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The author is confusing many things. If the metaverse is interconnected spaces, it requires federated protocols. The Internet relies on BGP and TCP/IP for that,

The author is confusing many things. If the metaverse is interconnected spaces, it requires federated protocols. The Internet relies on BGP and TCP/IP for that, with strong decentralized governance (via LIRs and RIRs and the IETF). The author claims Minecraft is an interoperable protocol, which is false: you can only run Minecraft where Microsoft distributes it (unless you crack/RE it) and you can certainly not expand the protocol. Minecraft is a very good example of vendor lock-in restricting user freedom. > FaceTime has taken a huge step forward in connecting people How so? What did it invent? Everything we do on computers today has been there since at least 1968's "Mother of all demos". If anything, FaceTime and iMessage and such have restricted people connections. We had standard protocols for IM (IRC/XMPP) and they deliberately broke away from the federation so that they could capture and control users. > This is not a winner-take-all, zero-sum environment. Video, text, images and other forms of media will not die as a result They may not die, but there's concerns to be raised. About accessibility first and foremost: text may not be accessible to blind people, but screen readers and braille screens make it so. Audio/Video can use transcripts and captions to be accessible. What about VR? Does VR care for disabilities? If VR tech becomes successful, there will be huge incentives for the usual evil corps to move everything there to appear modern and to better control our attention span. More immersion means more addiction, means more exposure to advertisement and more susceptibility to various "mind control" techniques. > But the metaverse actually (theoretically) allows for more fairness due to the decentralized nature of it. How is it decentralized? You make this argument over and over again yet all corporations pushing for the metaverse have never promoted a decentralized standard so far. > YouTube and TikTok have enabled people from unprivileged backgrounds to make money from providing value That's true for some people, but that's the exception and not the norm. Most people who make money don't make interesting content (just sponsored shit), and most people who make interesting content will be censored due to alleged copyright violation of ToS abuse. Youtube and Tiktok are two very good examples of everything that's wrong with the Internet as we know it. You may or may not agree with Youtube's political censorship, but you will certainly agree that TikTok's censorship is going really far. [0] > My conclusion and refutation of this point is that cross-compatibility is not bullshit. (...) We still text today, but we still video call too! The word you're looking for may be interoperability. And interoperability goes against the laws of capitalism. People use many different protocols and most are centralized proprietary protocols we have zero control over. I really recommend you check out Cory Doctorow's talks on interop and monopolies. > So yes, progress is a good thing, first of all. Depends how you measure progress. Is it financial? Scientific? Based on happiness? Equal access to resources? According to most metrics (except economic development) humanity has been going backwards for decades, destroying everything it touches. > technophobia and pessimism of technology I'm neither technophobic nor a pessimist. I'm a realist: i know humanity is capable of the best and the worst depending on the circumstances and incentives. There's a lot that's deeply broken about our society as it is, and i see the "metaverse" being pushed by the most evil actors out there. It cannot be for the betterment of humankind because the incentives are wrong to start with. If you're looking for a metaverse project that's not a complete dystopian nightmare, it appears Spritely Goblins [1] is the only one worth considering, because it aims to be federated and standardized, and based on capabilities. [0] https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-... [1] https://gitlab.com/spritely/goblins https://gitlab.com/spritely/goblins

rvz 5y ago
> ...is THE only one worth considering, because it aims to be federated and standardized, and based on capabilities. So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta? After looking at the proposals, I really hope it isn't the only one. We need more. Either way, the metaverse has multiple winners.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta? Not really. I'm saying VR is mostly a waste of resources, and that competing against big corp is useless because the system is rigged in their favor. We need to change the system, otherwise we're all doomed (see also End:Civ). Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me), i'm saying that Spritely Goblins is the only project i've read about that is not explicitly designed to abuse/exploit people. There may be others, but i'm not aware of them. Of course that doesn't mean that Spritely protocol can't be abused (like WWW), but it's to my knowledge the only protocol that fits the author's vision of what the metaverse should be (federated and extensible).
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    > Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me) Because that is what Neal Stephenson called it in _Snow Crash_, which, though perhaps not the very first, was at least the first widely-popularized description of such a system. I recommend reading the book and comparing it to what we actually have. What we actually have comes up pretty short.
    - matthewdgreen 5y ago
      I'm a huge fan of Stephenson, but: William Gibson's Neuromancer (trilogy) is probably more deserving of credit for initially popularizing the idea of a virtual shared environment. Wikipedia gives credit to Vinge's 1981 "True Names", but Neuromancer alone has sold more copies than that book and all of Stephenson's novels combined, not to mention that it won the Hugo and Nebula.

rvz 5y ago

> ...is THE only one worth considering, because it aims to be federated and standardized, and based on capabilities. So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta? After looking at the proposals, I really hope it isn't the only one. We need more. Either way, the metaverse has multiple winners.

southerntofu 5y ago
> So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta? Not really. I'm saying VR is mostly a waste of resources, and that competing against big corp is useless because the system is rigged in their favor. We need to change the system, otherwise we're all doomed (see also End:Civ). Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me), i'm saying that Spritely Goblins is the only project i've read about that is not explicitly designed to abuse/exploit people. There may be others, but i'm not aware of them. Of course that doesn't mean that Spritely protocol can't be abused (like WWW), but it's to my knowledge the only protocol that fits the author's vision of what the metaverse should be (federated and extensible).
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me) Because that is what Neal Stephenson called it in _Snow Crash_, which, though perhaps not the very first, was at least the first widely-popularized description of such a system. I recommend reading the book and comparing it to what we actually have. What we actually have comes up pretty short.
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    I'm a huge fan of Stephenson, but: William Gibson's Neuromancer (trilogy) is probably more deserving of credit for initially popularizing the idea of a virtual shared environment. Wikipedia gives credit to Vinge's 1981 "True Names", but Neuromancer alone has sold more copies than that book and all of Stephenson's novels combined, not to mention that it won the Hugo and Nebula.