More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The CCP’s concerns about the growing role of gaming content and platforms in public life became more explicit in August, when the state-owned Security Times warned its readers that the Metaverse is a “grand and illusionary concept” and “blindly investing [in it] will ultimately come back to bite you.”‡5 Some commentators interpreted China’s various warnings, prohibitions, and taxes as confirmation of the Metaverse’s significance. For a communist and centrally planned country ruled by a single party, the potential of a parallel world for collaboration and communication is a threat, regardless
...more
Despite his far-reaching impact, Stephenson has consistently warned against a literal interpretation of his works—especially Snow Crash. In 2011, the novelist told the New York Times that “I can talk all day long about how wrong I got it”2 and, when asked about his influence on Silicon Valley by Vanity Fair in 2017, he reminded the publication to keep “in mind that [Snow Crash was written] pre-Internet as we know it, pre-Worldwide Web, just me making shit up.”3 As a result, we should be wary of reading too much into Stephenson’s specific vision. And while he coined the term “Metaverse,” he was
...more
Library, as it was called, allowed users in countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to read banned literature, as well as works promoting free speech and detailing the lives of journalists such as Jamal Khashoggi, whose murder was ordered by political leaders in Saudi Arabia.
By the end of 2021, more than 150 million people were using Minecraft each month—more than six times as many as in 2014, when Microsoft bought the platform. Despite this, Minecraft was far from the size of the new market leader, Roblox, which had grown from fewer than 5 million to 225 million monthly users over that same period.
In December 2018, for example, the blockbuster video game Fortnite launched Fortnite Creative Mode, its own riff on Minecraft’s and Roblox’s world-building. Meanwhile, Fortnite was also transforming into a social platform for non-game experiences. In 2020, hip-hop star (and Kardashian family member) Travis Scott hosted a concert that was attended live by 28 million players, with millions more watching live on social media. The track Scott premiered during the concert, which featured Kid Cudi, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts a week later, was Cudi’s first #1 track, and finished
...more
A few minutes later, he added: “We’ve had metaverse aspirations for a very, very long time . . . but only in recent years have a critical mass of working pieces started coming together rapidly.”10
Comment from Tim Sweeney
But it was only in the late 2000s that the requisite mix of wireless speeds, wireless devices, and wireless applications had advanced to the point where every adult in the developed world—and within a decade, most people on earth—would want and be able to afford a smartphone and broadband plan.
Today, those one-year-olds are eleven to twelve. A four-year-old in 2011 is now well on her way to adulthood. These media consumers are now spending their own money on content—and some are already creating content themselves. And while these previously unintelligible consumers now understand why adults found their futile efforts to pinch-to-zoom a piece of paper so comic, older generations are not much closer to understanding how the worldviews and preferences of the young differ from their own.
In 2016, a year before his company’s release of Fortnite and long before the term “Metaverse” entered public consciousness, Tim Sweeney told reporters: “This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a God on Earth.”§11 It is easy to find such a statement hyperbolic. The provenance of the internet, however, suggests that it may not be.
I can surely see this becoming a push and pull around federal regulations of metaverse development efforts
It’s not difficult to imagine how different the internet would be if it had been created by multinational media conglomerates in order to sell widgets, serve ads, harvest user data for profits, or control users’ end-to-end experience (something AT&T and AOL both tried but failed to pull off). Downloading a JPG could cost money, and a PNG could cost 50% more. Video calls might have only been possible through a broadband operator’s own app or portal—and only to those who also had that same broadband provider (imagine something like, “Welcome to your Xfinity Browser™, click here for Xfinitybook™
...more
The internet’s nonprofit nature and early history stem from the fact that government research labs and universities were effectively the only institutions with the computational talent, resources, and ambitions to build a “network of networks,” and few in the for-profit sector understood its commercial potential. None of this is true when it comes to the Metaverse. Instead, it is being pioneered and built by private businesses, for the explicit purpose of commerce, data collection, advertising, and the sale of virtual products.
The very idea of the Metaverse means an ever-growing share of our lives, labor, leisure, time, wealth, happiness, and relationships will be spent inside virtual worlds, rather than just extended or aided through digital devices and software. It will be a parallel plane of existence for millions, if not billions, of people, that sits atop our digital and physical economies, and unites both. As a result, the companies that control these virtual worlds and their virtual atoms will likely be more dominant than those who lead in today’s digital economy.
Some journalists have suggested that big tech’s sudden interest in the nebulous idea of the Metaverse is actually an effort to avoid regulatory action.7 Should governments around the world become convinced that a disruptive platform shift is imminent, this theory supposes then even the largest and most entrenched companies in history need not be broken up—free markets and insurgent competitors will do the work.
Others have argued that CEOs are using the vaguely understood term to justify pet R&D projects that are years from public release, probably farther behind schedule, and of little interest to shareholders.
Lol fair
What makes technological transformation difficult to predict is the reality that it is caused not by any one invention, innovation, or individual, but instead requires many changes to come together. After a new technology is created, society and individual inventors respond to it, which leads to new behaviors and new products, which in turn lead to new use cases for the underlying technology, thereby inspiring additional behaviors and creations. And so on.
