb. Among the guests were the late Off-White founder Virgil Abloh and Spanish stylist Sita Abellán – the latter surprised guests with impromptu techno sets across the month-long show.

Attendees logged in using their Instagram accounts and milled around the multiplayer game as digital avatars. In this pixelated, 8-bit graphical world – which resembled an anime-fied Berlin – the players undertook quests that led them to “rooms” where they could admire the 12 digital artworks on display.

In one of these virtual rooms, his piece Depressed Twitter showed a loop of real-time tweets about mental health that he’d hacked from the social media platform. In another, What We Do With Infinite Knowledge, a live news ticker revealed the current most searched-for terms across the world, something Google usually keeps hidden. “As an artist, there’s an ability to shape the future. I want to explore not how it’s going to look, but rather how it’s going to operate,” he continues, as oysters arrive at the table.

In November 2021, the full version of Worldwide Webb was released on the Ethereum blockchain. Now it has more than 110,000 followers on Twitter, 29,000 active Discord members and is one of the first 2D metaverse games in Web3 history. That’s something that was acknowledged when the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, Hans Ulrich Obrist, hand-selected the game to be part of this year’s exhibition “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. Thomas Webb was presented alongside other developers breaking the game design mould, like the South Sudanese developer Lual Mayen, who founded Junub Games (a studio which programs games that teach children about peace) and American artist Angela Washko, whose feminist video games explore consent, the male gaze and seduction.

Since the launch of Worldwide Webb, its most loyal fans (including Linkin Park vocalist Mike Shinoda) have spent over $42 million on 9,500 virtual “apartments” within the game that can be used to host their own social events and exhibitions. “The end goal for me is to create a virtual world that has a synergy with the real world,” explains Webb under dimmed lights. “I want my players to value the experiences in the game enough to trade them, so a thriving economy can exist.” He’s also released various NFTs that are playable within the game, including a collection of crypto girlfriends featuring digital avatars of Shygirl, Mowalola and Munroe Bergdorf, which he collaborated with them on.

There are multiple new game quests, which take players on virtual adventures and result in a lucky few winning hyped NFTs. “These quests are a reflection of what I think of the world, and my ideas of what relationships and friendships are,” explains Webb, whose designs are inspired by everything from The Matrix to Berghain’s queue. “It’s what we’ve been doing since the beginning of time – we gather around fires and tell stories, and I think video games are going to be the highest form of storytelling in the future.”

Over the last couple of years, the idea of an immersive, interactive and 3D internet – a.k.a. the metaverse – has gone mainstream. Thanks to the pandemic’s online-everything shift, once-dystopian thought experiments are now manifesting into reality. You probably know someone who owns crypto, the fashion week calendar is bursting with virtual catwalks (including GCDS’ outlandish SS21 arcade show, which Webb helped build) and individuals spend millions of dollars to own a picture of apes that anyone could, in theory, right click and save onto their computer.

To some, the metaverse is an overhyped marketing gimmick. For others, it’s a brave new digital world that’s about to change the way we live forever. Either way, it feels like this overwhelming concept is being forced on us by only a handful of profit-crazed tech corporations. Facebook (or Meta), Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all vying to own the next stage of the internet and it seems like the glory days of lone bedroom developers disrupting the industry with indie software or games are long gone. Or so we thought. Webb’s breakthrough game is offering an alternative artistic vision of our digital future – one driven by independent collectives of individuals, rather than Nasdaq-listed monoliths.

“My last name is Webb, and I ignored that for a very long time. Even Web3 looks like Webb with two Bs. It’s like I have to do this, like it was written in the stars,” Webb chuckles, before correcting himself. “Or in the code, I should say.” His journey here hasn’t been linear. Webb was interested in building video games when he was 12, but wasn’t very good. “I tried to be an inventor for a bit,” he recalls. “I mostly made dumb stuff like an alarm clock robot that would slap you awake.” And all of this glosses over his stint as a magician.

Enthralled by a card trick performed on him by another barista at one of his first jobs in Starbucks, Webb devoured stacks of magic books until he’d mastered tricks. One day, at a local French restaurant, a twist of fate – magic, even – meant that a member of the Magic Circle (the secretive and exclusive organisation of magicians) was seated nearby Webb, who was performing. The magician, Étienne Pradier, was impressed by what he saw. He invited Webb to study advanced close-up magic.

Webb moved beyond card tricks and started mixing his two passions: technology and magic. He invented mind-fuck tricks that encouraged audiences to question their relationship to social media, big tech and data privacy. Most notably, under the alias Tom London, he wowed the judges with a trick on America’s Got Talent in 2017 (the clip has over six million views on YouTube). Then, two years later, he did the one thing a magician is not supposed to: he told everyone how he did it. “I thought it was more fascinating to tell the audience and say, ‘If I could deceive you with a calculator in my living room, what could these tech companies do?’” he explains.

He was kicked out of the Magic Circle, but didn’t leave it all behind. In Jungian analytical psychology, the “Magician” is one of the Swiss psychoanalyst’s 12 famous archetypes. Described as knowers and creators of worlds, the Magician is synonymous with science, technology and wisdom. The magician-to-technologist pipeline is a well-trodden trope. The founding father of modern conjuring, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, for example, was famous for using electromagnetism in his magic tricks (before the lightbulb had even been invented), and more recently, Facebook whistleblower Christopher Wylie moonlighted as a magician while working at the platform. “One of a magician’s main purposes is to deceive, so of course Chris would see through all the ways the platform was deceiving its users en masse in ways others couldn’t,” says Webb.

As we exit the restaurant, every staff member (with whom Webb is on first-name terms) stops him to catch up on the latest gossip, from the recent crypto crash to his trip to the Paris Ethereum conference. “I come here at least twice a week,” he explains. He manages a global team of 40 people who are helping him build his game at hyper-speed. His outrageous screen time means he doesn’t leave the complex much.

We head back to Webb’s penthouse in the residence quarter of the hotel. It looks like the new Balenciaga flagship store on Bond Street – down to both the brutalist, concrete interior design and the endless Balenciaga runway pieces in his walk-in wardrobe. Tonight he’s wearing a Rick Owens black T-shirt with Balenciaga leather trousers and studded platform Crocs. It’s not exactly what you’d expect from a video game developer.

Considering his aesthetic, his influence comes from an unlikely source. “I was really inspired by the Ozwald Boateng documentary. He would wear these emerald-green suits that were incredibly bold and made such an impact on Savile Row,” he says, switching on the digital infinity mirror in his sprawling living room. It’s an installation he’s become renowned for – he was commissioned by Warner Records to make one for his friend Dua Lipa to celebrate her album Future Nostalgia going platinum last year. “As a magician I would have to perform at billionaires’ yacht parties where I had to immediately command a room full of powerful people. The easiest way to do that was through wearing a great suit,” he continues. For him, there’s only one place for the best silhouette, cut and material: “Balenciaga kills it in that regard,” he adds.

The whole living room is lined with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out at the illimitable London skyline. “I think life is more programmed than a game,” says Webb, looking out at the thousands of twinkling lights beneath us. They almost look simulated. “We go to school, we get a job, we get married, maybe we have a kid,” he continues. “In my virtual worlds, I want people to be or create whatever they want.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Thomas Alexander
Styling by Itunu Oke
Grooming by Paul Donovan