Why the Metaverse is not Snowcrash / Monkey Art / The McRib-NFT
Microsofts take on the Metaverse will have PowerPoint and Excel
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Why the Metaverse is not Snowcrash
Most critics of the metaverse use Neal Stephensons original vision from his “Snowcrash”-novel to describe the dystopian aspects of a “metaverse”. I think this critizism is bullshit and cheap.
Those critics maybe should remember that there is no direct connection between this emerging tech and the fictional vision in Stephensons book besides the name, plus Stephenson himself was (is?) consultant for Magic Leap, the failed and overyped AR-startup, plus the metaverse is more about new protocols and standards to unify virtual spaces and their economics, which might or might not be gaming spaces.
The two most interesting points for me being Communal Intellectual Property and Portable Digital Identities. Whereas the former always has been a contract, the latter now becomes one too, with interesting questions emerging from this. To paint this as the arrival of dystopian shit stemming from a groundbreaking scifi-novel is just plain lazy tech journalism.
Stephenson himself is far more diplomatic at saying this: “What’s actually being built is fundamentally different from the Metaverse of the book in a few important ways — particularly the revenue model. The revenue model — the way that the makers of the system make money — is more important than anything else because it drives the technical features.”
Neal Stephenson also talks to Wired: In 'Termination Shock,' Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming.
Monkey Art
The Bored Ape Yacht Club in all its glory at NFT.NYC, a conference for internet “art”. “What’s more punk rock than that?” Rolling Stone explains: How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes.
These bored Apes illustrate perfectly, why I think that NFT-”art” will not go anywhere, as the “art” just is too bad. Most stuff in the NFT-”art”-space I don’t consider art at all and works like that from Mario Klingemann seems to be the exception to the rule. NFT art is mostly just stupid cartoon characters or whirly colorful pictures of nothing, this shit does not even qualify as illustration. These might make sense as avatars and profile pics, but humanity should laugh everyone out of the room who has a multimillion dollar profile jpg.
Similtaneously I also think that a bunch of owners of bad Ape-Illustrations have a stake in a future intellectual property that already gained global traction and who knows what can come out of this, from community owned Bored Ape Games to the inevitable Bored Ape Movie, which will be a bad CGI-comedy. I don’t think this should happen (as for “cool future stuff”), but chances are good, it will. The Bored Apes are the Angry Birds of the crypto world, with all good and bad coming from it. But art, they are not.
Here’s a lame joke from the future: “Where’s my fucking jetpack, all I got was a bad community owned monkey movie and access to empty 3D-worlds!”
The McRib-NFT
You can buy a McRib-NFT now. The McRib is still the best they have to offer. That’s all I got on the McRib-NFT.
Links
The decentralized crypto future is great and NFT would never get removed from opensea for critizising NFTs.
The smartest sentence about the metaverse yet: “I assume the generation of users that will build the metaverse are running Roblox scams on Discord right now.”
The dumbest sentence about the metaverse yet: “Microsoft’s take on the Metaverse is coming next year and will have PowerPoint and Excel”. Also, they have 3D-avatars without legs.
Welcome to the Stonk Market - Is finance just another meme? “The apes who are gambling and yoloing — they can coexist with high-frequency trading and Warren Buffet.”
A list of known attacks against Bitcoin / crypto asset owning entities that occurred in meatspace.
Valve bans blockchain games and NFTs on Steam.
Andrew Webster on the marvelization of entertainment and what we once called a “franchise”. Big entertainment assets (like, say, Fortnite) will try to ecompass everything from movies, games and social networks.
Another Metaverse is bullshit-article, this time with some more meat around game design. I’m neither convinced by Zuckerberg, or any crypto-bro, or any of those anti-metaverse-articles.
Crypto is not a scam at all: Squid Game cryptocurrency collapses in apparent scam: “Squid token’s website and social accounts disappear after price jumped more than 310,000% in value and then crashed.”
Here’s another sentence to mark the special supidity of this moment in time: “The shiba inu coin passed dogecoin in total value, which means a token that started life as a meta joke beat the original, itself a parody of crypto mania.” I mean come on.
Interviews with Mark Zuckerberg on Puck. and Stratchery with follow up article, Interview with Ben Smith (Tech/Media-Reporter NYTimes) on Longform.org.