???????? № 5 – Verse

What will our world look like in the Metaverse?

Hopefully very different than what it looks like now.

In fact, I am certain the Metaverse will never take off, at least not in our lifetime.

5 reasons why:

1. Humble beginnings

Web 2.0 changed the Internet from the wild wild west of forums, blogposts and unregulated media to the centralization of platforms (Twitter, TikTok, IG, Netflix, Reddit). Apple revolutionized the Internet, making it on the go. Suddenly, wherever you are, whether you are working from a remote beach, at a theme park, camping, or commuting, your apps are always with you. It introduced brands into our daily routine, however the benefits of connectivity outweighed its distractions.

The same can’t be said for Metaverse; it’s not something you can quickly glance at, it demands you to be unconditionally absorbed in it. And since it is in a rather incipient phase, the investment threshold is substantial, making companies bet into the dark that consumers will do all the work and the leisure activities will be enough to never leave.?

Even so, the roadmap to decentralize the Internet once again will inevitably backfire. Multitasking isn’t particularly easy when you have to “travel” to different locations, from one land or space to the next entertainment virtual location. With a phone, it’s a simple swipe between different types of apps, regardless of what you’re physically doing simultaneously. Inside the different verses, traveling is severely lagging – this goes for both VR & AR. Similarly, the de/re-regulation of payment gateways brought up even more issues with cyber security, and with so many crypto exchanges either shutting down due to regulations or proving to be rug-pulls, who even trusts a virtual wallet system that acts as an entrance key to a space, on top of passcodes and social media logins??It's an overabundance of albeit simple systems, yet all disconnected from each other.

Nevertheless, these humble beginnings have been lingering on for almost two decades now. ‘Metaverse’ as terminology has been around since the 90s, and brought back to the public eye in October last year, however the embryonic verse started in 2003 with Second Life. Ten years later, VR Chat came into play, which even by today’s standards is a better rendition than any of the newer platforms and it was made by 5 people and everyone could integrate their own avatars and characters without the need of a certain 3D world corporate art-style. Twenty years after its phase one, it's same-same, but worse.

2. AI

We’ve seen a surge of A.I. generators for images, videos, memes to the point of debating what’s the point of art & artists anymore. From an artistic POV, people’s obsession with AI-created films, music and games is pitiful. ?

The current state of automation works best in highly specific environments and scenarios. Outside of those parameters, it fails horribly, making its content incomprehensible.?

Artificial general intelligence isn’t about finding one mythical platonic algorithm that can be applied to multiple uses – it’s always a dance between simple elegant stable patterned principles and irregular chaotic and dynamic formulas. While AI systems are learning and achieving meaningful actions, they use the same base substate of adaptability, learning, growth, skills, memory.

In its essence, the AI needs frameworks to function.?

Can it generate a Picasso? Sure.

Can it become a Picasso? Never.

AI has many uses, but not in creativity nor entertainment.

Back in its advent days, computer scientists made some machines capable of processing outside data, trying to predict sequences of how would the markets react. To fund these studies, they sold the available informations to stock traders. This experiment led to more people buying in, resulting in the machines sending mathematic algorithms to eventually other machines that would take in the data to further sell, buy and report on stocks. Ultimately, we’re in a massive feedback loop of data managed by automatic intelligence that took out the human element, which is one reason why the world economy is so fickle nowadays.

Following?

With these autonomic intelligence feedback loops controlling the market, and marketing moving to content narratives, this only means that those abstract algorithms are in charge of the proliferation of culture, which at least gives one explanation for the lack of any new cultural movement of the past years.

Plugged into the Metaverse, AI’s only role will be one of an observer or an NPC at best. Even if given free autonomous range to operate fully independent of human input, it won’t reach “sentient” levels to collaborate with the few actual tourists.

The real concern with AI as it stands shouldn’t be that it will somehow become too smart for human interactions, it should however be that the AI is too dumb to discern the simplest of things if not properly supervised. And since the Metaverse is still a big question mark at best, then there's no real defined role for AI yet, despite its otherwise Axiom of Prosperity hypothesis, which I'll write more about in a different MEMO.

3. New Economy

Meta is well on its way to become MySpace, with Instagram already getting replaced by TikTok and BeReal by zoomers.?

Inside Meta, I know from trusted sources that it’s become a meme to ask people around the campus if they “believe in the metaverse”.

Google and Microsoft are working on their own metaverse projects, but they feel gimmicky, and primarily they use it as an open canvas for talented 3D artists and production companies. At HQ, this is anything but their main focus.

AR/VR sets should have laid the groundwork before the metaverse promise. I know Apple is creating something interesting, but I still don't think it will be a powerful enough system, although it might have a better consumer-centric approach than Meta’s or Sony’s.

Right next door, NVIDIA is more interested in digital twinning, harvesting GPUs for more than just crypto or video games, but neuromorphic architecture aka “digital twins” of human brains.

The new economy isn’t virtual places. It’s data and quantum.

I wish I could say more about it, but imagine a gamified protocological control of asset classes. Yeah.?

To me, that is the real “metaverse” – an algorithmic collective of datapoints used as a scrying mirror that will inevitably lead to metaphysical implications of mirroring organic entities in inorganic realms as “digital twins”.

Data is the new oil, the ethereal residue of life.

4. Human Nature

Society adapts, but ultimately doesn’t change.

The pandemic taught us a few lessons, the most important one being that human interaction cannot be surpassed.

These lessons apply as well to tech:

–VR education isn’t new, and online schooling has had a negative impact on the students’ wellbeing, as well as their development.

–e-commerce Metaverse is exactly the same as web, but with extra steps that add complexity (digital wallets, gas fees, general lack of interest outside of tight-knit communities, etc).

–VR headsets have seen a rise in sales at the beginning of the pandemic but slowly decreased in the summer.

–Streaming was seen as the future of gaming, and that imploded too.

People need genuine things to do in the Metaverse, not just own virtual McMansions. VR cannot exist without some underlying gamification to it, without that context there’s no worth to the micro-transactions.

To put it simply, the general population doesn’t want VR and never will. No one cares about virtual concerts, headset meetings, and all-you-can-MMOs. Moreover, the public sentiment with respect to the Internet has taken a dramatic turn for the worse over the past couple years.?

Living in the modern wold today, we are as close to a technocratic cyberpunk virtual world as Medieval Europeans were to steam engines.

5. Illusion inside the hive

I really do enjoy the unbridled enthusiasm of the web 3.0 communities, don’t get me wrong. I get it. There is lots of potential for crypto, entertainment, gaming, you name it. But is it any different than the enthusiasm for hovercars or the afforestation of Mars or time travel at this point? Not really.

When everything can be tokenized and given digital values, then nothing has any additional value. It's just like another tax added on top of an already inflated economy.

Metaverse is a big collective hallucination right now. It’s LARP for grown adults believing in a sublet matrix – an illusion inside of a superior illusion with an inflated valuation.?

People have completely abandoned any kind of skepticism or critical thinking about technology in its overly pessimistic vision towards our real world. I understand the need of inventing virtual "free" things to keep this Keynesian economics grift going, but this ain't it.

—————

The silver lining is the world doesn't really need the Metaverse.

Go outside, look at the sun.

More IRL Less URL,

-m-