People who are in their mid 30’s who grew up with AIM, Myspace and Napster as their first experiences with the internet, will more than likely be oppose to the ridiculous notion that we will be creating avatars, designing homes and worlds in a digital space that will represent the ‘true’ us.
The metaverse isn’t being built for us old folk though, it’s being built for the younger more impressionable generation, with already robust feelings of insecurities and inadequacies being programmed daily by the incessant scrolling of TikTok and Instagram. It’s true that there will be a space for everyone, but out of the gate, everyone will not buy into NFT’s and metaverse worlds, because for most of us, it sounds like the recipe for a dystopian future.
Why worry about the outside world’s politics, when you can escape into a utopian fantasy with strangers that look like cats and Spongebob? Entertainment is here to capture the spirit of humanity, hypnotize it, and enslave it to an authoritarian dictatorship formerly known as the United States (or whatever country you’re from).
However, if i’m going to play the optimist in this foreboding vision of global authoritarianism, the metaverse can be space for us to connect and envision together the possibility of avoiding ownership over our data, privacy, and essentially our minds.
The metaverse and decentralized blockchain technology hand in hand, have the potential to transform government and corporate media as we know it now. Where now, our trust must be put into the word of historic liars and bad actors essentially working for profit rather than the good of the people, the decentralized blockchain can replace ‘their word’ with actual verifiable trust, just refer to the ledger when there’s an argument over who won the election, or where our tax dollars are being spent, or what promise the politician broke again. It’s there plain as day on an immutable, decentralized ledger, called the blockchain.
I think a lot about what democracy on the blockchain in the metaverse could be like. I imagine, a committee of great thinkers, from city planners, mathematicians, healers, astronomers, doctors, lawyers, you name it — all meeting in a live virtual space, discussing what policies to enact around the country that can help the people prosper. A space where anyone around the world can tune in to and listen and get their voices heard, and vote on policies that the people actually have a say in, and actually have road maps to get implemented. Governance, in a time where we can actually eradicate corruption, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs will transform how democracy is practiced in the future, haha.
A DAO, not to be confused with the TAO (but i’d openly like them to share meanings) is something that is already a reality, except these organizations are meant to govern how a cryptocurrency project behaves. The potential to transform our communities, counties, cities, states, countries, is all there if only we had the leader in the right frame of mind to make something like this happen. It’s the subject of a good Sci-fi novel though, I think I should write it, and include all the side stories of how “They” would conspire to try to stop it all from happening, the assassination plots and conspiracies from the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, etc. It would make a good TV show too, maybe Netflix would pick it up.
Being a cynic is all too fun though, because when we look at history, the cynic was usually right most of the time. Take 2001, we heard the cynic say, “This war on terror is bull shit, it’s just for oil and opium.” (20 years later) “Told you it was bull shit, we got nothing done spent trillions in tax dollars, cost many innocent civilian lives and soldiers lives. Hell, we pretty much funded the damn terrorists.”
I think the metaverse has a lot of potential for connecting us like Facebook (Meta) imagines, but also we’re creating a zone where corporations can entertain our children into hypnotic meandering zombies with little to no attention on the problems facing their freedoms.
The metaverse will be a fantastical place in a few years. I’m pretty sure if you’re running a business you’re going to have no choice but to enter it, design your store and your avatar so that you can continue to sell your organic soap. Do your research though, because there are ways for you to take advantage of it if you so choose. In the end, who knows how this will transform humanity, I hope it has good implications on our future, but we all know who’s right most of the time in history, the cynic.
