18 ms·

The Great Bifurcation

153 points by oedmarap 5y ago

rajekas 5y ago
I agree with the thrust of this article, especially this line: "For a long time I felt somewhat unique in this regard, but COVID has made my longstanding reality the norm for many more people. Their physical world is defined by their family and hometown, which no longer needs to be near their work, which is entirely online; everything from friends to entertainment has followed the same path." The unbundling of physical and digital reality is certainly happening, but I also think new forms of rebundling are also happening. Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX. To see what's happening as only: 1) "the real world is the combination of the digital world and the physical world and that the real world is not just the physical world." or 2) "the Metaverse is the set of experiences that are completely online, and thus defined by their malleability and scalability" is to downplay the combinatorial possibilities of dis-aggregating and recombining the digital and the physical. It feels to me that a certain 'computational style' is becoming widespread tacit knowledge and shouldn't be identified only with the digital/online/virtual.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  It wasn't until you mentioned texting your daughter in the next room that I realized that I've been doing the same with my wife. On several occasions I'll be in the living room, she'll be in the bedroom, and we'll text each other about what to eat for dinner. It never occurred to me to ponder about that sudden change in behavior.
  - f38zf5vdt 5y ago
    I had been doing this way before the pandemic. Sometimes family members are wearing headphones and such, it just seemed polite.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      On the other hand, knocking on my door is the only way to get my attention when I'm at my desk. Typically, I'll have my headphones on and my phone out of view (but not in my pocket).
- simonh 5y ago
  I think the author is stretching the separation of the online world from the 'real world' to support the bifurcation thesis. The online world isn't a separate reality or separate world. 'This is a place with no need for traditional money, or traditional art; the native solution is obviously superior. To put it another way, “None of this real world stuff has any digital world value” — the critique goes both ways.' The Metaverse isn't a computer game, or at least isn't only a computer game made up of entirely imagined content. As an extension of the internet it's primary purpose is to do away with the physical separation and distance between real world people and resources. Fundamentally networks are communication systems, whether it's a telephone network, the Web or the Metaverse. It's about taking resources that are physically distributed all around the world and making them function as though they were right next to each other, re-composing them in different ways. The first phase was to allow you to log on to a server anywhere in the world, instead of only the one in your building. The next step with the Web 1.0 was to link and re-compose documents regardless of what server they were located on. The next step with web 2.0 was to give access to applications running on any server anywhere, rather than just applications installed on your local computer. Social media was another phase which did for interpersonal relationships and communication what the original web did for documents. The Metaverse doesn't really add any new capabilities here, it's just a new user interface. It's a VR browser instead of a web browser. It's not a new world anymore than the combination of facebook and twitter are a new world, they're not, they're just a way for real world people to talk to each other. With the Metaverse they will virtually stand next to each other instead. My kids already do this in Minecraft, Valorant and LoL. The bifurcation thesis works in terms of businesses, and that's what Stratechery is about, but the article doesn't actually analyse the business implications of any of this.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bckr 5y ago
    > It's a VR browser instead of a web browser Does this actually exist? My impression is that the Met*verse is just a marketing term for something that doesn't exist yet
- sidpatil 5y ago
  > Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX. Back in the mid-to-late 20th century, it used to be a luxury to have a whole-home intercom system. Eventually, the functionality was subsumed by cordless telephone systems. Texting someone in the next room over just feels like the next step in the evolution of intercom.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  COVID-driven bifurcation is still uncertain in how "sticky" it will be. With much of the initial panic over and many people getting vaccinated, there's already a little backtracking to old habits, along with the people who never changed their habits much in the first place through their resistance to COVID precautions. I'd be surprised if we ever went fully back to a pre-COVID status quo, but I think the changes will be significantly slower.
nickdothutton 5y ago
At this stage in development of a new “space” or perhaps I should say “plane of existence” in the case of meta, you need to get as far away from regulation as possible. There will be many casualties, as there always are in pioneering endeavours, but these are just a necessary part of advancement.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Which is - of course - easy to say when it is not the sailors themselves who are subject to the suffering.
- gostsamo 5y ago
  Are you ready to be the casualty?
  - nickdothutton 5y ago
    At times in my career I have been a “pioneer”, at times a “settler”, and at other times a “town planner”. While university friends took up offers from Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, I started work at one of the first ISPs. Terrible pay, zero benefits. Funding the company partly on our own meagre personal credit limits, but the thrill of building something from scratch that we were sure would change the world and that should be built. If not us then who? We thought. It worked out well for us, but most others didn’t make it.
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      This is the version where you take the risk, pay the price, and/or reap the rewards. When we talk about casualties, there is another story for people who didn't take the risk, did not reap any rewards, but paid the price anyway. When we talk about externalizing the costs, those are the people meant to pay them. So, excuse me, but when someone talks about inevitable casualties while enthusiastically pushing against regulations, it means that they do not intend to be the casualty and are looking for ways to push someone else under the bus. Progress is something wonderful, but it should prove itself before us, not we in front of it.
f38zf5vdt 5y ago
As the online world socially envelopes our subjective view of reality, is anyone else who grew up predominantly online simply dropping out? I've been spending more time on my meatspace hobbies, watching TV and movies, and generally avoiding interactions with the internet outside of work. I feel better for it and like I had been wasting so much time before on internet arguments and getting dopamine-hits from outrage based media experiences.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  If I were a betting man, I'd bet that some upcoming generation (maybe the one after Gen Z but who knows) will turn away from the digital world.
- bttf 5y ago
  I experienced a similar transition, albeit this was over 10 years ago. I've come to realize that a balance between both meatspace and hyperspace ends up being most satisfying. For me, the former was very valuable in introducing new experiences (learning and playing music, construction projects, hobbies like hiking and surfing), but the lack of cognitive and 'online' stimulation will make itself apparent over time.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Yes, but I'm not entirely sure it is related. The reason I think I've taken up more real-world hobbies and moved farther away from online stuff is that it seems like everything online these days is trying to sell me something. If not a product, then a scam, or FOMO about some new fad, or the latest conspiracy theory, or outrage about some thing or another. I don't think it used to be this way, it used to be a place I could go to hang out with people who had similar interests and talk about them. Theoretically that's what this place is and it still seems like people are trying to sell me shit all the time (mostly blockchain nonsense, web frameworks, and cloud services). Has it gone this way because of the ever-increasing monetization of it? I'm inclined to think so, but it's also possible it's just the natural result of becoming more widely used. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
- handrous 5y ago
Rastonbury 5y ago
I still cannot see any reason I'd want to connect any identifier or avatar across different online worlds apart from gaming. Am I missing something? For sure Meta wants to connect everything so it has a whole picture of its users so it can serve ads but why would people be compelled to connect their discords/linkedin/facebook or whatever personas when a key part of the web is anonymity, I don't even use the same handles for hn/reddit
- jasondigitized 5y ago
  It seems to me that Reddit would be a far more interesting place if you had separate identity with its own reputation / karma per subreddit.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    That's one of the nice things about StackOverflow/StackExchange. On the flip side, some (maybe most? all?) communities are tyrannical about the question/answer format and the discussion forums on SO/SX are pretty awful. Why can't everything be exactly the way that I want it?
- larrysalibra 5y ago
  Because you might want to leverage the reputation, credibility and following you built in one online community to another. Example: I learned about patio11 here on HN and was impressed by him actions in this community which lead me to follow patio11 on Twitter. I agree that one of the great things about the internet is that you don't have to have the same identity in different communities. It's optional. Facebook's business model gives them a strong incentive to remove that optionality.
  - Rastonbury 5y ago
    He's patio11 though that's his identifier like any in-game name, it make no difference if used as a username or as a 'metaverse' identifier. If I want to verify metaverse user 102372193, I'd go to their profile hoping they've linked their twitter
strict9 5y ago
I'm glad he addresses Stephen Diehl and his anti-crypto screeds. Nearly all of Diehl's criticism is some form of “None of this digital stuff has any real world value.” But the thing is, this digital stuff does have value to the people that own them. Diehl's opinion that the value is zero does not make it true. It's very reminiscent of Clifford Stoll's articles. Stoll was a brilliant engineer and writer, but a terrible predictor of the future. "Why the Internet will fail" is probably Stoll's most famous column.
- maxwell 5y ago
  Terrible predictor? "While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Stoll basically says (in 1995 when he wrote that) none of what we actually got will happen. He's laughably badly off, almost "But my Bible says the world will end in 2012" wrong. Stoll even mentions other predictions he suggests are ludicrous, but which of course came true - not because those other predictors were extraordinary but because it was already fairly obvious and Stoll doesn't see it. "Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." Or here's Stoll explaining that Amazon isn't possible: "Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople." This follows a pattern Stoll has. He has no imagination, given the ingredients for a cake, and the tools, and a recipe, and an oven, Stoll can't imagine a cake will result. If it could, thinks Stoll, there surely would already be a cake, there isn't, so making a cake is ipso facto impossible. Stoll won't try, and he's astonished that anybody else would. Here's the fun thing about that last one by the way. Stoll wrote this piece after Netscape shipped SSL. It wasn't yet popular enough that Stoll would definitely have known about it, but far from being an unpredictable future it was an all-too real present. Yes it's SSL 2.0 and SSL 2.0 is insecure, but that's what we know now in the present where TLS 1.3 is used for transactions underpinning a huge fraction of the global economy. When Stoll dismissed this as impossible it's not because he knows SSL 2.0 is insecure, it's because he can't even conceive of its existence, even though Netscape have it working. I think the average non-pundit can't imagine announcing new predictions after being wrong. But for a pundit this isn't even embarrassing. Metcalfe literally ate the speech where he'd said he would eat his words if he was wrong, then immediately made the exact same false prediction. They don't learn, because they pay no price at all for being wrong. They are, in fact, completely useless for this reason. When Warren Buffet invests in X, that's going to cost Buffet money if he's wrong. So, he doesn't make a habit of being wrong over and over without learning anything from it. Pundits like Thompson or Stoll don't care if they're wrong, they pay no price whatsoever for never learning from their mistakes, so why would they do so? Clifford Stoll seems like a nice guy, I bought one of this products years ago, perfectly satisfied, but he is, in fact, lousy at predicting the future.
lumost 5y ago
My two cents. Great proclamations of vaporware often come before a tech reset - be they VR, AI over reach, future money, or some other boondoggle that everyone is meant to love but actually sucks and people hate. Facebook is pivoting to a non existant technology, and no one even knows whether anyone would want it if it existed. Everyone is dumping dollars on self driving cars and other AI tech that Keeps missing deadlines. As long as there is free money, tech companies will burn it trying to invent the future. But at some point, if the illusion is pierced, everyone will just see a money pyre.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  > Facebook is pivoting to a non existant technology, and no one even knows whether anyone would want it if it existed. This is not true. The tech exists, Facebook is creating hoopla about a VR video game to distract from its offenses and to dissuade regulation. You can’t regulate something that is undefined. I don’t disagree with the rest of your point.
  - lumost 5y ago
    The Metaverse FB is pitching is either a ridiculously over-hyped video game, or vaporware. Arguably there may not be a difference. In the media, the main reference has been the "snowcrash" novel or "ready player one" level of immersion. Which is tech we fundamentally lack a reference for how to build.
    - yepthatsreality 5y ago
      Again, “level of immersion” is subjective to what? How good the graphics can be? How much rumble your hardware has? If Zuckerberg was smart he’d aim for something closer to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
      - chrstphrknwtn 5y ago
        The one ad that I saw for Meta (The Tiger & The Buffalo / this is going to fun) certainly make the "metaverse" look like it's supposed to feel like drug-induced hallucinations.
m0llusk 5y ago
Health care records seem to be outside this vision as they are inherently connected to the physical world yet invaluable for both epidemiology and marketing.
throwaway_2009 5y ago
Agree with the idea that the physical and digital worlds are bifurcating. The main way I see it is in discourse, and particularly the way in which people seem to believe "their way" is the only way, when actually they're just in a bubble. Comments here allude to it. Many people have been diving into the virtual world since lockdowns became mainstream. But many others have gone the complete other way - many of the groups I'm in have been rejecting technology more and more because they now value human experience far more. This is only one example, but as far as I can tell, these two groups are almost completely at loggerheads now, the other side just seems baffling to them.
bluetomcat 5y ago
I am utterly confused about the visions for the Metaverse. Would it be a parallel economy where people can find work, start businesses, buy and sell "3D" property, talk to audiences in an imaginary 3D world? Or probably some kind of a channel that substitutes in-person meetings and social life? In both ways it looks like a dangerous proposition where some arbitrary company defines your reality and the rules of life, the available forms of expression, the available actions, etc.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  I think the idea is that it's all of the above. Facebook is trying to create an all encompassing space that effectively replaces the internet.
  - dcist 5y ago
    It will be censored, curated, moderated, and filtered by Facebook. No thanks.
humanistbot 5y ago
I'm of the age that I remember getting sucked in to the Second Life hype. MMORPGs were also becoming popular, and there was this narrative that "virtual worlds" were on a rocketship to the future. Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble. Now I guess we call virtual worlds "the metaverse" and think it'll be different because people have to buy an expensive and uncomfortable VR headset?
- deleted 5y ago
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- sofard 5y ago
  I seriously wonder whether there will be a cultural rebellion against the digitization of our lived experiences. It seems like everyone (even the youngest who grew up in a fully digital world) feels like we're on this path to black mirror dystopia, but there's yet to be a collective awakening/action to combat it. It wouldn't surprise me if down the road there's a cultural movement that decides "we're opting out of all this"
  - patwolf 5y ago
    I'll gladly be part of a movement to opt out of this. I tend to be very selective about technologies I let into my life. My wife hasn't always shared my view, but the metaverse she agreed doesn't need to be part of our lives. I hope the bifurcation is real because that will make it easier to keep the metaverse separate from the real world.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > on this path to black mirror dystopia A bunch of episodes of Black Mirror aren't really even about the future. They're criticism of things right now (or, rather, when the episodes were made).
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      It seems safe to extend this comment to all episodes of every TV show.
boringg 5y ago
I like Ben's writing but this one seems a bit of a stretch for me. I do like the bucketing of tech eras. Though in regards to the Metaverse I feel like he might be drinking too much of the kool-aid. Metaverse feels like google glasses to me without any of the actual quasi benefits/hard-tech that google glasses created. That and Zuckerberg has killed any good will to build a project with such grandiose vision with the general public. And any experience to unite it under one roof seems a bit optimistic.
motohagiography 5y ago
How does one bet against the Metaverse? People hating on Web3 appear to do so because they aren't makers. They persuade and complain, but they don't build or risk. The Metaverse is just another centrally planned architected model that must be imposed from above. From what I can tell, that's just fancy communism meets Bentham and Taylor, all for your own good surely. The current platform owners are just not cool enough to pull it off. Nobody wants to be them. Facebook mainly worked because it had the Eros of a demographic bump from rich, elite college students. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_(concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_(concept) ) When it started, it had the one thing everybody wanted. Now it does not, and economically, it is an inferior good. Instagram will also age out like a boy band. The schools do not have it anymore either. The absolute best the planned Metaverse will achieve is to contain some captive populations, and be a kind of global prisoner entertainment system like television has become. When people say they are doing things "for humanity," it's usually because there are no specific people who actually want what they are proposing. Admittedly it is a familiar conceit, but now I know it when I see it, and I would like to get short.
- nix0n 5y ago
  > How does one bet against "the Metaverse"? Competitors to VR experiences include, real world experiences, and psychedelics.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Nature grows mushrooms free for the picking. That's $1000 less than a silly VR helmet.
    - eclipxe 5y ago
      The Oculus Quest is $299, not $1000.
- wespiser_2018 5y ago
  > People hating on Web3 appear to do so because they aren't makers. That statement is false.
dummydata 5y ago
> This is the type of role blockchains will fill: provide uniqueness and portability where necessary What does portability mean in this context? I assume he just means it's a digital asset so it is inherently easy to move around. I believe a better wording would have been interoperable.
joshuaheard 5y ago
I love the comment about the "real world" being the physical world and the digital world combined. I go back to some of the old computer games I have played, and they seem like real places to me, where I have memories and feel a certain nostalgia. They were certainly a "real experience", even though they were digital. One theory of consciousness is that it is a series of experiences. In that respect digital experiences are real.
olivermarks 5y ago
Blockchain I suspect will have a similar future and history to portable document format (PDF), an important facet of a much larger world, a solution that was originally looking for a problem slotted into an evolving world. Regarding online 'chat' clients, Bloomberg terminals have almost literally been the tool used to run the financial world(s) for decades. Different speeds, different needs...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MR4D 5y ago
> Where I disagree is with the idea that the physical world and the digital world are increasingly “being overlaid and coming together”; in fact, I think the opposite is happening: the physical world and digital world are increasingly bifurcating. Usually I agree with Ben, but on this I think he's dead wrong. For a simple example, text messages are technically virtual, but they arrive on a physical device (your phone). More and more we will see these sorts of interactions increase - whether it's maps displayed on your windshield (or your computerized glasses), the ability to checkout using crypto (Paypal, Visa, etc), or play games (Pokemon Go), we are at the very beginning of the integration of the virtual with the physical.
travisgriggs 5y ago
The majority of this article is history telling, told through the lens of one persons particular narrative, cutting that history up into conveniently sized chapters (1.0, 2.0, etc). Then the article shifts gears to the authors own transition to living in a new place, adapting to that change, and then describing the now as a bifurcated existence (real life proximal, and through the invisible network society/work). The second part would have stood on its own fine and didn’t need the “history as I see it” preamble. I don’t know why authorship on the net, in this bifurcated space, has to choose between tweets and long form. It’s ok to write a longer-than-a-tweet developed point.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
> why wouldn’t you want the most immersive experience possible? That folks potentially don't want the most immersive experience possible would be the thing that will end up burning piles of money and sinking the virtual reality vision of the metaverse that some have. It's not a given that people will want the immersion. After all, Facetime is a relatively extremely niche and rare way to communicate every day when compared to low tech texting.
heisenbit 5y ago
How many different digital selves are we going to fracture? Ben seems to manage 6 different lives. As a rule of thumb a manager can manage about 10 direct reports. Fewer if there is deep interaction and more if there is only a very light touch expected. Other rules of thumb indicate the people may directly interact with around 100. Given that for some thing to become a registered club in Germany one needs 7 people which may well be sensible lower threshold for a long term social endeavor. Combined give a max of 13 social circles. This thinking is reminiscent of Google Groups social circle thinking but on a heterogeneous technical and administrative foundation.
teebs 5y ago
> This gets to the other mistake Diehl makes in that article, which, ironically, echoes a similar mistake made by many crypto absolutists: there is no reason why the Metaverse, or any web application for that matter, will be built on the blockchain. Why would you use the world’s slowest database when a centralized one is far more scalable and performant? It is not as if WhatsApp or Signal are built on top of the plain old telephone service; they simply leverage the fact that phone numbers are unique and thus suitable as identifiers. This is the type of role blockchains will fill: provide uniqueness and portability where necessary, in a way that makes it possible to not just live your life entirely online, but as many lives simultaneously as your might wish, locked in nowhere. Halfway through this paragraph I thought Ben was arguing that phone numbers are a centralized service that shows that blockchain isn't necessary. Instead, he's arguing that blockchain will create "unique portable identities." This is an old vision that many companies have been pushing for a long time - "log in with Facebook" "sign in with Apple" etc. Today, we've pretty much settled on phone numbers and email addresses as a unique, portable identifier (plus accounts from big tech companies). You can even easily create new email addresses if you want multiple identities. Why do we need the blockchain to solve this problem either? Another example of the same thing: he says that it doesn't make sense to use LLCs, which are built for the physical world, in the digital world. He says that the digital world can use DAOs. But, of course, "Stratechery" isn't a DAO - it's an LLC. Meta is an LLC. LLCs are already non-physical, even if they're not purely digital. That's precisely why LLCs were invented - to decouple capital from physical ownership. Why do we need DAOs when we already have LLCs? Is it just that you don't need a lawyer to make a DAO? Ben spends a lot of time in this article arguing that blockchain can be better than centralized services for some purposes - but then fails to argue what those purposes are, in my opinion. To me, conflating the metaverse/VR - which I think is overhyped but has some obvious value - with blockchain - which is a lot harder for me to understand - is a mistake.
- dhosek 5y ago
  What the hell is a DAO anyway? The link on the article was to a paywalled article and I know it only as Data Access Object.
  - 5y ago
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
This is not what I expected, but I guess it tells more about me than anything else given that stratchery doesn't typically cover such subjects. What I thought the subject is going to be about society bifurcation along the traditional 'haves' and 'havenots'. For the record, I am not sure he is wrong. I just went in there with different expectations.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  > What I thought the subject is going to be about society bifurcation along the traditional 'haves' and 'havenots'. Theoretically, isn't metaverse the height of commodity fetishism?
chx 5y ago
He quotes Stephen Diehl but not https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html -- either he missed it or doesn't want to include it because it offers a very sharp rebuke of all things crypto: > Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.
mrkentutbabi 5y ago
I wonder if more and more people will rather be in the Metaverse like Ready Player One, so that real estate and real world prices will crash. I am looking forward for it. After that, maybe I'll buy an Island and create my own country and invite all of my family members that are now scattered in different countries, and build my own kingdom, in the real world, my own rules, my own philosophies. ah.., a man can dream...
ladyattis 5y ago
I just don't see how the metaverse has any more advantages than the virtual worlds of past decades. We've seen it in the mid-90s with many failed companies and only a couple of moderate successes in the 2000s with Second Life and IMVU plus MMOs if you want to expand the definition of virtual worlds to include games. The idea that you can replace the majority of in-person interactions with virtual ones is nonsensical to me; sometimes it's better to let people meet face-to-face. And it just seems to me it's all about puffing up the egos of Silicon Valley executives and letting them evade taxes at the same time thanks to the blockchain angle.
LordFast 5y ago
"In the end, the most important connection between the Metaverse and the physical world will be you: right now you are in the Metaverse, reading this Article; perhaps you will linger on Twitter or get started with your remote work. And then you’ll stand up from your computer, or take off your headset, eat dinner and tuck in your kids, aware that their bifurcated future will be fundamentally different from your unitary past." How is this different than me in 2001 using ICQ to chat with my friends/classmates about life/schoolwork, using Yahoo to read news, using forums to consume content and learn new things, and going out to dinner with my family/girlfriend IRL? How is any of this actually a new paradigm?
- dcist 5y ago
  It's not. It's the same thing, now with a headset and better graphics!
- raydev 5y ago
  Perhaps the new part is that it's now accessible to everyone and not just tech-savvy/nerd-types/households with enough income to blow on a PC.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Which of the things the parent listed are for "tech-savvy/nerd-types"?
    - raydev 5y ago
      I was only aware of a few households that owned a computer in the late 90s/early 00s. And only one had reliable dialup. My closest friend got DSL in 2000-ish. But again, it was because his dad worked from home occasionally. No one else in my large extended family or friendgroup was online in any significant way. Among my peers at school, I think most of them had heard of AIM by that point, but most didn't have screennames. Personally, we couldn't afford a PC at that time.
      - deleted 5y ago
tantalor 5y ago
> Facebook and Twitter represented Social Networking 1.0 No... bulletin boards, usenet, IRC, webrings, livejournals, etc. represented social networking 1.0 The difference is only nerds used those services, whereas FB and TWTR are inclusive to normal people.
bullen 5y ago
There are only two things at play here: money and energy. Money is believed to be finite, but in truth it's infinite. Energy is believed to be infinite, but apparently it's finite. Who could have guessed that coal, oil and gas are stored sunlight that landed on this planet millions of years back. And then you have men that used money and energy to build this computer network and now we realize only 1% of that networks potential has been tapped because software has been bloated 100x since the C64 for zero benefit. We know there is a 100x to be found but we don't really know how, where or when yet, but everyone is FOMOing around to see where the next liquidity hole will be. Better not miss it this time! VR is one of those liquidity trap dead ends, because the more you look at energy and money the more you'll see that you cannot have 90+FPS on two eyes and still afford the electricity bill unless you are ok with Doom levels of details and more importantly only one player (ready player one?). What I believe is the real immersion/presence enhancement is the merger of Everquest and 3D Mario/Zelda. 1000+ player action MMO with real-time physics, no rubberbanding, open-source, open interfaces and fair licensing. Lower energy consumption, the right to make money and since hardware has provably peaked, probably for eternity; you can build something today that lasts potentially forever, it's truly the opportunity of eternity! We cannot print energy, so if you are still working for the old system it's time to quit, everything is a scam except what you build from scratch on the internet. Make sure you have your meatspace sorted before you jump though, meatspace is about to get a special kind of ugly! Reduce your quality of meatspace life to gain your quality of metaspace life. Delayed gratification is the meaning of life.

153 points by oedmarap 5y ago

I agree with the thrust of this article, especially this line: "For a long time I felt somewhat unique in this regard, but COVID has made my longstanding reality the norm for many more people. Their physical world is defined by their family and hometown, which no longer needs to be near their work, which is entirely online; everything from friends to entertainment has followed the same path." The unbundling of physical and digital reality is certainly happening, but I also think new forms of rebundling are also happening. Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX. To see what's happening as only: 1) "the real world is the combination of the digital world and the physical world and that the real world is not just the physical world." or 2) "the Metaverse is the set of experiences that are completely online, and thus defined by their malleability and scalability" is to downplay the combinatorial possibilities of dis-aggregating and recombining the digital and the physical. It feels to me that a certain 'computational style' is becoming widespread tacit knowledge and shouldn't be identified only with the digital/online/virtual.

danielvaughn 5y ago
It wasn't until you mentioned texting your daughter in the next room that I realized that I've been doing the same with my wife. On several occasions I'll be in the living room, she'll be in the bedroom, and we'll text each other about what to eat for dinner. It never occurred to me to ponder about that sudden change in behavior.
- f38zf5vdt 5y ago
  I had been doing this way before the pandemic. Sometimes family members are wearing headphones and such, it just seemed polite.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    On the other hand, knocking on my door is the only way to get my attention when I'm at my desk. Typically, I'll have my headphones on and my phone out of view (but not in my pocket).
simonh 5y ago
I think the author is stretching the separation of the online world from the 'real world' to support the bifurcation thesis. The online world isn't a separate reality or separate world. 'This is a place with no need for traditional money, or traditional art; the native solution is obviously superior. To put it another way, “None of this real world stuff has any digital world value” — the critique goes both ways.' The Metaverse isn't a computer game, or at least isn't only a computer game made up of entirely imagined content. As an extension of the internet it's primary purpose is to do away with the physical separation and distance between real world people and resources. Fundamentally networks are communication systems, whether it's a telephone network, the Web or the Metaverse. It's about taking resources that are physically distributed all around the world and making them function as though they were right next to each other, re-composing them in different ways. The first phase was to allow you to log on to a server anywhere in the world, instead of only the one in your building. The next step with the Web 1.0 was to link and re-compose documents regardless of what server they were located on. The next step with web 2.0 was to give access to applications running on any server anywhere, rather than just applications installed on your local computer. Social media was another phase which did for interpersonal relationships and communication what the original web did for documents. The Metaverse doesn't really add any new capabilities here, it's just a new user interface. It's a VR browser instead of a web browser. It's not a new world anymore than the combination of facebook and twitter are a new world, they're not, they're just a way for real world people to talk to each other. With the Metaverse they will virtually stand next to each other instead. My kids already do this in Minecraft, Valorant and LoL. The bifurcation thesis works in terms of businesses, and that's what Stratechery is about, but the article doesn't actually analyse the business implications of any of this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bckr 5y ago
  > It's a VR browser instead of a web browser Does this actually exist? My impression is that the Met*verse is just a marketing term for something that doesn't exist yet
sidpatil 5y ago
> Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX. Back in the mid-to-late 20th century, it used to be a luxury to have a whole-home intercom system. Eventually, the functionality was subsumed by cordless telephone systems. Texting someone in the next room over just feels like the next step in the evolution of intercom.
ineedasername 5y ago
COVID-driven bifurcation is still uncertain in how "sticky" it will be. With much of the initial panic over and many people getting vaccinated, there's already a little backtracking to old habits, along with the people who never changed their habits much in the first place through their resistance to COVID precautions. I'd be surprised if we ever went fully back to a pre-COVID status quo, but I think the changes will be significantly slower.

nickdothutton 5y ago

At this stage in development of a new “space” or perhaps I should say “plane of existence” in the case of meta, you need to get as far away from regulation as possible. There will be many casualties, as there always are in pioneering endeavours, but these are just a necessary part of advancement.

germinalphrase 5y ago
Which is - of course - easy to say when it is not the sailors themselves who are subject to the suffering.
gostsamo 5y ago
Are you ready to be the casualty?
- nickdothutton 5y ago
  At times in my career I have been a “pioneer”, at times a “settler”, and at other times a “town planner”. While university friends took up offers from Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, I started work at one of the first ISPs. Terrible pay, zero benefits. Funding the company partly on our own meagre personal credit limits, but the thrill of building something from scratch that we were sure would change the world and that should be built. If not us then who? We thought. It worked out well for us, but most others didn’t make it.
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    This is the version where you take the risk, pay the price, and/or reap the rewards. When we talk about casualties, there is another story for people who didn't take the risk, did not reap any rewards, but paid the price anyway. When we talk about externalizing the costs, those are the people meant to pay them. So, excuse me, but when someone talks about inevitable casualties while enthusiastically pushing against regulations, it means that they do not intend to be the casualty and are looking for ways to push someone else under the bus. Progress is something wonderful, but it should prove itself before us, not we in front of it.

f38zf5vdt 5y ago

As the online world socially envelopes our subjective view of reality, is anyone else who grew up predominantly online simply dropping out? I've been spending more time on my meatspace hobbies, watching TV and movies, and generally avoiding interactions with the internet outside of work. I feel better for it and like I had been wasting so much time before on internet arguments and getting dopamine-hits from outrage based media experiences.

danielvaughn 5y ago
If I were a betting man, I'd bet that some upcoming generation (maybe the one after Gen Z but who knows) will turn away from the digital world.
bttf 5y ago
I experienced a similar transition, albeit this was over 10 years ago. I've come to realize that a balance between both meatspace and hyperspace ends up being most satisfying. For me, the former was very valuable in introducing new experiences (learning and playing music, construction projects, hobbies like hiking and surfing), but the lack of cognitive and 'online' stimulation will make itself apparent over time.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Yes, but I'm not entirely sure it is related. The reason I think I've taken up more real-world hobbies and moved farther away from online stuff is that it seems like everything online these days is trying to sell me something. If not a product, then a scam, or FOMO about some new fad, or the latest conspiracy theory, or outrage about some thing or another. I don't think it used to be this way, it used to be a place I could go to hang out with people who had similar interests and talk about them. Theoretically that's what this place is and it still seems like people are trying to sell me shit all the time (mostly blockchain nonsense, web frameworks, and cloud services). Has it gone this way because of the ever-increasing monetization of it? I'm inclined to think so, but it's also possible it's just the natural result of becoming more widely used. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
handrous 5y ago

Rastonbury 5y ago

I still cannot see any reason I'd want to connect any identifier or avatar across different online worlds apart from gaming. Am I missing something? For sure Meta wants to connect everything so it has a whole picture of its users so it can serve ads but why would people be compelled to connect their discords/linkedin/facebook or whatever personas when a key part of the web is anonymity, I don't even use the same handles for hn/reddit

jasondigitized 5y ago
It seems to me that Reddit would be a far more interesting place if you had separate identity with its own reputation / karma per subreddit.
- dhosek 5y ago
  That's one of the nice things about StackOverflow/StackExchange. On the flip side, some (maybe most? all?) communities are tyrannical about the question/answer format and the discussion forums on SO/SX are pretty awful. Why can't everything be exactly the way that I want it?
larrysalibra 5y ago
Because you might want to leverage the reputation, credibility and following you built in one online community to another. Example: I learned about patio11 here on HN and was impressed by him actions in this community which lead me to follow patio11 on Twitter. I agree that one of the great things about the internet is that you don't have to have the same identity in different communities. It's optional. Facebook's business model gives them a strong incentive to remove that optionality.
- Rastonbury 5y ago
  He's patio11 though that's his identifier like any in-game name, it make no difference if used as a username or as a 'metaverse' identifier. If I want to verify metaverse user 102372193, I'd go to their profile hoping they've linked their twitter

strict9 5y ago

I'm glad he addresses Stephen Diehl and his anti-crypto screeds. Nearly all of Diehl's criticism is some form of “None of this digital stuff has any real world value.” But the thing is, this digital stuff does have value to the people that own them. Diehl's opinion that the value is zero does not make it true. It's very reminiscent of Clifford Stoll's articles. Stoll was a brilliant engineer and writer, but a terrible predictor of the future. "Why the Internet will fail" is probably Stoll's most famous column.

maxwell 5y ago
Terrible predictor? "While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Stoll basically says (in 1995 when he wrote that) none of what we actually got will happen. He's laughably badly off, almost "But my Bible says the world will end in 2012" wrong. Stoll even mentions other predictions he suggests are ludicrous, but which of course came true - not because those other predictors were extraordinary but because it was already fairly obvious and Stoll doesn't see it. "Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." Or here's Stoll explaining that Amazon isn't possible: "Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople." This follows a pattern Stoll has. He has no imagination, given the ingredients for a cake, and the tools, and a recipe, and an oven, Stoll can't imagine a cake will result. If it could, thinks Stoll, there surely would already be a cake, there isn't, so making a cake is ipso facto impossible. Stoll won't try, and he's astonished that anybody else would. Here's the fun thing about that last one by the way. Stoll wrote this piece after Netscape shipped SSL. It wasn't yet popular enough that Stoll would definitely have known about it, but far from being an unpredictable future it was an all-too real present. Yes it's SSL 2.0 and SSL 2.0 is insecure, but that's what we know now in the present where TLS 1.3 is used for transactions underpinning a huge fraction of the global economy. When Stoll dismissed this as impossible it's not because he knows SSL 2.0 is insecure, it's because he can't even conceive of its existence, even though Netscape have it working. I think the average non-pundit can't imagine announcing new predictions after being wrong. But for a pundit this isn't even embarrassing. Metcalfe literally ate the speech where he'd said he would eat his words if he was wrong, then immediately made the exact same false prediction. They don't learn, because they pay no price at all for being wrong. They are, in fact, completely useless for this reason. When Warren Buffet invests in X, that's going to cost Buffet money if he's wrong. So, he doesn't make a habit of being wrong over and over without learning anything from it. Pundits like Thompson or Stoll don't care if they're wrong, they pay no price whatsoever for never learning from their mistakes, so why would they do so? Clifford Stoll seems like a nice guy, I bought one of this products years ago, perfectly satisfied, but he is, in fact, lousy at predicting the future.

lumost 5y ago

My two cents. Great proclamations of vaporware often come before a tech reset - be they VR, AI over reach, future money, or some other boondoggle that everyone is meant to love but actually sucks and people hate. Facebook is pivoting to a non existant technology, and no one even knows whether anyone would want it if it existed. Everyone is dumping dollars on self driving cars and other AI tech that Keeps missing deadlines. As long as there is free money, tech companies will burn it trying to invent the future. But at some point, if the illusion is pierced, everyone will just see a money pyre.

yepthatsreality 5y ago
> Facebook is pivoting to a non existant technology, and no one even knows whether anyone would want it if it existed. This is not true. The tech exists, Facebook is creating hoopla about a VR video game to distract from its offenses and to dissuade regulation. You can’t regulate something that is undefined. I don’t disagree with the rest of your point.
- lumost 5y ago
  The Metaverse FB is pitching is either a ridiculously over-hyped video game, or vaporware. Arguably there may not be a difference. In the media, the main reference has been the "snowcrash" novel or "ready player one" level of immersion. Which is tech we fundamentally lack a reference for how to build.
  - yepthatsreality 5y ago
    Again, “level of immersion” is subjective to what? How good the graphics can be? How much rumble your hardware has? If Zuckerberg was smart he’d aim for something closer to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
    - chrstphrknwtn 5y ago
      The one ad that I saw for Meta (The Tiger & The Buffalo / this is going to fun) certainly make the "metaverse" look like it's supposed to feel like drug-induced hallucinations.

m0llusk 5y ago

Health care records seem to be outside this vision as they are inherently connected to the physical world yet invaluable for both epidemiology and marketing.

throwaway_2009 5y ago

Agree with the idea that the physical and digital worlds are bifurcating. The main way I see it is in discourse, and particularly the way in which people seem to believe "their way" is the only way, when actually they're just in a bubble. Comments here allude to it. Many people have been diving into the virtual world since lockdowns became mainstream. But many others have gone the complete other way - many of the groups I'm in have been rejecting technology more and more because they now value human experience far more. This is only one example, but as far as I can tell, these two groups are almost completely at loggerheads now, the other side just seems baffling to them.

bluetomcat 5y ago

I am utterly confused about the visions for the Metaverse. Would it be a parallel economy where people can find work, start businesses, buy and sell "3D" property, talk to audiences in an imaginary 3D world? Or probably some kind of a channel that substitutes in-person meetings and social life? In both ways it looks like a dangerous proposition where some arbitrary company defines your reality and the rules of life, the available forms of expression, the available actions, etc.

colinmhayes 5y ago
I think the idea is that it's all of the above. Facebook is trying to create an all encompassing space that effectively replaces the internet.
- dcist 5y ago
  It will be censored, curated, moderated, and filtered by Facebook. No thanks.

humanistbot 5y ago

I'm of the age that I remember getting sucked in to the Second Life hype. MMORPGs were also becoming popular, and there was this narrative that "virtual worlds" were on a rocketship to the future. Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble. Now I guess we call virtual worlds "the metaverse" and think it'll be different because people have to buy an expensive and uncomfortable VR headset?

deleted 5y ago
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sofard 5y ago
I seriously wonder whether there will be a cultural rebellion against the digitization of our lived experiences. It seems like everyone (even the youngest who grew up in a fully digital world) feels like we're on this path to black mirror dystopia, but there's yet to be a collective awakening/action to combat it. It wouldn't surprise me if down the road there's a cultural movement that decides "we're opting out of all this"
- patwolf 5y ago
  I'll gladly be part of a movement to opt out of this. I tend to be very selective about technologies I let into my life. My wife hasn't always shared my view, but the metaverse she agreed doesn't need to be part of our lives. I hope the bifurcation is real because that will make it easier to keep the metaverse separate from the real world.
- handrous 5y ago
  > on this path to black mirror dystopia A bunch of episodes of Black Mirror aren't really even about the future. They're criticism of things right now (or, rather, when the episodes were made).
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    It seems safe to extend this comment to all episodes of every TV show.

boringg 5y ago

I like Ben's writing but this one seems a bit of a stretch for me. I do like the bucketing of tech eras. Though in regards to the Metaverse I feel like he might be drinking too much of the kool-aid. Metaverse feels like google glasses to me without any of the actual quasi benefits/hard-tech that google glasses created. That and Zuckerberg has killed any good will to build a project with such grandiose vision with the general public. And any experience to unite it under one roof seems a bit optimistic.

motohagiography 5y ago

How does one bet against the Metaverse? People hating on Web3 appear to do so because they aren't makers. They persuade and complain, but they don't build or risk. The Metaverse is just another centrally planned architected model that must be imposed from above. From what I can tell, that's just fancy communism meets Bentham and Taylor, all for your own good surely. The current platform owners are just not cool enough to pull it off. Nobody wants to be them. Facebook mainly worked because it had the Eros of a demographic bump from rich, elite college students. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_(concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_(concept) ) When it started, it had the one thing everybody wanted. Now it does not, and economically, it is an inferior good. Instagram will also age out like a boy band. The schools do not have it anymore either. The absolute best the planned Metaverse will achieve is to contain some captive populations, and be a kind of global prisoner entertainment system like television has become. When people say they are doing things "for humanity," it's usually because there are no specific people who actually want what they are proposing. Admittedly it is a familiar conceit, but now I know it when I see it, and I would like to get short.

nix0n 5y ago
> How does one bet against "the Metaverse"? Competitors to VR experiences include, real world experiences, and psychedelics.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Nature grows mushrooms free for the picking. That's $1000 less than a silly VR helmet.
  - eclipxe 5y ago
    The Oculus Quest is $299, not $1000.
wespiser_2018 5y ago
> People hating on Web3 appear to do so because they aren't makers. That statement is false.

dummydata 5y ago

> This is the type of role blockchains will fill: provide uniqueness and portability where necessary What does portability mean in this context? I assume he just means it's a digital asset so it is inherently easy to move around. I believe a better wording would have been interoperable.

joshuaheard 5y ago

I love the comment about the "real world" being the physical world and the digital world combined. I go back to some of the old computer games I have played, and they seem like real places to me, where I have memories and feel a certain nostalgia. They were certainly a "real experience", even though they were digital. One theory of consciousness is that it is a series of experiences. In that respect digital experiences are real.

olivermarks 5y ago

Blockchain I suspect will have a similar future and history to portable document format (PDF), an important facet of a much larger world, a solution that was originally looking for a problem slotted into an evolving world. Regarding online 'chat' clients, Bloomberg terminals have almost literally been the tool used to run the financial world(s) for decades. Different speeds, different needs...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

MR4D 5y ago

> Where I disagree is with the idea that the physical world and the digital world are increasingly “being overlaid and coming together”; in fact, I think the opposite is happening: the physical world and digital world are increasingly bifurcating. Usually I agree with Ben, but on this I think he's dead wrong. For a simple example, text messages are technically virtual, but they arrive on a physical device (your phone). More and more we will see these sorts of interactions increase - whether it's maps displayed on your windshield (or your computerized glasses), the ability to checkout using crypto (Paypal, Visa, etc), or play games (Pokemon Go), we are at the very beginning of the integration of the virtual with the physical.

travisgriggs 5y ago

The majority of this article is history telling, told through the lens of one persons particular narrative, cutting that history up into conveniently sized chapters (1.0, 2.0, etc). Then the article shifts gears to the authors own transition to living in a new place, adapting to that change, and then describing the now as a bifurcated existence (real life proximal, and through the invisible network society/work). The second part would have stood on its own fine and didn’t need the “history as I see it” preamble. I don’t know why authorship on the net, in this bifurcated space, has to choose between tweets and long form. It’s ok to write a longer-than-a-tweet developed point.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

> why wouldn’t you want the most immersive experience possible? That folks potentially don't want the most immersive experience possible would be the thing that will end up burning piles of money and sinking the virtual reality vision of the metaverse that some have. It's not a given that people will want the immersion. After all, Facetime is a relatively extremely niche and rare way to communicate every day when compared to low tech texting.

heisenbit 5y ago

How many different digital selves are we going to fracture? Ben seems to manage 6 different lives. As a rule of thumb a manager can manage about 10 direct reports. Fewer if there is deep interaction and more if there is only a very light touch expected. Other rules of thumb indicate the people may directly interact with around 100. Given that for some thing to become a registered club in Germany one needs 7 people which may well be sensible lower threshold for a long term social endeavor. Combined give a max of 13 social circles. This thinking is reminiscent of Google Groups social circle thinking but on a heterogeneous technical and administrative foundation.

teebs 5y ago

> This gets to the other mistake Diehl makes in that article, which, ironically, echoes a similar mistake made by many crypto absolutists: there is no reason why the Metaverse, or any web application for that matter, will be built on the blockchain. Why would you use the world’s slowest database when a centralized one is far more scalable and performant? It is not as if WhatsApp or Signal are built on top of the plain old telephone service; they simply leverage the fact that phone numbers are unique and thus suitable as identifiers. This is the type of role blockchains will fill: provide uniqueness and portability where necessary, in a way that makes it possible to not just live your life entirely online, but as many lives simultaneously as your might wish, locked in nowhere. Halfway through this paragraph I thought Ben was arguing that phone numbers are a centralized service that shows that blockchain isn't necessary. Instead, he's arguing that blockchain will create "unique portable identities." This is an old vision that many companies have been pushing for a long time - "log in with Facebook" "sign in with Apple" etc. Today, we've pretty much settled on phone numbers and email addresses as a unique, portable identifier (plus accounts from big tech companies). You can even easily create new email addresses if you want multiple identities. Why do we need the blockchain to solve this problem either? Another example of the same thing: he says that it doesn't make sense to use LLCs, which are built for the physical world, in the digital world. He says that the digital world can use DAOs. But, of course, "Stratechery" isn't a DAO - it's an LLC. Meta is an LLC. LLCs are already non-physical, even if they're not purely digital. That's precisely why LLCs were invented - to decouple capital from physical ownership. Why do we need DAOs when we already have LLCs? Is it just that you don't need a lawyer to make a DAO? Ben spends a lot of time in this article arguing that blockchain can be better than centralized services for some purposes - but then fails to argue what those purposes are, in my opinion. To me, conflating the metaverse/VR - which I think is overhyped but has some obvious value - with blockchain - which is a lot harder for me to understand - is a mistake.

dhosek 5y ago
What the hell is a DAO anyway? The link on the article was to a paywalled article and I know it only as Data Access Object.
- 5y ago

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

This is not what I expected, but I guess it tells more about me than anything else given that stratchery doesn't typically cover such subjects. What I thought the subject is going to be about society bifurcation along the traditional 'haves' and 'havenots'. For the record, I am not sure he is wrong. I just went in there with different expectations.

imbnwa 5y ago
> What I thought the subject is going to be about society bifurcation along the traditional 'haves' and 'havenots'. Theoretically, isn't metaverse the height of commodity fetishism?

chx 5y ago

He quotes Stephen Diehl but not https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html -- either he missed it or doesn't want to include it because it offers a very sharp rebuke of all things crypto: > Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

mrkentutbabi 5y ago

I wonder if more and more people will rather be in the Metaverse like Ready Player One, so that real estate and real world prices will crash. I am looking forward for it. After that, maybe I'll buy an Island and create my own country and invite all of my family members that are now scattered in different countries, and build my own kingdom, in the real world, my own rules, my own philosophies. ah.., a man can dream...

ladyattis 5y ago

I just don't see how the metaverse has any more advantages than the virtual worlds of past decades. We've seen it in the mid-90s with many failed companies and only a couple of moderate successes in the 2000s with Second Life and IMVU plus MMOs if you want to expand the definition of virtual worlds to include games. The idea that you can replace the majority of in-person interactions with virtual ones is nonsensical to me; sometimes it's better to let people meet face-to-face. And it just seems to me it's all about puffing up the egos of Silicon Valley executives and letting them evade taxes at the same time thanks to the blockchain angle.

LordFast 5y ago

"In the end, the most important connection between the Metaverse and the physical world will be you: right now you are in the Metaverse, reading this Article; perhaps you will linger on Twitter or get started with your remote work. And then you’ll stand up from your computer, or take off your headset, eat dinner and tuck in your kids, aware that their bifurcated future will be fundamentally different from your unitary past." How is this different than me in 2001 using ICQ to chat with my friends/classmates about life/schoolwork, using Yahoo to read news, using forums to consume content and learn new things, and going out to dinner with my family/girlfriend IRL? How is any of this actually a new paradigm?

dcist 5y ago
It's not. It's the same thing, now with a headset and better graphics!
raydev 5y ago
Perhaps the new part is that it's now accessible to everyone and not just tech-savvy/nerd-types/households with enough income to blow on a PC.
- detaro 5y ago
  Which of the things the parent listed are for "tech-savvy/nerd-types"?
  - raydev 5y ago
    I was only aware of a few households that owned a computer in the late 90s/early 00s. And only one had reliable dialup. My closest friend got DSL in 2000-ish. But again, it was because his dad worked from home occasionally. No one else in my large extended family or friendgroup was online in any significant way. Among my peers at school, I think most of them had heard of AIM by that point, but most didn't have screennames. Personally, we couldn't afford a PC at that time.
    - deleted 5y ago

tantalor 5y ago

> Facebook and Twitter represented Social Networking 1.0 No... bulletin boards, usenet, IRC, webrings, livejournals, etc. represented social networking 1.0 The difference is only nerds used those services, whereas FB and TWTR are inclusive to normal people.

bullen 5y ago

There are only two things at play here: money and energy. Money is believed to be finite, but in truth it's infinite. Energy is believed to be infinite, but apparently it's finite. Who could have guessed that coal, oil and gas are stored sunlight that landed on this planet millions of years back. And then you have men that used money and energy to build this computer network and now we realize only 1% of that networks potential has been tapped because software has been bloated 100x since the C64 for zero benefit. We know there is a 100x to be found but we don't really know how, where or when yet, but everyone is FOMOing around to see where the next liquidity hole will be. Better not miss it this time! VR is one of those liquidity trap dead ends, because the more you look at energy and money the more you'll see that you cannot have 90+FPS on two eyes and still afford the electricity bill unless you are ok with Doom levels of details and more importantly only one player (ready player one?). What I believe is the real immersion/presence enhancement is the merger of Everquest and 3D Mario/Zelda. 1000+ player action MMO with real-time physics, no rubberbanding, open-source, open interfaces and fair licensing. Lower energy consumption, the right to make money and since hardware has provably peaked, probably for eternity; you can build something today that lasts potentially forever, it's truly the opportunity of eternity! We cannot print energy, so if you are still working for the old system it's time to quit, everything is a scam except what you build from scratch on the internet. Make sure you have your meatspace sorted before you jump though, meatspace is about to get a special kind of ugly! Reduce your quality of meatspace life to gain your quality of metaspace life. Delayed gratification is the meaning of life.