A post by the User, from Substack, Nov 24th 2022.
Aside: Hiro, thank you for the ‘10 Metaverse Commandments’ but drinking alone in the Black Sun is not a good look.
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The Economist recently observed that “a reality check for the metaverse is coming.” It’s a timely headline.
Very soon entrepreneurs, VCs and governments will realise that 3D playable worlds, 1990s graphics and JPEGs on the blockchain do not represent an imminent revolution. An actual metaverse maybe a decade away. I do believe it will be transformative.
In a way, we are all already living in hybrid liminal space, generationally stuck in the old world of nation-states, even as networks encroach on our everyday existence. Allow me to explain and describe what I mean.
A couple of hours ago, I was in a store somewhere on the grey and unhappy island of the United Kingdom. I browsed the newspapers: train-strikes, postal-strikes, energy-hikes, tax-rises, liberals, conservatives, celebs and foreign wars.
Aside from a feeling of total disenfranchisement, the headlines arrested me because they seemed strange and irrelevant. Morally and geographically, as a citizen of a nation-state, I had been told I should care. I don’t. Why?
Millions of young people already live in a reality in which events on the network are often more consequential, than events in their own communities.
In many ways the FTX crash is a more consequential story – certainly historically – than the financialization of the United Kingdom, which has been in permanent economic crisis since 2008.
The swift and completely unrelated scrutiny applied to Binance in the aftermath of the FTX scandal, is less about ‘regulation’ and far more about the future balance of global financial power. Technology, particularly financial technology, is becoming the central arena of intra-state competition.
Meanwhile, an entire generation in the States is locked to twitter, watching Elon Musk spend $44 billion to become imperator of the West’s most influential social network.
The purchase of twitter has given Musk control over a critical communication resource, even allowing him to demonstrate magnanimity toward Presidential candidates. Twitter is transforming from a town square for Marxists into a colosseum ruled by one man.
So where I am going with all of these disparate threads?
Millions of young people already live in a reality in which events on the network are often more consequential than events in their own communities.
While luckier more wholesome souls are still connected to the daily news of nation-states, they are dimly aware that something imperceptible is shifting. Great changes are afoot.
None of us are currently living in the metaverse. Instead, we are living in a precursor moment, where the network now significanctly overlaps with our political, financial and cultural reality.
On the coattails of the FTX Crash, Mastercard, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and others launched a 12-week experimental digital dollar pilot (CBDC!) with the New York Fed.
None of us are currently living in the metaverse. Instead, we are living in a precursor moment, where the network now significanctly overlaps with our political, financial and cultural reality.
The beginnings of a supra-national, digital age, are being erected around us. Be it in payments, identity, networked communication or new cultural movements, the metaverse will at some point merge with this new architecture that is being developed, and imposed, around us.
