What We Talk About When We Talk About The Metaverse
It is fucking hilarious to hear people talking as if the metaverse is some huge failure or flop, that Meta itself is over…
when it hasn’t even launched yet.
Are you quite well?
We… don’t get to “choose” the metaverse. This is the direction that the entire tech industry has DECIDED to go in. There has been an enormous investment in this at every level of the industry. The tech giants are all getting ready to come out with their own hardware platforms. Apple, Microsoft and Google are going all in. The development of all this to date has cost 100s of billions of dollars. Brands are announcing everyday new software experiences and new monetization models and new branded experiences and new collaborations: today’s announcements were Bain and Coca-Cola. Massive deals with video game companies like Nvidia and Activision have gone down to prepare for the stunning visual experiences that are coming. There were over 500 metaverse startups… in the middle of last year, and that number has probably doubled since then, with significant deal making already. The Oculus, the basis of Meta’s corporate metaverse strategy, has been beautiful ever since it launched… in 2016. Correct, one of the most important tech companies with the most data of any other entity in the world, with a giant engineering workforce and massive assets, has been working on this as the primary mission, in partial production, since AT LEAST seven years ago.
But to reiterate; unfortunately Meta’s brilliant marketing move — calling the whole idea of virtual reality the “metaverse” and thus staking the claim early — has resulted in everyone thinking or pretending to think that this is just one company acting on its own, instead of the entire technology industry moving in this direction as one body; yes, vying for positions, but on a shared boat. Microsoft has made some extraordinarily compelling moves in the metaverse space, with the purchases of significant AI tech (Github, OpenAI partnership) and BIG DEAL gaming studios who already consistently deliver immersive experiences on internet-connected consumer hardware, globally. This is well within the capabilities that the technology world has developed, these technologies are already globally implemented and consumed, and anyone telling you otherwise is lying. And Apple is moving in silence on this as usual but when they unveil whatever the fuck they have brewing, it’s gonna be beast mode.
Please take an ecosystem-wide view, even where we use Meta itself as a lens. Venture capitalists have been putting energy and money into the vision for this, arguably since inception, but certainly aggressively since the early days of the last bubble, more than 10 years ago. Hell, in 2013, Google launched Google Glass, ten years ago now, they already had people walking around in augmented reality… the tech wasn’t there yet, but a critical point had been reached: we were able to get people all over the Bay Area walking around with this shit strapped to their face. We called them “Glassholes”. Once I had to move to a different table in a restaurant because I was often stalked by computer programmers and didn’t like the idea of this jerk recording and streaming me having a nice Saturday brunch. Programmers are a whole fucking new breed man. Being in Silicon Valley is like being in an augmented reality version of American Psycho.
The metaverse, despite again, not having launched yet, is cited as the cause for Meta’s “downfall,” which also, does not exist. There is no downfall. Suddenly everyone is a Wall Street Analyst — a small dip in stock price? The whole beast is downed!!!
Well actually, their stock rose 17% on their Q4 earnings call. Dying my actual ass. And you know who the layoffs didn’t touch? The metaverse team. This is reminiscent of everyone also saying that crypto is dead and Twitter will go down. Thousands of startups are chomping at the fucking bit to go after the metaverse market, VCs have them teed up waiting to push over $300 billion of dry powder into this market.
This is going to hit hard, and fast.
But it hasn’t hit yet.
Let’s be clear that the metaverse involves Strapping A Device to Your Fucking Head, Neo. So if you don’t have a device strapped to your head right now, it means the Metaverse has not launched. From there it will progress to computerized contacts and brain implants, but the leap we are making now is fundamental. You could argue that the Apple Watch marks the predecessor point of getting this shit onto the physical body, but it was never meant to be a complete platform the way the Metaverse will offer a complete platform and be the primary computing device and the primary mode/medium of interaction.
There is a reason that tech elite are calling this as impactful as the iPhone; it changes the form factor in a novel way and also makes way for a whole new level of application development using an expansion of inputs and outputs and new technologies and new substrates and new APIs and haptics and on and on. After they get this on our physical bodies, a critical barrier has been fully breached; life slips away even further behind a digital world.
The incursion onto our bodies is transformative; this leap is only insubstantial in some kind of meaningless hell world where bodily integrity and bodily invasion are somehow the same. An upside-down, anti-intellectual world that VCs are purposefully inculcating you into. This is a big fucking deal, never, ever minimize what tech is doing. Because this is a necessary chasm for them to cross in order to get a computer into our fucking brains, literally. And at that point all is lost.
It’s extraordinarily dangerous that people are acting as if the Metaverse is DOA, because not only are we going to be getting the Metaverse, we are going to be fucking addicted to it. They have us addicted to fucking Facebook and Instagram, which have very few immersive properties and have remained more or less unchanged for any dimensionalities outside of level of psyops in recent memory. They have literally billions of people addicted to this bullshit using nothing more than a few photos, a few lines of text in a status update, and a thumbs up emoji. These are experts in manipulation of human emotions and habits and tendencies and social phenomenons; after all, it is their job to get us to do what their advertisers want us to do. This is the product they are actually selling: their ability to change our behavior.
There is every reason to believe that the Metaverse, with access to more data, more features, and more ways to interact with the user and get feedback cycles going, will be MORE toxic, isolation, esteem-destroying, dangerous and depressing as all the other shit we are currently using. And more so, because this is going to increase again the emotional experiences of being in the social media environment and increase the identification with it, this is going to increase the amount of time being spent in that environment, and the number of roles we are playing in it, and the amount of ourselves we expose to it.
With this comes a level of data exploitation that is unprecedented, and it will be concentrated in a way that is also unprecedented: the few companies who will make up the foundational infrastructure from hardware to software. The metaverse will be lorded over by, at most, a small handful of large tech firms and venture capitalists helming a fleet of startups. Even fewer places than now will have all of our precious data. For Meta in particular, this is a total sea-change in the amount of data captured; they go from being able to collect data from its applications to being able to collect data in a much broader, more substantial portfolio of “apps” than they have now.
This is where Facebook transforms its business model, and starts looking a lot more like Apple. We are entering a new paradigm where Facebook is the platform for the entire human lifecycle, where school, work, creation and other functions, are fundamentally rooted in a Meta ++ environment, and where all of the data that could potentially be captured in these interactions, is going through one central platform.
Money money money money money.
As Zuckerberg said upon the acquisition of Oculus in 2014, almost 10 years ago:
“this is just the start. After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home. This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.”
We have lapsed into an ongoing apathy about data collection, assuming that they have taken as much as they possible can from us; as a result, we are about to let a massive escalation in data collection pass right on by without comment. The form factor of the device, and the increase in number of functions that it will serve in our lives, is a game changer. The more data they have, the more they can manipulate us. Yes, you feel incredibly surveilled and invaded now, but that doesn’t mean that tech feels that they have sufficiently surveilled and invaded -you-.
We’ve seen that there is a direct relationship between the growth of data and the growth of the tech elite’s fortunes, so one of the things we are looking at here is a massive growth in the financial capture of tech companies. We think the industry has money now? That will skyrocket as soon as the goggles go on and they begin pumping yet more data out of you and collecting even more money from all the corporate and financial interests that want to pray on you.
Like I’ve been saying consistently in this blog: we need to prepare for a tech industry that has double, triple, and more of its current money, power and control. Are you ready for a 10x tech industry? Do we understand what the growth scale on this is going to look like? When we are saying the Metaverse is a money-losing flop, are we even capable of telling the truth that this is going to be a fucking gusher?
+ The name “web 3.0” is not a metaphorical one. The internet we are using today is about to go bye bye. OpenAI is, at the end of the day, an abstraction layer over the “old” internet; it will be used to power the metaverse experiences that we enjoy, but tons of the information, almost all of the human detail, and the ways we are used to interacting with tech — through browsers and laptops, phones and mobile apps — are going to change. There isn’t going to be an “old internet” that is viable to stay on if you wanted to!!! Shit is falling apart around here already.
This drives further to this idea that we don’t “choose” what technology we use. Tech has the ability to simply stop maintaining the old internet, to stop developing the apps and the experiences, to simply let it degrade as if it were an old site — which it is — becoming outdated and non-functional. Metaverse’s clients are not US, we are its product, so it will be doing everything it can to give us the push onto the new internet… and it will be making sure that we HAVE to switch in order to keep up with everything.
When your work, your school, your friends, your DOCTOR are all using this shit, and its what you need in order to get along on a day to day basis, the issue of “adoption” becomes irrelevant: yes you will be using the fucking new shit. This is the school you go to and the place you work at and it is how you see your doctor and your friends and how you date and how you make art in the new, unasked for, AI marketplace. Browsers are going to go away, social media sites as we know them are going to go away, laptops will likely go away in time as well, static websites, text websites, these are all going to go away. Facebook.com will finally die, though under the worst possible circumstances for all of us: Facebook will have left the nest and attached itself to, again,
Your fucking face.
Protect your face from tech fascists!!!
+ If the metaverse is a new platform, this brings up the issues of how the metaverse is going to be built. Everything will need to be built for the new metaverse platforms, the new APIs, the new AIs, the haptics, the data models, the new video and imagery, everything. In order to stay competitive, existing corporations will have no other option than to build a metaverse “space” or whatever they will decide to call it, or to otherwise integrate itself through the metaverse’s story world.
This once again brings up what Marx has described as the progress of capitalism, how the constant, desperate revolutions in the instruments of production — so that capitalists can keep their boots on our necks — become suddenly necessary to survival for everyone and everything near and far. The metaverse will be tablestakes to life and commerce itself.
We are in fact at the beginning of a new bubble; the beginnings of tech bubbles have always been heralded as death rattles. When Amazon launched ec2 all everyone could talk about for yearsssss was that the cloud computing “bubble” was over. The metaverse is going to cause what we’ve seen in previous cycles, where there will be an explosion of new apps, services, integrations, startups, media models, even new Metaverse celebrities and so forth; we are not at the end of the bubble right now, we are at the beginning of one.
By the same token, companies that fail to make the switch will die off or at least fail to compete and therefore to grow. There’s even a possibility that one or more of the tech giants that we have now, will cease to exist if they can’t compete on this new playing field. Some of them are approaching the hours of expiration like companies before them, Oracle, HP, Sun. Is VMWare even alive?
Tech has made an absolute fuck ton of money forcing corporations onto its platforms, putting them on the hook to build websites and apps, so they are spending hundreds of billions on tech to ensure their survival. The industry likes to say “every company is a tech company now”; and wouldn’t you know it, they have a package to sell you that can turn you into one!! Sign right here.
A new one every year!
Now to compete, companies will have to be able to build out entire immersive environments, either by paying to acquire the competency or outsourcing it. Most companies do not have the DNA to function like tech companies and tech companies have kept a monopoly on that. This is going to make it harder than ever for non-VC backed companies to compete when the tablestakes of go-to-market, is being able to build out an entire virtual reality integration or experience.
I imagine a number of corporations will not be able to make the leap and this will open up space for major disruptors, the way that Blockbuster was replaced by Netflix, taxis by Uber, etc. Luckily, VC is sitting there ready to pounce on the opportunity in the stated goal of capturing as much of the GDP as possible.
The two biggest targets in my book are healthcare and school. Tech already has damn good integration into the workforce, but I think what we’re going to see in healthcare and school is going to be a sea change. In fact, venture capitalists have made it pretty plain that the college and university system are in the cross hairs. I’ll be looking for a wide proliferation of privatized school programs built entirely around corporate/VC interests, using something a lot more like the code school model where the lines between the tech company and the educational program are totally collapsed. Tech will provide the “backing” for these new models, these alternatives, in the form of venture capital funding and in patronage, making sure that these programs are “successes” via placement into the workforce. Startups are the new schools. Which would be cool if startups weren’t fascist economic weapons wielded by open psychopaths. (Greetings to all my readers in venture capital :)
Tech has been trying to get its way inside the education market for a long time; Zoom calls for remote classes is the closest they’ve come to a real disruption but oh boy did it get them riled up. From debates about charter schools in California, to Peter Thiel’s forever insistence that college is useless and everyone should drop out and become tech entrepreneurs; this goes wayyyyy back to Apple and Microsoft competing to see who could get the most computers into the most middle schools and high schools, so that there would be a generation that came up with them, and because children, especially young girls, are used as the innovation center of tech.
Tech has a vision of a educational system that is contained within the industry, piloted for years in remote learning, charter schools and coding bootcamps; now they are opening the door to letting these models, unfolding in the Metaverse, taking advantage of AI, and using the startup funding model and coding school monetization model, totally take over the existing system.
If you are a digital native company such as the vast number of new healthcare and biotech startups, the metaverse gives you a sudden shot at incumbents in the space — I.e. Replacing the doctors offices and other healthcare offerings with virtual health services is an entire world of money and opportunity just sitting right there. The pandemic already did a lot of the work for them, as far as getting inroads into the dominant paradigm.
And doctors, like taxi drivers before them, will go from being stable, full-time work to being gig workers.
Tech is posed to take advantage of a massive die-off in both of these key areas, having spent a few decades now diversifying into them; in particular there are a number of medical and educational startups from the past decade that are now reaching a point of maturity and development where they are able to credibly challenge some existing major players, which we have seen in other sea-change tech disruptions in prior years. OneMedical and other concierge health care is also a model that translates perfectly to the Metaverse and that is already established nationally, on the back of adoption by rich techies.
You could certainly consider that tech actually has the opportunity to serve as “king maker” in this environment and that it can actually withhold technological development from established sectors as a tactic as well.
Tech has a monopoly on technological production and that works in both giving and in taking away.
Tech and VCs can literally starve entire sectors and cities from tech that they themselves are making indispensable.
+ A major thing we have been tracking for years with regards to technology and the rise of social and digital media is the possibilities for free and independent press, free and independent art, and so on. We’ve also had this conversation within the industry itself where we talk about having independent social media (there have been several alternatives to Twitter and Facebook over the years, including Diaspora and Ello).
Similar concern for the future of the indie press here and for indie art and so on, that this is a much more complex built environment, with more inputs and more outputs, more dimensions (including the idea of a virtual reality layered over real life, aka “mixed VR”), more data in play, more complex interactions, requiring more data input, requiring dealing with the hardware being much closer to the surface, requiring a lot of technical skill, and that is just building up the cost of participation in the marketplace.
As that cost skyrockets, it is harder and harder for independent collectives to carve out literally any infrastructure that can be run in anything like an independent manner. Especially in the early years of this, the prices of development will be sky-high and the ability of any individual or small collective to command these type of resources is going to go away.
This could easily be the death-knell on independent media that has already been under non-stop assault by venture capital for 20 years. The barrier to entry only allows large and monied players.
+ We can never forget that AI and the metaverse is building on the combined generations of output of billions and billions of people and literally lifetimes of human production, incalculably rich, with incalculable depth.
What is extraordinary about these platforms is the degree of information that has been stolen.
NOT the AI.
We are tempted to think of these things as we are “getting” the Metaverse; but please remember that *we* are the ones who built the first web AND web 2.0. We are the ones who built both the first, browser based internet and the second, app/mobile/cloud computing internet. We are the ones who populate Wikipedia, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; while tech companies force us into their various frameworks and business models, at the end of the day, it is us that is going to be building this thing out.
User generated content I think is a really important thing to think about in this context. I watched a demo the other day of a CodeAI-based tool that takes plain-English prompts from the user and turns it into in-environment objects, in this case for Mindcraft. This was fascinating for me because it’s an example of how the metaverse will once again build itself… with us.
+ Even though the bulk of what populates the Metaverse will be our own work, we still have to look at how this might be affecting the labor picture we are dealing with outside of end users.
Frankly, this build-out of the Metaverse is going to require a lot of coding labor. A lot of it. I’ve been wondering for a long time how they are going to pull off getting the amount of talent they will need to pull this off, and it’s become a lot more clear.
I was thinking of it at first in terms of full-time staff of tech companies; but they are shifting the whole development model in real time.
They are massively ramping up a decentralized development process reliant on a huge amount of cheap contract workers from India, Romania, Kenya, Ukraine and others. Outsourced software development is expected to grow by 70% this year. OpenAI’s choice, as a blue-chip startup, and in fact a fully VC startup, to use $2/hr outsourcing as a design principle for tablestakes work, is not them being caught being cheap, or cutting corners; it’s them using the new model for software development for how the startup is constituted in a web 3.0 world where having software development be a highly paid, stable position is no longer tenable.
The previously stable programming workforce in this country, has been subject to serious layoffs, serious attacks on autonomy and stability, and ongoing threat of automation by AI. Layoffs have been actively depressing salaries and stock compensation across the industry, which means both tech and their customers, who will be building out metaverse environments in every field, will be able to get more talent more cheaply.
And they’ll be using coding AI as well, so a lot of automation. Zuckerberg already announced AI as a contributor to yet another round of layoffs just this month.
As I wrote about in more detail here, the software development model has changed. It will be much more heavily rely on a lower-paid, contracted technical workforce that isn’t salaried or given stock. AI will play a greater and great role in this work and tech giants have also indicated they will pursue AI efficiency at all costs and great speed with no regard for the impact on workers.
And global outsourcing has been promoted from, often being looked at as a last resort or parenthetical part of the business, to being a permanent and dominant base for the business and its model. They are cannibalizing the programming workforce in real time; it will be left with a fraction of the stability, prestige and compensation previously allowed, for all but the “top” talent.
Oh fucking well. Software engineers have been warned this is coming for a long time now, the writing has been on the wall, but they are fucking cowards and bootlickers. Enjoy the life you made a reality on the backs of people you are so much better than.
+ Just as we know that Meta’s core competency is manufacturing addiction; and that they will do it for the Metaverse, we also need to know that the core of their business model always involves teen girls; Meta’s profits come first from its base of teenage girls and that is true across Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram; and of course, those girls are treated like shit by these apps, literally and predictably, causing mental illness, degraded quality of life, and ongoing abuse ranging from pedophilia attacks to bullying.
We are going to have to start worrying about new kinds of sexual assault and sexual abuse and what that could look like in the Metaverse. The impact of Meta’s other apps, Facebook and Instagram, on teen girls has been catastrophic, particularly when it comes to sexual abuse. They are subject to all kinds of sexual harassment, from verbal abuse, to “revenge porn” and images, to being attacked and groomed non stop by pedophiles. The rate of sexual abuse on these platforms is extremely high. There is every reason to believe that these rates and the impact are going to go through the roof; new forms of sexual assault are developed and unleashed on girls to even more devastating effect.
+ CONCLUSION
We cannot accept the type of nihilistic thinking that has been going down where all breaches of self and privacy and humanity are the same; this is a big step and one we are still in a position to stop; because it hasn’t FAILED, it just hasn’t LAUNCHED YET.
Please take off the MENTAL goggles you are wearing, irony poisoned, too cool for school, you, somehow omniscient enough about this technology market to assume that everything in it will fail.
We are at a inflection point here, and it’s harder to take off the goggles than to never put them on. We need to move with great speed and violence to stop it. If we can’t do it for our own generation, let’s do it for future generations, and for the children now who don’t deserve to have a panopticon strapped to their head from birth.