The Metaverse is a broad, undefinable milieu in which you take your disease-ridden social network, add some home-brew virtual reality and more forms of data surveillance, call it an experience and trap people in it. It’s similar to ‘ecosystem’ but attempting to become more encompassing.
It’s starting to encroach into the narrative space of technology, a useful shibboleth for a range of things that no one really knows what they’re for. For example, I recently heard the idea being bandied about by some vacuous shill Shoreditch gallery owner trying to convince students to mint their work as NFTs and let his gallery take a cut or, as he put it, to ‘join the metaverse.’ The fact that none of those components even add up let alone make any moral sense demonstrates how useful a cover something like ‘metaverse’ is for naked profiteering. Now the ‘Metaverse’ is apparently coming according to those most interested in promoting it and has started to appear in keynotes and TV bits as the next apparently inevitable wave of ‘paradigmatic’ technology.
As the article there points out, nebulous prognosticating is a common tactic of boosterism and hype. I spend a lot of time looking at it in regards to so-called artificial intelligence but we also saw it in the Internet of Things for example, and most of us still don’t have smart fridges and smart locks; the case is too difficult to make. Despite that, the snake oil, Bitcoin bros are already moving in, buying and selling land that doesn’t exist, for example, but calling it ‘the metaverse.’
When you predicate your entire model on endless growth, but you’re hitting a ceiling like Facebook is, you sort of have two option: First, you could fundamentally reform, addressing and acknowledging the dependence people have on you to become a more wholesome piece of public infrastructure that enacts its claims of connecting people, information and debate by ejecting organisations that capitalise on your existing structure to profit, create hate and division for political ends or outright scam people and reform around a more open and accountable framework. Or second, you could say that a thing called the ‘metaverse’ is coming and put loads of articles out for your shareholders to read about how you’re going to make trillions of dollars.
The metaverse is season 5 of Lost. The writers are rudderless and throwing in hook after twist, time travel after reincarnation, just trying to hold on to the viewing figures while refusing to admit they actually have no idea of the actual plot.
I was thinking about this yesterday with Strava. I use Strava a lot for cycling stuff, and Strava keeps adding features to try and make it a social network – things like group challenges, meetups and so on. Strava is huge, it probably has most people who are somewhat serious about running, cycling and a load of other sports as regular users but all these people already have social networks. They’re already plugged in to whatever platforms they can confidently exercise self-loathing on so they don’t need another one. Strava has a lot of bugs and problems in the way the things I actually want – fitness data – are interacted with. Last year, they introduced a paid model and lots of people declined to sign up, largely because what you’d be paying for (lots of fitness data crunching) is done better by various free plugins. Rather than fix the broken bits and innovate on the things Strava users want, they tried to pivot to a social network.
So here’s my thought, I can’t tell if it’s just because I’m older and slightly less dumb or maybe it is a genuine shift of the status quo. I really don’t think people have much more patience for feature-loading; adding gimmicks and hype to services to stimulate growth and higher profit. We’ve just seen a massive international effort to turn the tables on a virus, where science and innovation actually saved lives, tangibly and really. Watching multi-billionaires gloat about the metaverse they’re building from their spaceships suddenly undermines their own self-importance. I’m sort of cautiously optimistic (increasingly also by the ad-war of personal security going on between Facebook and Apple) that these charlatans are going to have to take their problems and the problems they’ve created and profit from seriously. Really, really, this time. I just don’t think the consumer patience is there for more bullshit while whole nations burn and genocides are humoured.
Short Stuff
- Some heteromation here from The Boring Company. Techcrunch got hold of the manual for people working on Musk’s Loop including readily prepared answers to questions about the system. Behind every bombastic charlatan is a well-oiled PR machine.
- An alternative to the metaverse – miniverses in Moving Castles from Trust. Also particularly interesting for the idea of kitbashing CGI objects.
Ok, love you, speak next week.