You Already Live In The Metaverse
For about ten years we’ve lived in a world where people are happy to check their phone rather than control a two tonne vehicle safely.
“IRL” became secondary to the internet a long time ago. We all construct a persona online and increasingly it’s more real or important than who we are in real life. The most extreme example is the trend for cosmetic surgery to become more filter-like. But even the insane amounts of camera phones that are drawn and held aloft to cover every non-boring moment in civilisation is testament to this.
But this isn’t a rant about ‘being in the moment’.
It’s a rant about the fact that we already live in the Metaverse, that is, a world where we use the Internet as a single, universal and immersive virtual world, the problem is that it’s our world, Planet Earth, that we’ve done it to.
Our lives are secondary to the internet, until atoms and cells cause you problems real problems, like bodily injury, disease, hunger.
Our eyes and ears are already plugged in most of the day to screens and airpods, and we exist as data points in an immense web of services that, for good or bad, have changed the way we live in the last 20 years.
You’re the robot
Even the sci-fi dream of having a personal robot has gone with time. Instead, you and I have become the automatons, fed by a stream of instructions and entertainment from our ears and eyes, which are nearly always ‘online’.
The idea that we’re going to live in a Ready Player One style ‘Metaverse’ (owned by Andreessen Horowitz?) is ridiculous. There will no doubt be more online gaming in the future — fine, but hardly revolutionary.
In today’s web3 dream of an ersatz metaverse, we don’t even get a beautiful virtual reality. It’s like we gave up on the crappy VR experiences of the 90s and now they’ve somehow ironically become ‘relevant’ again. From what I can tell of the gaming world, it’s possible to make photo realistic realities now. So why do these web3 renderings always look like Super Mario’s night terrors?
What should we be building?
A lot of web3 writing gets caught up in high-minded tripe about the human “species” and civilisation.
I dived into web3 and came to some demoralising conclusions, about the tech, the economics, and the politics, but what I didn’t expect was how reinvigorated I became about the state of other tech… ecommerce, fintech, biotech, greentech, spacetech, healthtech and so on.
There is so much good stuff out there that we could be building now, in fact I am so optimistic about tech, despite web3 and the metaverse. Just this week our perception of the actual universe became clearer. Let’s build a Betterverse.
Be good to each other,
web2 boomer
