Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Been thinking about making a thread about this, but this article just pushed me over the edge.
www.coindesk.com
There were also a couple good tweets about this, from random people.
One, in response to Facebook, Inc.'s rebranding as Meta, was a declaration that the term "metaverse" officially became boomer.
Another was an explanation of the metaverse less as a place, but more as a gradual transition during which our digital lives become more important than our physical lives.
Anyway there will be a number of technologies, each entailing their own revolutions, that are in the process of converging into an overwhelmingly robust digital reality.
- AI / machine learning, as a means by which we may outsource a significant portion of our cognitive labor, i.e. certain kinds of data analysis. Visual object recognition, content recommendation, etc.
- Video games, already boasting a global market significantly bigger than that of sports or that of film/television, and may eventually dwarf both of these industries combined. Work meetings will be held, at least some of the time, with workplace avatars. Virtual land, as in Decentraland or Upland, will gain value insofar as those spaces can be socially inhabited, thus qualifying as the grounds for markets/marketing.
- Gamification, here defined as the process of engineering an experience to be systematically rewarding or punishing, i.e. establishing and revising the parameters of an experience qua game. This can draw from or otherwise relate to video games, but is far more general and can apply to virtually any socially and/or technologically mediated experience.
- VR / AR, we begin to perceive digital objects enmeshed within the physical world, perhaps an unprecedented technical extension of the mind.
- Blockchain, perhaps especially the utility of the non-fungible token, i.e. the publicly verifiable certificate of digital ownership. It cannot be stressed enough how important this verifiable digital ownership is. Before NFTs, this was largely impossible, to my knowledge. More broadly, blockchain allows unprecedented access to capital markets, as far as I can tell, as well as incremental degrees financial independence as our economy comes to understand and rely upon crypto assets as media of exchange, stores of value and units of accounting.
Blockchain is just a particular, robust protocol, or family of protocols, to be piled onto the internet qua stack of protocols. And there is a sort of network effect to be witnessed, in terms of protocols being added to the internet and unlocking new features, new combinations of features. Every new protocol introduced entails new combinations for all pre-existing protocols.
So we're still early into this, insofar as brain-computer interfaces are still primitive (to my knowledge), insofar as the term "metaverse" itself may seem silly or fantastical, insofar as most humans are not digital natives, and insofar as it is still a niche concept/interest.
It is a bit of a gaudy term, in my opinion, but what it denotes is quite serious and incipient, and will blossom (or metastasize, depending on how you view it) regardless of whether or not you take it seriously.
Really what I'm interested in now is probing potential next steps for a post-metaverse society. What frontiers await us once the premises and innovations entailed by the metaverse are taken for granted, just as the premises and innovations entailed by the internet are now taken for granted?
Barbados to Become First Sovereign Nation With an Embassy in the Metaverse
The Caribbean nation is working with multiple metaverse companies to establish digital sovereign land.
There were also a couple good tweets about this, from random people.
One, in response to Facebook, Inc.'s rebranding as Meta, was a declaration that the term "metaverse" officially became boomer.
Another was an explanation of the metaverse less as a place, but more as a gradual transition during which our digital lives become more important than our physical lives.
Anyway there will be a number of technologies, each entailing their own revolutions, that are in the process of converging into an overwhelmingly robust digital reality.
- AI / machine learning, as a means by which we may outsource a significant portion of our cognitive labor, i.e. certain kinds of data analysis. Visual object recognition, content recommendation, etc.
- Video games, already boasting a global market significantly bigger than that of sports or that of film/television, and may eventually dwarf both of these industries combined. Work meetings will be held, at least some of the time, with workplace avatars. Virtual land, as in Decentraland or Upland, will gain value insofar as those spaces can be socially inhabited, thus qualifying as the grounds for markets/marketing.
- Gamification, here defined as the process of engineering an experience to be systematically rewarding or punishing, i.e. establishing and revising the parameters of an experience qua game. This can draw from or otherwise relate to video games, but is far more general and can apply to virtually any socially and/or technologically mediated experience.
- VR / AR, we begin to perceive digital objects enmeshed within the physical world, perhaps an unprecedented technical extension of the mind.
- Blockchain, perhaps especially the utility of the non-fungible token, i.e. the publicly verifiable certificate of digital ownership. It cannot be stressed enough how important this verifiable digital ownership is. Before NFTs, this was largely impossible, to my knowledge. More broadly, blockchain allows unprecedented access to capital markets, as far as I can tell, as well as incremental degrees financial independence as our economy comes to understand and rely upon crypto assets as media of exchange, stores of value and units of accounting.
Blockchain is just a particular, robust protocol, or family of protocols, to be piled onto the internet qua stack of protocols. And there is a sort of network effect to be witnessed, in terms of protocols being added to the internet and unlocking new features, new combinations of features. Every new protocol introduced entails new combinations for all pre-existing protocols.
So we're still early into this, insofar as brain-computer interfaces are still primitive (to my knowledge), insofar as the term "metaverse" itself may seem silly or fantastical, insofar as most humans are not digital natives, and insofar as it is still a niche concept/interest.
It is a bit of a gaudy term, in my opinion, but what it denotes is quite serious and incipient, and will blossom (or metastasize, depending on how you view it) regardless of whether or not you take it seriously.
Really what I'm interested in now is probing potential next steps for a post-metaverse society. What frontiers await us once the premises and innovations entailed by the metaverse are taken for granted, just as the premises and innovations entailed by the internet are now taken for granted?
