It’s Hard to Critique the Metaverse
It was about two years ago now that I started wrapping my head around how crypto and web3 technology works. PoS vs PoW, EVM, NFTs and so on became a part of my new lexicon of crypto to use and abuse, and alongside them floated a not-so-new idea: the Metaverse. While the term of course originates from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, my closest touchstones for the concept at the time were Isekai like Sword Art: Online and .Hack, William Gibson novels, whatever those Fortnite concerts were and the fairy-floss fun of Ready Player One (the book not the movie). My starting assumption was that the metaverse was some sort of digital environment that people could engage with/be active participants and that it was ‘meta’ to our day to day lives.
My gut instinct was to be critical of the whole idea: I thought it smacked of ‘nerds get VC funding to build the Torment Nexus’ . I very quickly abandoned this position — not because I was suddenly bullish on the Metaverse but because it became apparent that there wasn’t anything to criticise in the first place . Some small companies building VR tech rebranded to ‘Metaverse hardware providers’ in time for the next SXSW convention, NFT Worlds was trading Minecraft servers that you could resell on a blockchain. Decentraland and Sandbox were doing something similar but without Microsoft/Mojang’s software. Some banks and consulting firms bought some space on those platforms. A lot of people were talking about Roblox but I didn’t seem to know anyone over the age of 16 who plays it. Walmart or Amazon or whoever it was trialled that backrooms-looking VR shopping experience.
I can and do have opinions on each of these things. I could list those opinions and present my reasoning. You, dear reader, could agree or disagree with my points and present your own. I might say that a VR headset suddenly putting ‘Metaverse’ on the strap is opportunistic buzzword-chasing bullshit. You could counter and explain that a quick and inexpensive pivot on branding is a smart business decision. We can have that debate because VR headsets are real things, with generally agreed-upon uses that we can rate them by- does it fit, is it expensive, what framerate and resolution does it support and so on. When I first came across the modern so-called Metaverse this type of conversation was entirely impossible to hold. The only thing of substance anyone seemed to be able to agree upon was that it was (or would be) 3D. Any point beyond this was very vague. The metaverse was coming, it was already here. There is the Metaverse or a metaverse. Some were ‘true’ some were ‘fake’. It must be decentralised via web3 (which could already mean so many different things) or the crypto component might at most be used as a payment infrastructure. It supersedes all the internet, or replaces our physical interactions or it’s only built ontop of them. This one over here is AR.
I wanted to just say ‘metaverse bad’ and tell the same to anyone who asked, but in a far more interesting turn of events it turned out that there was nothing much to say about it at all. At that time, the Metaverse was an incomplete idea born from a general vibe of ‘we’re about due for The Next Thing’. It was not even contested so much that it had the potential to be contested — if someone wanted to metaphorically draw the battle lines by defining the damn thing then we would finally have something to discuss. Enter Zuckerberg’s Meta rebrand and more quietly, Matthew Ball’s ‘The Metaverse Primer’.
I’ll start with Zuckerberg. When it happened, the rebrand from Facebook to Meta was criticised as an attempt to somehow magically escape the heat from cascading investigations into repeatedly choosing money over ethics. Zuckerberg lives in some billionare lalaland where he cannot comprehend our mortal struggles, but he is not stupid. He knows the blame gets laid at his feet no matter what logo we see, because his name and the company are effectively interchangeable. Eleventy-something billion dollars in the hole and eleven-thousand laid off staff later, the actual play becomes clear: Zuckerberg is going meta on his platform, and wants the first-mover advantage in the race for the Metaverse.
Aha! Finally there was something to criticise, and criticise we did. From parody sites, endless memes about the lack of legs on the avatars and the ~75% share price crash, Meta’s metaverse tree sprouts fruit so low-hanging you can punt one over the neighbour’s fence straight from the branch. Criticism of Zuckerberg’s metaverse (though fun) is not what I’m interested in here. The Zuckerverse is the first Very Public attempt at a metaverse, and consquently gets to set the terms of engagement.
Zuckerberg has picked a bunch of metrics for the metaverse: how it will be used, what hardware it will run on and what it will look like, set the highest possible expectations for each of those metrics and then spent obscene amounts of money failing to even touch the bar. Immersive VR is expensive to develop and has a high barrier to entry. He wants it to be for everything: working, playing, living, laughing, loving, spreadsheeting etc. If he can find a way to get us to shit in the metaverse, he will. Finally, the endless mockery for launching with ‘Nintendo-DS era graphics, minus the legs’ means that the expectation for graphical fidelity is now impossibly high. If you want lots of people to start doing things in 3D, it has to run on the widest range of hardware possible: Roblox has its current player count because of its low fidelity, not in spite of it. Zuckerberg’s definition of a metaverse is utterly paralysing.
Conveniently, there is another vision to contest the Metaverse. Enter Matthew Ball, the most sober media pundit on the planet. After casually blogging his thoughts on Disney’s plan for growth like he was a fly on the wall of their C-Suite’s Zoom call, Ball has in the last few years turned his attention to the Metaverse, both as a commentator and as a VC. I’m not going to try do a proper summary of his thoughts on the topic as his blog already does this well, but for the purposes of this post I’ll outline some general themes here:
- There is an ongoing trend that more and more of our lives are happening on the internet, and in the future the internet is going to be increasingly 3D. There is already evidence for this in the uptake of virtual world games like Roblox and in-person meetings being pretty smoothly overtaken by virtual ones.
- This is going to take an ungodly amount of new internet infrastructure, software development and hardware adoption and a lot of this is moonshot technology that still needs to be invented.
- Investments in #2 will be made by people betting on making big returns on #1 over 10+ years. This is going to be across industries, with established players developing their current models and startups breaking new ground.
The ‘Ballverse’ is the yin to the Zuckverse yang. It’s in the future, other people will build it and we already have working examples to explain where it’s coming from. There are differences and similarities worth discussing. There are levels of centralisation, assumptions about what they should be used for. Most importantly for me, I finally have some assumptions about the Metaverse to sink my teeth into.
