The Great Bifurcation
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
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?
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).
“The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.”
Some people like VR but they use it at home.
On the other hand, earbuds and smart watches haven't had the same issues.
Google Glass was just too sudden a change. Another decade of eroding our collective sense of privacy and boundaries means it might be more successful now than it was back when we still had some expectation of personal privacy.
As it was, wearing a Google Glass was making several statements: I have acccess to this special thing; I'm going to wear this mostly useless object in a highly visible location on my body; and if actually using it in public, I don't care that having a one-sided conversation with a computer annoys those around me (kind of like talking on a phone/bluetooth headset, but worse). Maybe the camera was the anchor for the issue, but I don't think it was the real issue; I don't recall seeing articles about people being shunned for wearing the Snapchat camera glasses.
If/when we have AR glasses that are reasonably priced and genuinely useful, I'm inclined to think they'll be broadly accepted. Yes, there will be people including some of the people reading this who will be upset about the panopticon-like invasion of privacy associated with always-on cameras everywhere. But they'll be largely ignored just as they are today with respect to video/photos being just a smartphone in the pocket away.
It's easy to forget that less than 20 years ago taking a photo, much less a video, was a pretty deliberate act involving equipment that most people didn't routinely carry with them.
There seems to be a majority swath of humans who get hooked on unproductive hobbies. Drugs, partying, social media, video games. I'm talking HOOKED, dreams framed by the TikTok UI, taking work off to watch a Counterstrike tournament, weeks of back-to-back hangovers.
I mean, I've been there. I too hear the lull of chemical dissociation.
What I'm wondering is, what happens as that lullaby gets louder and brighter and more attractive, in sync with people working less and less as automation forms a mechanical sheen on all economic activity?
I'll just toss this one I caught as I wrote that: You think the opioid epidemic is bad? Is it better or worse for us that our addictions can't annihilate us in an instant? How many people are in their rooms right now, alone, entangled in expensive parasocial relationships and expensive video game habits?
What if people aren't stealing and robbing shit for drugs anymore, but are doing it to donate to their favorite streamer, or buy the new Supreme hoodie or buy a PS5?
Every game developer I've ever known, which is a good number, was a hard core gamer who loved games. Most of them really reduced it as they get older - not just because as you get older you just don't have the time or energy, but because doing something for work just kind of ruins it for most people.
That last bit is very common: my wife is a professional artist and doing that as her profession has just about ruined her interest in painting and drawing despite doing it for a lifetime. I was a hobby coder my entire life until mid-way through my career. Now although I sometimes do short stints, I gotta say, it is kind of ruined for me.
So, sure, you are probably right, but probably for the wrong reasons.
As for "unproductive hobbies" the reality is that all hobbies are basically unproductive. The stained glass artists I know struggle to give away their output because there's only so much anyone around them wants, but their hobby is to produce it. Ditto the painters, woodworkers, etc. Yes, these can give you practice with useful skills, but they're still basically generating a waste product, and if you try selling it, on average, you're just trying to mitigate your losses, piece work is almost never financially sound. This is all to say that one shouldn't view hobbies as "productive" or not, you should view them as providing benefits not directly related to the activity. Hiking, running, cycling, weightlifting - these are all "unproductive" but they are useful practices. Games aren't devoid of value in this sense - hand eye coordination, rapid tactical thinking, etc. are all skills you develop and maintain with practice.
That said, I'm 100% on board with you about the parasocial relationship thing, but to note the obvious, the real elephant in that particular room is social networking in all of its guises. Video games aren't even close, and, if anything, are probably closer to the "real relationship" end of the spectrum than any other online endeavor. I know many gamer groups who have transitioned to real life on multiple dimensions, far more than "hey these are the people i interacted with on Twitter" and other purely ephemeral constructs.
You are correct that social media and online gaming are not the same: I have heard numerous examples of online gaming friendships transforming into real life friendships, but I have never heard of people on twitter/tick-tock/etc forming real life relationships.
I believe that gaming is fine in moderation, but as soon as gaming starts to negatively impact other aspects of your life — personal health, relationships, work/study commitments — you need to cut back. I have seen numerous people squander away their education and futures to video games. I’m guilty myself of letting video games negatively impact my life and it can be hard to find the right balance.
Just don't use it.
5-ish years ago it would be common to see 25-45% of the crowd with their phones up and out recording almost the entire show
Think genetically engineered humans vs. cyborgs; there will be a focus on holistic 'working with' human impulses and neurology instead of 'what can the tech accomplish'?
That'd be my guess.
The expectation windows are set by investors, and I think biology has a good shot at being able to get resources/funding without having to rely too heavily on VCs or investors (think government and academic funding). Likewise, there's no Microsoft, Google, or FB waiting in the wings to buy up/bury any advancements.
I also think we're overdue for some major social changes because our current ways aren't sustainable (regardless of what you think the problems are + what 'side' you're on, I think we can almost all agree that this can't continue). The main problem I think IS that we're too short sighted currently, and we'll have to correct that, so I do think long-term projects will become easier in the early 2030s.
Why is "big pharma" not this?
1.) Geopolitics. I don't imagine this biological cultural flowering to come from the First or Developed Worlds. If I had to guess, I'd say India or Africa, because they have a ton of manufacturing going on (and therefore a bunch of practical knowledge) AND governments that both a.) don't give a shit about copyright or property law outside of their borders and b.) are incentivized to make sure it stays that way.
For example, Moderna could try to bury an Indian biotech company, but how? Literally. So what if they're infringing on one of your patents in making their 'turn your eyes purple' serum? They don't care.
And for buying, yes, they could, but the regulatory differences between acting in the developed versus developing world are huge, so it would be purchasing a company solely to keep the product off the market/so it isn't approved in the developed world before their own version. Okay, so they buy the company... and all the foreigners quit and start a new one. Or they don't, but they tell their friends so their friends who didn't sign an NDA do it and then hire them for something 'unrelated'.
2.) Vertical integration or lack thereof. You know how FB is particularly insidious in the Third World? How it pushes WA, for example? Good luck developing anything tech wise without being bought out or discovered when all of your communication tools are made by the people who have an interest in burying you. The tech companies have done a very good job at integrating themselves into logistics at a base level on a global scale. Pharma, on the other hand, doesn't have this advantage. If Google or Apple ARE recording all my phone calls, they aren't giving that data to Moderna. They'd rather keep it and later try to poach the medical-data business from Moderna or fund some SaaS company.
Does point 1) not apply to tech innovations outside the global north as well? I can definitely see your points about patent infringement being relevant to the Chinese tech ecosystem.
Vertical integration is a really interesting point. It's easy to believe that monopolies are all-powerful, but there's plenty of room in the "margins" in industries which aren't (yet) built on pervasive surveillance.
> I also think we're overdue for some major social changes because our current ways aren't sustainable (regardless of what you think the problems are + what 'side' you're on, I think we can almost all agree that this can't continue).
I'd love to hear more of your POV here - I tend to think things are....pretty okay? In the grand scheme of things?
Change, however, doesn't come based on how good things are. It comes based on what people expect from the future, and right now we have a system that more and more people aren't trusting to be there in a few decades.
From a domestic American POV, we need to address things like retirement funding, healthcare, and political corruption as well as our lack of social cohesion. Imagine a pandemic like COVID but slightly deadlier in the late 2020s; it'd be absurd because EVERYBODY'S blown their good will at this point. Likewise, our supply chains and economy clearly don't have key risk redundancies built in. On a more sociological scale, I note that more and more people are beginning to feel like it doesn't matter what they do because the system will ALWAYS fuck them, and stripping people of agency doesn't lead to good, stable societies.
On a global scale, since the start of the Industrial Revolution we've focused on growth while disregarding externalities and we really need to stop that. Likewise, since America is going to probably go down (or at least knock itself out of the unipolar world) in the 2030s/2040s, I also imagine there will be a backlash to the American Era, including in cultural values, which will also result in big changes.
Cyborg always has the feeling of a severely augmented and strange human. I'm surprised by the number of people who have no interest in Neuralink, and say they wouldn't go near it.
As we're seeing the mental health benefits of sometimes turning off our digital devices and focusing on ourselves, I think this will drive the future of us not being always connected, but being connected when we want to.
I think what you're pointing to is correct, Augmented Humanity, rather than Augmented Reality.
This is a much better way to put it. Also I love some good sleep, so thanks for the link!
Which is sad because I love the idea so much. Plus I remember the Web before advertising, I don't even want to think of what they'd do with NL or the Metaverse. I can see them doing things like trigging shots of adrenaline so I feel appropriately angry viewing 'Red/Blue Team Bad' video stories.
Degen?
I hope the bifurcation is real because that will make it easier to keep the metaverse separate from the real world.
The push to own the metaverse seems like a land grand.
The technology has to be at the point where you can casually wear fashionable glasses which overlay easily readable information.
And other people would need to be OK with the fact that people are wearing said glasses that put them on candid camera at all times.
My theory is that I think the companies that sell these things are just really good at hyping and selling the headsets. I just don't see what the end game is. It's certainly possible that I'm wrong about all this though.
The Daemon series by Daniel Suarez showed an impressive vision of what AR could do in a not-so-distant future where online information is linked to physical entities. The things to make it work like haptic suits or lightweight AR classes with overlays and a HUD are getting fairly close technology-wise.
Can you give some mainstream examples? Anything that has 1mm+ users?
Whatever gripes you have about the space, it is hard to deny the rapid evolution we're seeing due to the influx of investment.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
I think focusing on stupid looking headsets misses the author's point. He's looking toward a decentralization of thought aggregation and how that will impact the 'real world'. Maybe it'll be similar when cable happened and we all stopped watching the same three channels?
That's not to say that the metaverse will take off (I think it still lacks a compelling use case), but many of the parameters have changed.
A lot of dumb things happened in the past, especially with companies that tried to substitute virtual scarcity speculation for an actual business model.
It's easy to mock them for how ridiculous it all is, but I don't see any evidence that Meta is charging down a path of repeating all of the failed business models of years past.
I think a lot of the old timers who have seen hype cycles of past businesses are projecting too much of those old, failed businesses on to this new wave of activities. Everyone is so busy speculating that Meta is going to fail that it's hard to actually understand what they're doing or what their business model really is.
Regardless, it's trivial to see that video games and VR of 2021 are nothing like the Second Life of almost two decades prior. Back then, video games and even computer-based entertainment were a niche hobby. Today, video games are everywhere, VR is cheap, and everyone is already attached to their phones 24/7. I'm interested to see where this goes.
"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.
'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.
Does this actually exist? My impression is that the Met*verse is just a marketing term for something that doesn't exist yet
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think the difference here is the overall human approach to digital and physical lives. In 2001 the line between the two was clear and distinct. Now, for many, those lines blurred, and have blurred hard. Almost to the point to where their online manifestation has become their physical manifestation. Look at the language carryover from online to meatspace. More than once have I heard someone say "el oh el". And not in a sarcastic way. It's only a matter of time before desired physical characteristics bleed over. (Pretty sure it would be pretty easy to make an argument that it already has.)
I can tell you where I grew up (a poorer area), always-on internet access was very much seen as a luxury until the late 2000s. Many of my classmates used the internet at school rather than at home. Now kids in the same (still poor) area couldn't think of not having internet on their phones.
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
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.
That way he can be patio11 across all platforms if he wishes (and doesnt need to worry about getting "patio11" on every new platform that's created). Or, he can just create a subwallet with a different identity but still rolls up into his main wallet.
It also protects against somoene putting their twitter in their profile and pretending to be patio11. i.e.:
Hey HN I'm patio11, here's proof, I linked my twitter: https://twitter.com/patio11
Casually, rather than e.g. legally or as a matter of trademark, I "own" patio11 across all the namespaces because I've put in the work over the years to make people associate that with me. This doesn't necessarily work in reverse; you should probably not assume patio11 DMing you in a Chinese MMORPG is actually me and will actually wire you money if you give them all your dragon eggs.
If I need to auth myself to a savvy technologist in a channel not known to be controlled by me, I don't say "Trust the display name" or "Trust that I also know my username on Twitter." I publish something somewhere where the technologist would know "Hmm compromise of that account would be a much larger problem for him than this transaction." (Bonus: invariably relies on public key cryptography; no blockchain required.)
But those are sites where there's not much value in keeping the same identity for the average person. Only at the very top end is your identity meaningful on some sites.
On Twitter and Facebook, however, I've keep my real name identity for well over a decade. There is value for the average person there to be known by a consistent identifier.
I don't know which approach I'll take with the metaverse. My instinct is that I'm going to want my identity to be quite malleable. In a place that's all about expressiveness (or at least that should be its core purpose) I think I'll want different identities depending on what it is I'm expressing.
I can definitely picture a vibrant market where people trade these things, but compared to the market that Meta dominates now I can only imagine it being tiny in comparison.
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.
A DAO is a piece of code which performs all the functions you would expect an organisation to perform. It, entirely automatically, keeps track of its finances, provides services, and makes sure it has enough tokens to keep running. It can even provide some means for control, perhaps even a voting system. Uploading it to the network makes that piece of code permanent, both unremovable and uneditable. Since it exists autonomously across a network of millions of machine, and behaves like an organisation, we call it a decentralised autonomous organisation.
Then imagine accidentally writing in a bug you didn't catch. Yeah, there goes the DAO. These things have in the past caused major online financial crises because they are code and have bugs.
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.
If not for external pressure to have it, I'd not find it worth ~$1,000/yr for home Internet and ~$400/yr for my cell phone's Internet service. That's a hell of a lot of entertainment money to put toward something else, and that's before you pay for anything on top of it (say, streaming services). In fact, it'd almost be worth paying that much to get my wasted Internet time back (he writes, on HN).
In my teens I couldn't wait to jack straight in to the 'net. Now? Screw it. I'd rather live entirely in meatspace. I think the whole thing's been, overall, a mistake that I wish we could obliterate.
But I'm also keenly aware things will change, so I see this as a foundation rather than a place to stay. You can't just stay fixed in place and expect to have any input on the future. I've been back on Mastodon more since it has a lot of the good parts of past Twitter with less of the bad. I wrote an article that did numbers here called "ActivityPub could be the future." I pulled it since I got a bit cynical about the whole thing, but I might use it as the basis for something new.
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.
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.
Plenty of heretics have been burned through history in the name of advancement to a superior moral plane. Of course, that was horse shit.
The criticism levied against crypto and the meta verse is in a similar vein. To what are we advancing? How do we measure progress? And who wants to go there?
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.
For the record, I am not sure he is wrong. I just went in there with different expectations.
Theoretically, isn't metaverse the height of commodity fetishism?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One theory of consciousness is that it is a series of experiences. In that respect digital experiences are real.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Zuckerberg was smart he’d aim for something closer to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
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...
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) ) 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.
Competitors to VR experiences include, real world experiences, and psychedelics.
That statement is false.
But BTC seems extraordinarily inefficient (~$200 “spent” securing the chain per transaction, and what happens once mining dries up?). ETH seems extraordinarily inefficient (run the same code everywhere, burn a shitload of money/gas doing it). I don’t know enough about the others, so maybe the usefulness is elsewhere.
I do like the fact that all these chains seem like effectively open apis for everything, though. It gives me hope for a more interoperable future. I just wish there was some obvious fundamental underpinning to the 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.
"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."
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.
He was optimistic that the web wouldn't destroy local institutions and benefit authoritarian regimes over democratic society. That local journalism and commerce wouldn't be subsumed by a few giant, highly destructive monopolizing web-powered multinationals. That we would still read the "friendly pages of a book" instead of only the "myopic glow" of screens.