Because humans are notoriously incapable of dealing with the universe as it is I suspect that people will flee into the parallel universe and ultimately prefer to live out their lives in that space and diving back into reality only when necessary--- like for routine maintenance.
They already tend to do that on the antisocial media now so I see that as devolving into millions of parallel universes perhaps launching attacks on other parallel universes. A Metaverse populated by Metatrolls.
Bottom line no one has given me a single rational argument for what this "visionary" effort is supposed to do or why one should go there.
I have found ways of managing Facebook and Twitter so that they remain enjoyable experiences for me. I voluntarily emulate the utilitarian focus that the CPC has imposed on social media in China. The Metaverse just looks from the outside like a black hole wasting time and energy.
Social media is pretty toxic, in general--but then human socialization is often toxic even in person. It is just easier to be toxic online--you are far less likely to get punched in the face and you are often essentially anonymous... this allows people to let their inner a-hole have a bit more free rein.
Humanity has come up with a lot of things that we would probably be better without, social media and what comes from it down the line are just the latest additions to that long list. The primary characteristic of most of the things on the list is that they made money for somebody.
Even that sceptic letter is nowhere screptical enough. Most of crypto is simply smoke and mirrors. There appear to be a handful of peoplle with endless fake online companies that create the illusion of a market. Wildcat bank Tether provides free money to the exchanges, which are co-owned by same people, which wash trade to create fake numbers and steal actual money from the rubes. Hell even the cofounder of the Quadriga scam recently reappeared running a defi fund.(because there is little actual cash in the system) Its a massive miasma of fake numbers, all in the hopes of pulling in a little real money in exchange for virtual casino chips. Its amazing because its so blatant, and you can see every version of a scam happening daily.
If you got some time, the following YouTube video is a great watch, and explains it all. Plus gives a great overview of the crypto/NFT craze, how it connects to the Great Recession and how bad the idea of the idea of putting everything on the blockchain is. At the end of the day, crypto/NFTs remain a Greater Fool exercise.
LOL, on your column today. Fifty years ago, I was stressed to keep up with the then hip ways. Since then, my wanting to keep up the social culture waned, especially after learning teaching high school for ten years. I knew all the news and music of the social sphere via Rollin g Stone magazine.
Since my mid-thirties, my interest in social culture and "hipsterdom" waned accordingly to becoming more parochial, first in Los Angeles scene, and then in Boston.
In the latter, I was dragged into the social culture maelstrom in the 1990s when my daughter was born. I needed to reconnect, so as not to embarrass her (which I did anyway - sorry Alexandra)
Today, after recently entering my 70s, my only connection to the current social hipness is reading the cartoons in The New Yorker.
People are so enamoured of technology and now, dependent. All of us. Truly a malevolent djinn's bottle. We can try to drop out and live real lives close to the natural world, but the majority of humans (on this continent anyway) want/are trained to want the technological future. I could not accept it, but it's going to overtake me anyway.
I am well aware that my age demo--75 to dead--inclines me to negativity about such radical "innovations" as crypto and all its manifestations. But my 50 years of involvement with markets gives me a sound basis for skepticism. When a "financial product" has no utility beyond naked speculation and covert criminality, I simple KNOW this cannot end any way but badly. Of course people reading of the obscene gains by the very early adopters of Bitcoin, etc. has fueled this extreme speculation. Given the undeniable fact that far more purchases of these instruments take place at elevated prices than at those initial low prices will, over time, guarantee that more money will be lost than gained from them.
Seriously. The metaverse is likely to be a big dumb joke, riiiight up until it isn't. Just like how Facebook itself was a dumb photo website my generation jumped on in college before it was colonized by racist Boomers and psychpaths and pedophiles and evil bots and became a Human Misery Factory.
Stupid things can ultimately be evil once they gain enough mass and momentum and reach. No reason the Metaverse ("Snow Crash" is an excellent novel, btw) can't be a menace *and* a farce.
Not sure if I feel the trade off of keeping in touch with friends is worth the political implications of social media. Yes, nice to see what long lost friend is doing, but not worth it overall and most of those relationships are still very distant in that we don’t share real time or life together. Looking at posts does not equal a relationship. That not even considering the absolute time suck that social media is. I dropped facebook a while ago. Don’t really miss it.
Never got into soc. media for pretty much those reasons myself. Even my adult children have now dropped out for the most part. Suck is the operative word, not just concerning time.
Do we not already lead "parallel lives" online to one extent or another? I mean how much of your work life happens online, JVL? And the rest of you all at The B? And how much interaction of a social nature takes place there as well? My youngest daughter is a manager at a commercial insurance company. She has been working from home 40+ hours per week for a couple of years now. She took a position with a new company several months ago and has met company flesh & blood IRL exactly twice; once when she interviewed for the position, and once when they sent her to her "office" in the city and showed her where her desk was for what they said was only a slight possibility that she would end up working there in the future.
My online "life" has a much smaller footprint than many. My job doesn't happen online, and I'm pretty much an outdoors type when home. But this time of year, with temps at -3 to -7 at my horse barn at daybreak for the past week and a high today of 17, indoor time greatly surpasses outdoor time, and here I am with my backside on the couch pecking at the keys, and perhaps sometime today a connection will be made with another key-pecker and a brief exchange of thought will take place. There's a phone on the end table at my elbow. I could pick it up and call someone, but who? Most of my acquaintances are co-workers whom I see through the week, and the friends I have are of the sort who have lives not conducive to long phone conversations and who live too far away to visit IRL with any frequency. A couple of them I stay in contact with through email more than anything else.
Will any of this online "living" be enhanced by some hi-techy 3D avatars skittering about on my screen or in a visor or head gear of some sort and doing in the end God knows what? No. If I felt the need for "face time" in the virtual world, there's already Zoom and the like. But why have the "real thing" in the way of a face and a voice when you can have a snazzy tech imitation, no doubt programmable for its own unique voice complete with a chosen accent and a cache of colloquialisms for any occasion, y'all?
The Metaverse is a farce, being promoted and created precisely because "...tech has run out of things to sell." Like so much the tech world has brought us, it's no more than a gimmick, in the end of little use other than perhaps entertainment for some. But it's also a menace, threatening to further depersonalize and cheapen online human contact, which in some ways is far too impersonal and cheap already. It's also a menace because as with any hi-tech gimmick there's the potential - potential hell - there's the certainty that it will come to be used in some diabolically nefarious way. Think not?
Remember when remote control toy cars and the like were just coming onto the scene? How long ago was that? Recently read about an exercise in which one operator controlled 100+ devices of one type or another, prowling or flying around on some test range. Can anyone say robot-swarm? How 'bout a swarm of deep fake 3D misinformation-spewing avatars? What kind of mischief might those get up to?
Of course, this is all quite predictable and expected, since Mr. Z's mantra is pretty much any modern-day tech capitalist's mantra...anything for a buck, with no worries about where the buck will stop if the whole thing goes south.
Yeah. And as I believe Twain's famous zeugma proclaimed, also children. So, as the world's population grows, and we all become more "familiar" with each other through the 'net and the "connectedness" it provides, contempt will probably not limp in catching up and growing in quantity. Considering the ocean of contempt sloshing around social media already, I shudder to think what may be in the offing if this whole Metaverse thing takes hold and actually goes somewhere and decouples connectedness and interaction even more from being "human". Not as likely to feel contempt for someone IRL eyeball to eyeball for some minor difference as opposed to in the virtual world where they are no longer flesh and bone but only some digital representation in word and form. Happily, I'm sure I won't be around long enough to see that happen. But still, it's a gloomy prospect.
One reason I enjoy the company of my equine and canine companions so much. No agendas (other than feeding time), no judgement other than whether you're to be "trusted" or not (and they're always pretty quick to figure that out). No lies. And, once created, genuine bonds that unfailingly endure all. Not that there aren't humans I know with these traits. But if there were a few more of them than there are, I'd probably have made a few more real and genuine friends from the host of friendly acquaintances I've had over the years. Which number exactly the same as the number of nags standin' around out back at the moment, plus the dog: 3. A cornucopia in this day and age of shallow and tenuous interpersonal connections.
As you noted in your other comment, friendly acquaintances are good. And I'm quite glad to have the many that I do, both here online and IRL. But you just can't beat the real McCoy when it comes to friends. Or good and faithful companions. And there ain't no 3D or AI or virtual or digital anything that will ever change that.
I was one of the early adopters who was high on the potential of the internet and global community potential. It didn't seem so impractical at the time- in the earlier days there was just a lot of random bouncing around and connecting with people, because the content was sparse compared to the inundation we have now.
For a young man growing up in a rural region, the internet was a boon because for the first time in my life I could go out and find people to talk to about the sort of esoteric things that interested me, on a level that couldn't be found locally. On any given subject, I didn't have to go very far to find somebody who knew vastly more about the topic than I did. So there is some hindsight nostalgia. And that still is a factor- people who otherwise couldn't find a space due to physical or social isolation now have a place where they can connect.
The problem with things like Meta (and what ultimately borked the whole flattened global community concept in the first place) is that fear and anger are good for marketing. Algorithms slice us up and transport us directly to material designed to emotionally manipulate us. "If it bleeds, it leads" is axiomatic for a reason- good news doesn't sell. Stability and security as present conditions don't sell.
Meta (and Youtube, and Twitter, etc.) don't maintain engagement with broad audiences by engendering peaceful, harmonious discourse. People breaking barriers, communicating, and resolving disagreements doesn't pay.
On the other hand, videos with catchy titles like "(Commentator of my political orientation) CRUSHES (viewpoint or political commentator of opposing orientation)" do sell.
The problem is not necessarily the medium, anymore than television, radio, or newspapers were the problem. The problem is that we have a marketing machine that has evolved for a couple of centuries now to punch our buttons- to wind us up into perpetual states of agitation, then offer us balms of false assurance.
Ultimately this leads us down the path of seeing that an ethos that places profitability over social responsibility leads to social destruction.
Indeed, the real "problem" is seldom the medium, but what that medium enables us to do, with no practical fail safes against human nature or the vulnerability of that nature to the marketing machine you described. Hit the nail on the head with that one. Props.
I'm a believer in the metaverse but it won't be Zuck's metaverse. It's inevitable really. Human-to-human communication, both one-on-one and one-to-many, has gone through a couple of generations already. Roughly, we started with email and other text-based messaging, then we progressed to the web, now we are ready to take the next step.
As with the earlier generations, the metaverse is most likely to involve public, open standards. We're not all going to pile into Zuck's ad-filled universe. It will likely consist of multiple metaverses, though they'll often be connected together via some sort of portal. Just as YouTube, Twitter, and other websites all are offered via the web, we will have multiple metaverses that will link together. No one metaverse could possibly deliver for every person and every application. The ability to create online universes is its best feature. As with the web now, metaverses will have things in common so that people can move smoothly from one to another without a huge learning curve. Video games have this already. They are often built on common game engines and must work with multiple gaming systems and the buttons on their controllers but also offer a unique, but not too unique, experience.
WebXR is a standard that may be part of this new metaverse. Right now it is a web standard for virtual and augmented reality. I can don my Oculus Quest 2 headset and visit 3D worlds given a URL. It's primitive now but it will develop fast.
Because humans are notoriously incapable of dealing with the universe as it is I suspect that people will flee into the parallel universe and ultimately prefer to live out their lives in that space and diving back into reality only when necessary--- like for routine maintenance.
They already tend to do that on the antisocial media now so I see that as devolving into millions of parallel universes perhaps launching attacks on other parallel universes. A Metaverse populated by Metatrolls.
Bottom line no one has given me a single rational argument for what this "visionary" effort is supposed to do or why one should go there.
I have found ways of managing Facebook and Twitter so that they remain enjoyable experiences for me. I voluntarily emulate the utilitarian focus that the CPC has imposed on social media in China. The Metaverse just looks from the outside like a black hole wasting time and energy.
Social media is pretty toxic, in general--but then human socialization is often toxic even in person. It is just easier to be toxic online--you are far less likely to get punched in the face and you are often essentially anonymous... this allows people to let their inner a-hole have a bit more free rein.
Humanity has come up with a lot of things that we would probably be better without, social media and what comes from it down the line are just the latest additions to that long list. The primary characteristic of most of the things on the list is that they made money for somebody.
Even that sceptic letter is nowhere screptical enough. Most of crypto is simply smoke and mirrors. There appear to be a handful of peoplle with endless fake online companies that create the illusion of a market. Wildcat bank Tether provides free money to the exchanges, which are co-owned by same people, which wash trade to create fake numbers and steal actual money from the rubes. Hell even the cofounder of the Quadriga scam recently reappeared running a defi fund.(because there is little actual cash in the system) Its a massive miasma of fake numbers, all in the hopes of pulling in a little real money in exchange for virtual casino chips. Its amazing because its so blatant, and you can see every version of a scam happening daily.
BTFD, FOMO, TINA, and WAGMI. LOL.
Hate when a title is a goddamn riddle.
If you got some time, the following YouTube video is a great watch, and explains it all. Plus gives a great overview of the crypto/NFT craze, how it connects to the Great Recession and how bad the idea of the idea of putting everything on the blockchain is. At the end of the day, crypto/NFTs remain a Greater Fool exercise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Relieved to see it's a multiple choice Jeopardy... Ummm... I'm gonna go with Fate of the World for a gajillion dollars... What is a MENACE?
Doesn't the crypto craze reveal the same spiritual sickness as the day-trading craze?
LOL, on your column today. Fifty years ago, I was stressed to keep up with the then hip ways. Since then, my wanting to keep up the social culture waned, especially after learning teaching high school for ten years. I knew all the news and music of the social sphere via Rollin g Stone magazine.
Since my mid-thirties, my interest in social culture and "hipsterdom" waned accordingly to becoming more parochial, first in Los Angeles scene, and then in Boston.
In the latter, I was dragged into the social culture maelstrom in the 1990s when my daughter was born. I needed to reconnect, so as not to embarrass her (which I did anyway - sorry Alexandra)
Today, after recently entering my 70s, my only connection to the current social hipness is reading the cartoons in The New Yorker.
The metaverse: Menace or farce?
Do we really have to accept the future our tech overlords are preparing? Especially since nobody seems to desire it.
People are so enamoured of technology and now, dependent. All of us. Truly a malevolent djinn's bottle. We can try to drop out and live real lives close to the natural world, but the majority of humans (on this continent anyway) want/are trained to want the technological future. I could not accept it, but it's going to overtake me anyway.
I am well aware that my age demo--75 to dead--inclines me to negativity about such radical "innovations" as crypto and all its manifestations. But my 50 years of involvement with markets gives me a sound basis for skepticism. When a "financial product" has no utility beyond naked speculation and covert criminality, I simple KNOW this cannot end any way but badly. Of course people reading of the obscene gains by the very early adopters of Bitcoin, etc. has fueled this extreme speculation. Given the undeniable fact that far more purchases of these instruments take place at elevated prices than at those initial low prices will, over time, guarantee that more money will be lost than gained from them.
😎
'¿Porque no los dos?'
Seriously. The metaverse is likely to be a big dumb joke, riiiight up until it isn't. Just like how Facebook itself was a dumb photo website my generation jumped on in college before it was colonized by racist Boomers and psychpaths and pedophiles and evil bots and became a Human Misery Factory.
Stupid things can ultimately be evil once they gain enough mass and momentum and reach. No reason the Metaverse ("Snow Crash" is an excellent novel, btw) can't be a menace *and* a farce.
Not sure if I feel the trade off of keeping in touch with friends is worth the political implications of social media. Yes, nice to see what long lost friend is doing, but not worth it overall and most of those relationships are still very distant in that we don’t share real time or life together. Looking at posts does not equal a relationship. That not even considering the absolute time suck that social media is. I dropped facebook a while ago. Don’t really miss it.
Never got into soc. media for pretty much those reasons myself. Even my adult children have now dropped out for the most part. Suck is the operative word, not just concerning time.
Do we not already lead "parallel lives" online to one extent or another? I mean how much of your work life happens online, JVL? And the rest of you all at The B? And how much interaction of a social nature takes place there as well? My youngest daughter is a manager at a commercial insurance company. She has been working from home 40+ hours per week for a couple of years now. She took a position with a new company several months ago and has met company flesh & blood IRL exactly twice; once when she interviewed for the position, and once when they sent her to her "office" in the city and showed her where her desk was for what they said was only a slight possibility that she would end up working there in the future.
My online "life" has a much smaller footprint than many. My job doesn't happen online, and I'm pretty much an outdoors type when home. But this time of year, with temps at -3 to -7 at my horse barn at daybreak for the past week and a high today of 17, indoor time greatly surpasses outdoor time, and here I am with my backside on the couch pecking at the keys, and perhaps sometime today a connection will be made with another key-pecker and a brief exchange of thought will take place. There's a phone on the end table at my elbow. I could pick it up and call someone, but who? Most of my acquaintances are co-workers whom I see through the week, and the friends I have are of the sort who have lives not conducive to long phone conversations and who live too far away to visit IRL with any frequency. A couple of them I stay in contact with through email more than anything else.
Will any of this online "living" be enhanced by some hi-techy 3D avatars skittering about on my screen or in a visor or head gear of some sort and doing in the end God knows what? No. If I felt the need for "face time" in the virtual world, there's already Zoom and the like. But why have the "real thing" in the way of a face and a voice when you can have a snazzy tech imitation, no doubt programmable for its own unique voice complete with a chosen accent and a cache of colloquialisms for any occasion, y'all?
The Metaverse is a farce, being promoted and created precisely because "...tech has run out of things to sell." Like so much the tech world has brought us, it's no more than a gimmick, in the end of little use other than perhaps entertainment for some. But it's also a menace, threatening to further depersonalize and cheapen online human contact, which in some ways is far too impersonal and cheap already. It's also a menace because as with any hi-tech gimmick there's the potential - potential hell - there's the certainty that it will come to be used in some diabolically nefarious way. Think not?
Remember when remote control toy cars and the like were just coming onto the scene? How long ago was that? Recently read about an exercise in which one operator controlled 100+ devices of one type or another, prowling or flying around on some test range. Can anyone say robot-swarm? How 'bout a swarm of deep fake 3D misinformation-spewing avatars? What kind of mischief might those get up to?
Of course, this is all quite predictable and expected, since Mr. Z's mantra is pretty much any modern-day tech capitalist's mantra...anything for a buck, with no worries about where the buck will stop if the whole thing goes south.
"a menace, threatening to further depersonalize and cheapen online human contact"--this. well said.
Thank you.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Yeah. And as I believe Twain's famous zeugma proclaimed, also children. So, as the world's population grows, and we all become more "familiar" with each other through the 'net and the "connectedness" it provides, contempt will probably not limp in catching up and growing in quantity. Considering the ocean of contempt sloshing around social media already, I shudder to think what may be in the offing if this whole Metaverse thing takes hold and actually goes somewhere and decouples connectedness and interaction even more from being "human". Not as likely to feel contempt for someone IRL eyeball to eyeball for some minor difference as opposed to in the virtual world where they are no longer flesh and bone but only some digital representation in word and form. Happily, I'm sure I won't be around long enough to see that happen. But still, it's a gloomy prospect.
One reason I enjoy the company of my equine and canine companions so much. No agendas (other than feeding time), no judgement other than whether you're to be "trusted" or not (and they're always pretty quick to figure that out). No lies. And, once created, genuine bonds that unfailingly endure all. Not that there aren't humans I know with these traits. But if there were a few more of them than there are, I'd probably have made a few more real and genuine friends from the host of friendly acquaintances I've had over the years. Which number exactly the same as the number of nags standin' around out back at the moment, plus the dog: 3. A cornucopia in this day and age of shallow and tenuous interpersonal connections.
As you noted in your other comment, friendly acquaintances are good. And I'm quite glad to have the many that I do, both here online and IRL. But you just can't beat the real McCoy when it comes to friends. Or good and faithful companions. And there ain't no 3D or AI or virtual or digital anything that will ever change that.
Both farce and menace.
I was one of the early adopters who was high on the potential of the internet and global community potential. It didn't seem so impractical at the time- in the earlier days there was just a lot of random bouncing around and connecting with people, because the content was sparse compared to the inundation we have now.
For a young man growing up in a rural region, the internet was a boon because for the first time in my life I could go out and find people to talk to about the sort of esoteric things that interested me, on a level that couldn't be found locally. On any given subject, I didn't have to go very far to find somebody who knew vastly more about the topic than I did. So there is some hindsight nostalgia. And that still is a factor- people who otherwise couldn't find a space due to physical or social isolation now have a place where they can connect.
The problem with things like Meta (and what ultimately borked the whole flattened global community concept in the first place) is that fear and anger are good for marketing. Algorithms slice us up and transport us directly to material designed to emotionally manipulate us. "If it bleeds, it leads" is axiomatic for a reason- good news doesn't sell. Stability and security as present conditions don't sell.
Meta (and Youtube, and Twitter, etc.) don't maintain engagement with broad audiences by engendering peaceful, harmonious discourse. People breaking barriers, communicating, and resolving disagreements doesn't pay.
On the other hand, videos with catchy titles like "(Commentator of my political orientation) CRUSHES (viewpoint or political commentator of opposing orientation)" do sell.
The problem is not necessarily the medium, anymore than television, radio, or newspapers were the problem. The problem is that we have a marketing machine that has evolved for a couple of centuries now to punch our buttons- to wind us up into perpetual states of agitation, then offer us balms of false assurance.
Ultimately this leads us down the path of seeing that an ethos that places profitability over social responsibility leads to social destruction.
Indeed, the real "problem" is seldom the medium, but what that medium enables us to do, with no practical fail safes against human nature or the vulnerability of that nature to the marketing machine you described. Hit the nail on the head with that one. Props.
I'm a believer in the metaverse but it won't be Zuck's metaverse. It's inevitable really. Human-to-human communication, both one-on-one and one-to-many, has gone through a couple of generations already. Roughly, we started with email and other text-based messaging, then we progressed to the web, now we are ready to take the next step.
As with the earlier generations, the metaverse is most likely to involve public, open standards. We're not all going to pile into Zuck's ad-filled universe. It will likely consist of multiple metaverses, though they'll often be connected together via some sort of portal. Just as YouTube, Twitter, and other websites all are offered via the web, we will have multiple metaverses that will link together. No one metaverse could possibly deliver for every person and every application. The ability to create online universes is its best feature. As with the web now, metaverses will have things in common so that people can move smoothly from one to another without a huge learning curve. Video games have this already. They are often built on common game engines and must work with multiple gaming systems and the buttons on their controllers but also offer a unique, but not too unique, experience.
WebXR is a standard that may be part of this new metaverse. Right now it is a web standard for virtual and augmented reality. I can don my Oculus Quest 2 headset and visit 3D worlds given a URL. It's primitive now but it will develop fast.