Meta X

Writing in their seminal thesis on the Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore lead us to Cafe Ke’ilu or roughly translated from Hebrew - Make Believe Cafe. Situated on the trendy Senkin Street in Tel Aviv this is an experience unlike any that you will come across. Conceived by the Swiss Chef Phillip Kaufman Cafe Ke’ilu charges $3 during the week and $6 on Fridays for the privilege of ordering from a would-be menu of eel mousse, salad of pomegranates (in season) or ram’s brain in lemon-lime sauce. Except that guests don’t get served anything but empty plates and mugs.

Manager Nir Caspi said customers have been coming again and again for the world’s first experience in “conceptual dining.″ The point, according to its creators is that: people come to cafes to be seen and meet people, not for the food and drink. And Cafe Ke’ilu seems to have taken that approach to its logical conclusion. Visitors are welcome, as long as there are tables available and white-gloved waiters will serve them with plates and cups of nothing.

For some, the point of the metaverse reminds them of an evening spent in Cafe Ke’ilu. Just like when I see my young son spend endless hours in Minecraft chipping away on imaginary blocks across what seems to me like a featureless digital wasteland. The zeal,? intensity and commitment to engage and participate in a seemingly mindless activity is incredible. When he is off the computer he is on YouTube, you guessed it watching videos of Minecraft that people like him have posted on their channels. I can maybe understand why people visit Cafe Ke’ilu but I sure struggle to figure out what my son finds by spending time in Minecraft.

When I talk to people about the metaverse and its emerging relevance to business and industry, I see a similar sense of bafflement. While many dismiss the space as sheer fiction, something technology companies are trying to foist upon them, others don’t see any need for a business to define a strategy or create a plan for the emerging meta space. Just like how Cafe Ke’ilu would not have made any sense on a spreadsheet. Many - even progressive CXOs don’t seem to find the relevance of incorporating a metaverse play in their medium and long-term planning.

As a digital evangelist for most oft of the last two decades, I am not new to cynicism because in the early 2000’s I did hear the same when I went pitching the web and the possibilities it could create for businesses. And rather than sit here and type: I told you so about the transformative power of the internet and the trillions of dollars in value it has unlocked, the metaverse will unlock even more exponential and far more disruptive changes.?

Here then are a few samplers.

The online gaming industry is now bigger than the movie and the music industry combined. If you have not read about it already, in the last decade, the gaming industry has been smashing Hollywood’s earnings out of the park! Just in 2021, the global “Games Market” had a whopping $180Bn in revenue. According to Marketwatch Grand Theft Auto V raked in $6Bn, that's more than the $2.4Bn that the highest ranking movie Avatar earned.

God, State, and Network. ?As Balaji Srinivasan argues in his new book, The Network State that a new kind of decentralised government will be built on the blockchain. The core idea here is that the organizing poofr by physical proximity has lost its relevance in a fully immersive digital world. We now have more in common with members of our favoursubredditddit or Discord channel and he thinks people who are a part of these groups could morph into small, “tax” paying experiential communities of newly formed network states.

The Metaverse will transform healthcare. AI and robotic surgery are already at work taking high-end healthcare services to areas where they could not have traditionally reached. A VR game EndeavourRX became the first prescription-strength video game that won FDA approval to fight ADHD in children. Elsewhere headset-enabled VR therapies are being used to help treat patients with chronic pain.

The workplace will see dramatic disruption with the coming of immersive collaborative offices. Distributed and hybrid work is here to stay. While many have reaped the benefits of pandemic-induced remote work, many people, myself included, think that remote working is not conducive to creative business. However, startups like Spatial - dubbed ‘The Metaverse of Culture” by its creators is changing that.

Think EdTech startups are hot? You haven’t seen the coming of AR and VR-enabled education startups! Gig XR is busy building mixed reality healthcare applications for clinical training and education mimicking internal organs of the human body and helping students understand how they function inside the body, without having to work with real patients. Other companies are taking learning to places it’s never been to before.

I could go on. But I am limiting the possibilities of what a meta future holds by my own lack of knowledge and imagination.?

Switching back to the original premise of this post - the experience economy and how another way of looking at is to put experience up there in zone of self-actualisation as defined the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The metaverse many think of it as Cafe Ke’ilu or Make Believe but for the metamotivated, a term coined again by Adam Maslow is the place for people who go beyond the scope of basic needs and strive for constant improvement.