The Event Horizon of Digitalisation.

Facebook recently announced that it will be known as 'Meta', and this re-branding came with the announcement of a major investment (circa 10,000 new staff) in an area that will develop the 'Metaverse' an entirely new digital experience, that promises to be immersive. Que 'Ready Player One' and just about any sci-fi fan's wild applause.

We are on the road to effectively re-creating our reality within a parallel (mirror) digital universe. Imagine a stargate, a doorway to a virtual world. Now imagine a long que of people and things waiting to go into it, and to find their digital counterpart within the other side.

We began by taking money, a physical thing that used to mean something in the gold standard, but became an abstract concept since the 1970s when the gold standard was abandoned. It was easy to transfer this asset over because already it was a strange abstract thing, and we could easily represent in a digital footprint. The advancement of electronic banking, payments, foreign exchange, just reinstated the idea that money was now a digital thing, and Blockchain took it further and enhanced its capabilities to travel and be untraced even more so. But importantly, electronic payments made the physical entity that is money redundant.

The communication between us first became digital with the telephone and radio, transforming and carrying our voices to entertain and chat. Later the images, in the form of television, and videos and phone calls. The recording and playback of audio and visual became represented and imprinted into the digital world. It was akin to what books did to our knowledge and stories, it transformed them from being spoken in the context of a roaring fire, to fixed with ink on a page, in a book written centuries ago. This was transforming our humanity of course, but in a convenient way.

The most recent incarnation are social media platforms, trying to digitalise mass societal communication (not just 1-to-1 communications), and the meta-verse is a more recent incarnations to embed more of the experience (from audio, digital to touch perhaps) into its digital counterparts. To effectively find the mirror universe of our activities.

We then invented 'digital ants', kind of little exploratory agents in our economy that went around, trying to figure out what could be converted into digital version of itself.. looking for activities, for things, for anything really. These are SaaS companies today. They are well funded, there are enormous numbers of them, and they are all trying to find activities or things that they can take into the digital meta verse, and improve. Searching for things, marketplaces, corporate tools and so on are all on the possible lists. For some, their digital counterparts aren't yet advanced to take over the real-world activity. For others, they are close, and just looking for wide scale adoption.

These ants (SaaS companies) are fighting for our attention, our data, our 'activities' to be transformed and to be scalable. The winners of these transform from ants to horses with horns (you see what I did there), while many others labour away. This new industry, populated by talented product managers and designers, takes us willingly to a new prosperous place where our frustrations are eased and melted away by the click of a few buttons. We go willingly because the successful companies make our lives easier, more beautiful, and more worthwhile, even if in a digital way. We no longer exercise muscles like crafting a letter, or wait patiently for a response, nor the activity of persistent search, because if we cant find it in the first few pages of Google.. well.. it probably isn't there.

The long trail of ants carries our experiences up to the land of the digital universe (metaverse) is in the clouds. Geo-location co-ordinates in 3D space, something that we rely on to help us 'fix' physical things in our universe, will be handled by Blockchain, embedded and locating not only assets, and the building blocks of the digital world, but also its ideas, its IP and its secrets. It will serve as our gravity, our three dimensional space construct.

For sci-fi fans, the digitalisation is a coming true of popular stories like Tron. A world integrated within the digital fingerprint. With all of our activities (including me writing this note for you) now intermediated by the digital media that I choose, screened, and filtered. The trend is clear that we are slipping into this alternative universe (and reality) of digital mirror activities, and mirror assets.

Even the voicing of the idea of metaverse this week, as a corporate, investible and profitable project is an important acknowledgement that we are nearing an event horizon of digital experience that will be indistinguishable from the real (que existentialist anxiety from Elon Musk). It doesn't have to be today, but it is within a generation or two. It's aim is what it has always been: to find the digital counterpart in all our activities and things of value.

It is a sweeping technology, and in capitalism, it is driven by the massive economies of scale achieved through the digital distribution network that is the internet. AI and similar technologies will bond closely with these assets and services to make them 'more': more attractive, easier, quicker, smarter, and faster. They will come to remember us more.

And the ants carry us, and all of our bags, and experiences, and tasks, and skills, and voices.. indeed the sum of our digital humanity, into this mirror dimension.. And we follow.