metaverse

“And now you hear people at Facebook saying, well, we're going to build the metaverse. It's like sitting down in 1994 and saying, well, now we're going to build the web. You know, it's like news corporate, it's like news corporation in 1994 saying, oh, well, wh…”

“You get a whiteboard and you write VR, AR, social, crypto, place, tradable goods, creator economy, and you draw a box around this and above the box you write metaverse. Like, okay, but that doesn't mean it exists or you can buy it or invest in it. It's just a …”

“And, you know, we're particularly in a moment now where smartphones have happened, and happened quite a long time ago, and there's lots of different things happening, and one of them are the, none of them is the thing.”

“While tech is obsessed with Web three and metaverse, There's going to be an awful lot of billion dollar companies that do something that sounds really boring until you describe what it is and you think, oh yeah, I can see how that would be useful.”

“Go forward 10 years and the two of them sort of merge. In that, you know, if everyone is doing, if they could both work, and everything that you do in the metaverse will be web three, will be running on web three.”

“And they're both kind of competing and in some ways parallel visions for the future of large parts of the tech industry in the next 1015, 20 years.”

“There's no such thing as metaverse. Metaverse is everything cool that will happen in the next 10 years. Mainly centered on some combination of AR and VR and gaming, and self-expression and self-identity, and then a mood board of other stuff.”

“And that's exactly where we are today with Metaverse and Web Free and blockchain.”

“The challenge is at this point, we're sort of designing social networks in 10 years time. Which kind of comes back to my, you know, the more we spend time we spend saying, so this is how I think it's all going to work. The more you're like, we have no idea how…”

“And so I think that, you know, there's sort of a grounding point, you know, if in five to 10 years, we are all using consumer services or business services or, you know, infrastructure or something that's all running on blockchains, which is basically what we …”

“The more that you try and make things open and standardised, And interoperable and portable, the more you're actually describing cable TV, not the internet. Because the whole fucking point of the internet is actually how little of it is standardized, as much a…”

“It's tied to you as an individual and what you're trying to say about you and bring it into other spaces, which essentially is what we do as human beings. Like, why do I wear a certain, I know you don't wear caps or hats, but why would you wear a football team…”

“It's always kind of much more useful to try and find the middle ground between, like, of course you can't predict what we'll be doing on the internet in 15 years' time, but to try and get specific about, well, what is it that you think that would do or not do,…”

“And the same thing for quote-unquote metaverse, which is, you know, what point do we think we might have billions of people wearing something that looked like a pair of glasses as their main or only computing experience? And is that, that, and that's a sort of…”

“And so I sort of just, I mean, I just kind of think like with all of the attention and all the buzz and hype around like metaverse and web three and crypto and DeFi and VR, we kind of stopped paying attention to AI.”

“And so even if you think that VR and AR are going to work and are going to be the universal thing, think of anything you're doing now as pure experiment, pure learning, pure interest, with no expectation that this is going to be meaningful.”

“Well, in the kind of linguistic sense that the word metaverse contains no meaning. It is meaningless because you do not know what the person speaking might mean by it.”

“It's this top-down, centralized, inorganic, deterministic, predetermined, sort of ideal, republic, utopian vision of this is how the internet will work. And it's got all these kind of other ideas attached to it, like I was describing this as like Katamari Dama…”

“And hence people saying, should we regulate the metaverse, or how will politics work on the metaverse, is just completely ludicrous. It's like saying, should we regulate the mobile internet differently from the internet? Well, no, it's just the internet. And, …”

“Obviously metaverse is dead which is good because it's a meaningless term and no one knows what anybody else might.”