(2021-08-11) Monahan Techies Think Were On The Cusp Of A Virtual World Called The Metaverse Im Skeptical

Sean Monahan: Techies think we’re on the cusp of a virtual world called ‘the metaverse’. I’m skeptical. I find it interesting that both the centralizers – tech giants whose power and influence rival nation states – and the decentralizers – crypto innovators who remain something of an influential subculture – see the new chapter in technological progress in roughly the same terms: to escape reality.

VR – and AR after it – have run into a continual problem: people mostly like reality. People have liked visual entertainment for as long as there have been screens, for as long as there have been theaters. But, like all entertainment, visual entertainment has its time and its place

Two factors determine whether new technology catches on: capacity and incentive. Not all things that tech can do (capacity), people want (incentive).

Remember Friendster and MySpace? The capacity was there. But what was the incentive? To get people to join his network in droves, Zuckerberg added two ingredients that the earlier social networks lacked: exclusivity and status.

Facebook in the early days was additive. It was where you found friends before you arrived on campus

what does the metaverse add to everyday life?

A new youth survey by Dazed reports that just 9% of Gen Zers want to stay on social media; fatigue with digital substitutes for real life may be even broader than just the Zoom-fatigued legions working from home.

Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, with his Sauron-like ambition to own the One Ring to rule them all, seem like the worst choice to put in charge of building a new world. I’m more sympathetic to the crypto community’s nascent interest in the metaverse. The promise of crypto, it seems to me, is its potential to spark decentralization in an already overly centralized world, to play Gutenberg to the next generation’s Martin Luthers. The metaverse proposes a smoothed-out and rationalized version of our messy and chaotic world.

Why the Metaverse Won't Happen. One struggle in sitting down to prove out my position that the metaverse will not happen is the difficulty everyone has defining it. As I say in the piece, we resort to science fiction metaphors: Neuromancer, The Matrix, Snow Crash, Ready Player One. When you point out that virtual reality (VR) has a long history (dating back to the pre-Internet 80s!) of promising a lot and delivering little, people inevitably say “Well, the metaverse isn’t VR!” BUT THEN WHAT IS THE METAVERSE?

AR (Augmented Reality)

These gained popularity around 2016-2017. But since their media blitz a few years ago, I haven’t seen a huge number of options build out these two basic uses: games and toys

MR (Mixed Reality)

XR (Extended Reality)

This is the merging of the three: VR, AR, and MR. See the diagram below:

WHERE IS THE METAVERSE?

the profusion of terms adjacent to VR just feel like iterations on the original concept.

The central conceit of the concept seems to be that consumers want more information, all the time. After a year of Zoom conferences, I’m skeptical of this

I want less information clouding my field of vision when I am consulting. I am much more focused (DeepWork) pacing around and smoking a cigarette. Glued to a chair, my brain is split between listening to my clients, watching notifications whiz by in the corner of my screen, and looking at myself in the mirror. (Why be bothered managing facial expressions, pondering if it’s a bad hair day, when you can be thinking?)

The sooner we realize multi-tasking should be more correctly termed constant distraction, the better. And the sooner we realize this, the sooner it becomes clear, the metaverse doubles down on current problems, rather than solving them.