What is the Metaverse For? (and Other Unasked Questions)
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to live local. 🏡
It's probably a paranoid habit really, one which I should unlearn as I grow older and wiser. But I can't help the world in which I grew up, and the behaviors I collected as a result. So whenever it seems like the entire internet is telling me the same thing, all at once and without dissenting voices, my filters immediately begin to scan for hidden information. Or at the very least, I try and find out who, exactly, seems to be so eager to secure my belief.
And this, in short, is why I am so very skeptical right now. Skeptical of the rosy future painted by the Metaverse acolytes that have suddenly rappelled into the zeitgeist, shouting about the future of everything and trading videos of low-resolution video games without the game included. Struck by the double-down heel turn of a certain billionaire who seems to have watched Ready Player One and actually not understood who the villain was. And very underwhelmed by the whole sterile, sad excuse for a future that the internet seems to be terribly excited about right now. Really, this is it? We are going to revolutionize the way information can be created, shared, owned, and distributed, and then use it to build hundreds of cheap multiplayer roleplaying games to toggle between all day long? That's almost as bad as all of the power of the web2 internet being wasted on Twitter and Tumblr. Are we serious about this? Isn't anyone going to state the obvious? Alright, I suppose I don't mind. Let's create a vision of the future that is more exciting, shall we?
We'll start with a thesis: the purpose of web3 technology, of which the Metaverse is only a new offshoot, is to unleash the power that is harnessed whenever we use bits to affect atoms. That's it. My historical analogs here can go back as far as the Reformation or even further to the invention of coinage. Money took a binary concept (I have or I have not stored a value of work) and unleashed it in a new way. Money changed many things in the real world, rearranged empires, opened up the next evolution of capitalism, spelled the eventual end of monarchic societies. And all from what many might argue is an illusion, an unreal concept made real by the use of a technology. The printing press did something similar. Martin Luther's dissent from Catholic theology would have just been the grumblings of an unknown Augustinian if it wasn't for the printing press. The press made ideas into easily accessible physical reality, a bridge between worlds that allowed concepts to have new and shocking influence.
But here's the thing: crypto isn't going to eat the world. Everyone isn't going to have a tech job and sit inside pecking away at code. That would be like a Renaissance noble claiming that instead of farming everyone's new job would just be counting money. Coins didn't become the job, they just became a financialized layer to enable better economic opportunity and living for people. Plumbers aren't going to stop repairing pipes to become web3 developers, but plumbers will own crypto. These tools are going to be at their strongest when we are thinking about them the least.
Let's compare this thesis to the Metaverse future. The focus of the demos and the gushing proclamations is all headed into the digital world, not bridging out from it. If these visions are to be believed, we will put on virtual reality goggles to have meetings with coworkers and use augmented reality lenses to review streams of information about the world around us constantly. We will, essentially, become people who live more in a digital reality than a physical one. Many people seem to be very excited by this prospect. But I cannot help but ask myself: which people? Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who stand ready to extract untold wealth from our every digital interaction. Aging members of a gerontocracy who seek immortality in machines. The disenfranchised and hopeless hoping to find in a new realm what they cannot find in their own. Many people, to be sure, but people who seem to have very specific reasons for the orchestration of a future they present as a natural juggernaut. And meanwhile, many more people, perhaps many of you reading this letter, who do not share their vision. People who are waking up and realizing the dangers of even our current bargains with centralized technology, and see web3 as an offramp, not an onramp.
It's easy enough to rail at the oncoming future and bemoan the fading of our past, so I'll instead try to present my alternate vision. What if the point of web3 technologies, of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, of the Internet itself, was not to engineer a new realm for us to inhabit? What if the best use of a technology is to enable human life, rather than to supplant it? I believe we can measure the humanity of a technological innovation by the extent to which it can carry on by itself enriching our lives, making us more human by its existence. In this rubric, a book is an incredibly human technology, allowing humans to store and impart wisdom and emotion to one another separated by vast gulfs of time and space. Books deepen our lives, filling us with thought and conversation that then sprouts into our relationships and our outlook on the world. A video game would be similar, perhaps less human-friendly due to the habit forming nature and the potential for isolation, but scoring points for its' ability to extend our experiences and portray story and emotion. At the bottom would be social networks which insist on mediating your interactions and extracting every opportunity to monetize your attention.
The beauty of web3 to me is that it has the potential to create a new explosion of human-enabling technologies. Cryptocurrencies are enabling a larger and larger group of people amass and maintain an independent source of livelihood, and the growth of staking and other interest-bearing decentralized finance means that making money can be an app that runs in the background while you go get on with your life. NFTs are being used as keys to enter real-life events and membership cards for tightly knit realspace communities. Decentralized organizations are harnessing all of this potential to do strange and wonderful things, like try to build a city, or try to capture carbon, or try to buy a copy of the US Constitution. This is where the power is, wherever people get together to do real (and very challenging) things in the physical world harnessing digital leverage.
And just at the moment when many are discovering that they don't need gatekeepers' permission or funding to band together, change our small world, make new relationships with like-minded people, the Metaverse explodes into our consciousness. Reheated dreams of virtual reality life from the 80s and 90s combined with an incredibly vogue disdain for simple, small-scale humanity and all of it's local idiosyncrasies. Afraid of the coming future, they rush to peddle yesterday’s shabby dream. In their incredibly privileged and out of touch worldview, they envision humanity gradually ascending away from anything that cannot be recorded, observed, and monetized. Terrified of death and loss and impermanence, they seek a way around the bonds of time and space that confine humans to experiences that cannot be copied for reuse and replication. And what they fear is anyone breaking out of the walled garden and doing things they can't see. Anyone realizing that it is possible to be satisfied with the good that is right in front of them, waiting to be savored. Anyone willing to give up the ever-shifting realm of the possible for the difficult and rewarding reality of the here and the now. If these people are afraid, we must be close to something wonderful.
I can't leave on this note of Ludditism, but of course you know that I believe strongly in the good of technological advancement when used wisely. Even the Metaverse will have it's benefits, if we can treat it like a place we visit rather than a layer to our reality. But I can't help thinking of an observation that has haunted me so long I've forgotten its' original source. Go back and watch movies from the 1990s depicting office life, and spot the computers in the frame. They'll be there, at the edges of the room. On side tables and in nooks, waiting helpers ready to unleash impressive power for specialized tasks. But not on the desk at the center of the room. That clean expanse is reserved for other things. May our lives be so.
WGMI 😎
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered...When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this? ...And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day? ~ C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. ~ Ecclesiastes 5:18