Link: Malevolence of the metaverse
On the metaverse:
Take this quote from the WIRED article:
“If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear on a daily basis—a substantial ‘if’—then perhaps the idea of a virtual poker game where your friends are robots and holograms and floating in space could be somewhat close to reality.”
What an utterly clownish sentence. The substantiality of that ‘if’ is not ‘hey, maybe we’ll work this out,’ but ‘we are not even remotely close to doing this on a very basic level.’ If you’ve used an Oculus HTC, or Sony VR headset, or any other of the various bespoke VR experiences, you will know that they are janky, even if you can get the hardware to fit well.
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The only reason people are giving this term the time of day is because Facebook (successfully) used it to distract from the larger conversation about how much they suck.
On Web3:
Every major influencer-investor - the ones that seemingly do not do anything other than post on Twitter and release 4-hour-long podcasts - has done some sort of 30-tweet thread about how web3 is the future of the economy, but also communities, and that is where the metaverse fits in. Confused? Well, they think you’re an idiot and they’re going to block you if you question it.
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The idea, of course, is that “everybody wins” because the value of a token goes up, and“it’s decentralized and thus no big party wins,“ as long as you don’t think about who has the most tokens, who invested early, and who is or isn’t manipulating the price. The public lie is that you’re playing or participating because it’s a fun game, and because you want to “own your data,” but the reality is you’re trying to “invest” in a system that was built to monetize you.