114 - I'm So Meta Even This Acronym ⬅️
Hey there, Subscriber.Metadata.First_Name: !
“Did you hear the news?
Facebook is dead, long live Meta.“
- This isn’t a real quote I just made it up
- Which I guess is how all quotes get made, but this one specifically doesn’t reference anything at all
I wanted to chat about the metaverse because I’ve been reading a lot about it and impart a bit of knowledge on what it is before you either a. read that it’s only VR/AR and ignore it, or b. see that it’s being run by Facebook and ignore it completely.
I hope you don’t ignore me 🥺
I read this piece called ‘The Metaverse Primer‘ by Matthew Ball a while ago, stumbling across it in my Internet travels. I read it enraptured because it was such a clear picture of what this new word actually meant.
He’s now written a 9-part, 33,000 word explanation / thesis on his view of what the Metaverse is and it’s actually fantastic. I’ve read through the whole thing and I can’t keep it in my head long enough before I forget an aspect of it and then have to re-read it again.
I wanted to give some simpler thoughts about it, because it’s a trend I see going forward, but I have my own thoughts on what it might become.
1.
First things first, I’m the realest / Drop this and let the metaverse feel it - Fancy (Iggy Azalea, Charli XCX (kind of)) - predicting the metaverse a full 7 years before the Zuck announced his company name change
What’s real? You, me, that sandwich you ate for lunch…all of this could be a simulation. The Matrix could have been a story about what our universe really is, and how we have been trapped inside of it without even knowing it.
Neo, if you’re reading this, I’m okay staying in here. Life doesn’t seem too great outside…
Reality is perception, and shifts as the world around us changes. Technological innovations often help us better communicate with one another, and connect us in various different ways. A cornerstone of breakthroughs in technology have been in communications, which have taken many forms:
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Language allowed us to communicate orally with each other;
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Writing and Drawing gave us a way to mark down what we had seen, or heard, or remembered, and then pass those on to the next generation (or more);
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The printing press gave us an efficient, simple way to copy writing, and the post office gave us ways to send letters between one another;
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Phones, telegraphs and radios helped us transmit information over loooong distances, allowing us to communicate with each other from a far distance;
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TVs took over the living room, sending out daily, globalised news about the world, as well as used for entertainment; and finally,
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The Internet broke down the barriers of countries by creating shared protocols and information to communicate across the world
Each time a new technology came into play, an explosion of creativity and new ways of using media followed. Over time, it would slowly become more and more ubiquitous, until it was common. We take for granted that books can be published and distributed around the world, or that we have radios and satellites that beam information all across the world.
The metaverse is described by its supporters as the next phase of our communications journey where the Internet is ubiquitous, and something else comes along built on top of it to make it even better. Imagine the step change from no Internet to Internet - the world has literally changed (okay that was climate change but still), and the metaverse’s explosion of creativity is still on its upswing right now.
These different technologies continually shifted the dial on what was ‘real’ - sure, you can write a letter, but you can’t hear someone’s voice. Sure, you can hear their voice, but can you see them? Sure, you can see them on TV, but is it them?
Sure, you can see and hear them online, streamed in real-time, but can you feel their presence?
2.
”What’s in a name? That which we call a metaverse by any other name would smell as sweet” - Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare (kind of)) - so ahead of his time
The name’s not important, but the concept is.
I could be wrong, but I think that for a lot of people, the metaverse is envisaged as like…a version of Facebook where you have virtual people instead. This kind of use case sounds boring, and with many people turning off Facebook altogether, it’s not a very compelling use case.
The most visual way of explaining the metaverse has been VR/AR. Many of the demos around the metaverse have been how it looks in terms of trying to replicate real life - having a person’s ‘body’ be over there while you have your own backyard to compete with them in games. Or maybe you’re walking through a ‘virtual mall’ doing your shopping. Or maybe you’re outfitting your ‘digital twin’ with new clothes, new hairstyles - the works! It’s the next stage in how we can be ‘together’ in a place, by having more of our ‘presence’ in a location.
I don’t think this fully encompasses what the metaverse could be, because the map is not the territory. There are so many different ways to explain what the metaverse could be, and what it will entail, that I would prefer to quote from Matthew Ball’s piece:
- Be persistent – which is to say, it never “resets” or “pauses” or “ends”, it just continues indefinitely
- Be synchronous and live – even though pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, just as they do in “real life”, the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real-time
- Be without any cap to concurrent users, while also providing each user with an individual sense of “presence” – everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together, at the same time and with individual agency
- Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others
- Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms
- Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences – your Counter-Strike gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite, or be gifted to a friend on/through Facebook. Similarly, a car designed for Rocket League (or even for Porsche’s website) could be brought over to work in Roblox. Today, the digital world basically acts as though it were a mall where every store used its own currency, required proprietary ID cards, had proprietary units of measurement for things like shoes or calories, and different dress codes, etc.
- Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors, some of whom are independent individuals, while others might be informally organized groups or commercially-focused enterprises
3.
“The next big thing will start out looking like Fortnite” - Chris Dixon (kind of)
For me, it’s clear that there are various precursors for the Metaverse that started in gaming (or, digital toys).
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MMORPGs are the greatest examples of these - servers that are hosted persistently, with concurrent users engaging in the same space, buying and selling virtual items with virtual currency (and scamming runic armour in the process). Think Runescape or Maplestory - these things were games that allowed you to play with your friends in the same ‘3rd space’ (to steal Starbucks’ term).
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Minecraft allows you to create your own story, and build whatever the heck you want in an open-world. You can play with friends, or play alone, and though there are discoveries you can make to propel the story forward, you could go your entire experience with Minecraft not finding those things at all.
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Fortnite, the king of pivots, has moved to hosting virtual concerts online, with an infinite number of ‘concert halls’ that people can log in to to see the same performance, without a degradation in quality. That scale is scary cool to see.
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Alternate Reality Games (ARG’s) help tell a story across both the primary medium (let’s say TV) with secondary mediums (such as the Internet). These games help you interact with extra content across channels, and give you a fundamentally deeper connection with the story.
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Pokemon Go and those Augmented Reality-type games are also a way that the physical and digital has interacted.
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Even The Sims could be used as a great example of people loving to spend money on building a digital avatar of themselves and making them do stuff. Woo-woo!
I’ve got even more to say on Gaming as a Trend next week, but suffice to say it has probably been the sleeper ‘toy’ that is currently coming to fruition in terms of real-world applications.
And though I’m extremely bearish on cryptocurrencies, it is a fundamental step to help motivate the development of the metaverse.
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Without digital ‘money’ to spend, you can’t have metaverse businesses or shops to sell things in
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Without distributed protocols that people around the world believe in, you would have to rely on centralised authorities to dictate your experience
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Without a generation of kids growing up allocating value to NFTs, who would give a shit about digital assets? No status, no growth.
These technologies are still being ‘played’ with, and there are so many examples I want to bring up about it…but there’s just so much to cover, and so little space to write without you getting bored! AGH. I’ll write more soon :)
4.
“The metaverse…uh…finds a way” - Jurassic Park (Jeff Goldblum…kinda)
I’m actually not that interested in a vision of a metaverse which is like Ready Player One - jacked into a reality like the Matrix and ‘being’ someone else like that. That seems like a lot of work (like, if I don’t want to get up from my sofa right now, will I want to get up and ‘log in’ to the metaverse? no thanks), and also, reality is interesting enough to discover on its own.
There’s enough reality to go round that we don’t need a whole new one!
I predict that we’ll never actually get to that stage of metaverse. At least not the fully bodysuit / scanned avatar version of us - that would just be a literal digital twin, and who needs that. If the Internet allows us to be whoever we want to be, anonymously, then why can’t we do the same thing in the metaverse? I’m fine to be a cool lookin’ dragon online - you’ll never prove I’m not!
I don’t want a centralised metaverse will be the future, but I’m worried it will be. Humans are optimised for the fuzzy edges; though we put a lot of rules and regulations around how we live our lives, we’re still the greatest general-purpose organisms that have evolved, and can deal with uncertainty a lot quicker and better than even AI’s. This uncertainty would be taken away with a guided, centralised experience (unless designed really well) but even then, there’d be backlash against who is designing that experience.
In addition, being locked into one ecosystem would go against the principles of sharing in the metaverse - you’d want to have shared protocols, if not a shared world where everyone interacts.
I do think that there will be some intermediate stage that could look like the Sims or Minecraft - where people will spend a lot of their time looking after their avatars, or using those avatars to ‘go to school’ or ‘buy stuff’. All the technologies that are peripheral to the metaverse (especially AR/VR) will just be new channels with which to interact with it, and unlock new forms of interaction.
However, I still think there are issues to be solved:
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How do you get people to log on to the metaverse out of their own free will? What compels them to do that - what’s the use case? I can’t touch grass on the metaverse. I can’t cook food to serve my friends, I can’t enjoy the pleasure of driving a car, I can’t physically be present. Games already have a defined purpose (the game itself) to hang out, so why would I log on to a marketplace to buy things when I already have the tools to do that right now?
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How do you ensure people will share and standardise their protocols? The Internet used to be a wild, ever-growing monster of pages and creativity. It was open, free, lawless and anonymous. But now we have such vested corporate interests in capturing value as much as possible - will we just have different centralised ‘metaverses’ that don’t overlap? The Facebook metaverse vs. the Apple metaverse - a new series of Internet Nations?
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How can you provide the digital education to help people take advantage of the metaverse? If we want to prevent the centralisation of experiences from large companies (like we have now), people need to be better educated / better tools need to be built to help them host their own servers and decentralise their experience. I think that people who ‘build the shovels’ / the tools will reap the most reward when the metaverse emerges.
Even with everything I’ve written that seems insurmountable or bearish regarding the metaverse, I know that it will find a way to emerge.
I don’t know exactly how, or when, or what it will look like, but just like my belief in cryptocurrency, even though I think it’s stupid and won’t take off, it still might.
Strong opinions - weakly held. Keen to hear all your thoughts on this!
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Ready or Not - a comedy horror movie I remember seeing come out around the same time as Knives Out (probably in a trailer or something). I remember being intrigued by the setting (a bride has to survive a night of murderous hide and seek) but never got around to watching it in cinema. Instead, I saw it was put on Disney+ so I put it on…and wow! - much better than I thought. It was super campy and silly, but I loved discount Margot Robbie (Samara Weaving) going through some great, tense, scenes surrounded by a cast of pretty funny characters. It’s an above average look at a comedy horror film, with not overly crazy gore or violence (let’s say…John Wick level?) and very enjoyable to watch! Highly recommended :)
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Drifting House - a collection of short stories from Krys Lee on the Korean-American immigrant experience. There are some books that I just get captured by through the sheer beauty and utility of the writing - this is one of them. When I say beauty, for me, it’s not flowery language or sweet words - it’s raw human emotion, straight-forwardly expressed, that really brings out the emotion of the situation. Show, don’t tell. Though the flavour of Korean culture littered throughout made it hard for me to specifically relate (as I don’t understand the language that well), the universality of these specific scenarios was, well, confronting and surreal. Two children escaping North Korea, haunted by what they’ve left behind. A Korean salaryman slowly losing a grip of his life after losing his job. A roommate moves in with his pet goose and brings out the best of the protagonist. A man holding on to old Korean rituals even once his family has moved to America. Wonderfully moving stories, recommended!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Squid Game Crypto Scam - an all-too-familiar story of a shitcoin scamming people, getting away with about $3.3m in a matter of days. Honestly, how is this still happening? I guess with real crime there also comes Internet crime…and then maybe metaverse-crime?
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Bitcoin cannot replace the banks - I don’t like saying banks are ‘too big to fail’, more that banks provide a particular social purpose with capital in society which Bitcoin currently cannot provide in terms of a niche. Maybe in the future metaverse we’ll be using more crypto, but from my view it’ll just be another way to bank. Only time will tell how large that niche will be.
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And You Will Know Us By The Company We Keep - a long read by Eugene Wei again, but this one is a great breakdown of where the social media landscape is headed. I specifically enjoyed his description of ‘graph design’ in terms of the ‘social network graph’ that people create when on these sort of networks, and describing how the design of one-way and two-way graphs lead to different impacts for end users.