I'm going to be honest, it's really hard to read this with a straight face when our current notion of a Metaverse is nothing more than Roblox and some telepresence apps. Hell, those examples don't even fulfill Matthew Ball's Metaverse definition that they referenced earlier on: both of them lack persistence, data interop, and have hard caps on how many people can inhabit their digital space, K8-scaling be damned.

The biggest issue is that none of the companies investing in the Metaverse truly care about the fundamentals. We're rushing in to buy McRib NFTs on blockchains that may-or-may-not exist in 10 years, and McDonalds is happy to turn a quick buck for selling nothing. Similarly, the companies who see this concept as collectible trinkets are entirely missing the point: NFTs are not a social service, they're a digital one. I've seen a lot of people claim that NFTs solve an issue that doesn't exist, and I frankly disagree. The concept of decentralized digital ownership is a huge conversation that stands to upend our current concepts of DRM and online possessions. The issue? There's a ton of money to be made in preventing you from accessing the stuff you want. Rights holders exist almost exclusively to prevent as many people as possible from attaining persistent ownership of their intellectual property. So long as capitalism is the driving force behind the so-called "Metaverse", you can safely assume that the only meta thing about it is how it's hellish reality exacerbates the issues corporations pose to us in the real world.