A Wild New World
It’s a wild new world. Just went to a metaverse meetup. A metaverse meetup. Didn’t imagine myself typing those words even one year ago. And it wasn’t in San Francisco, it was in San Diego. On the way back, the Uber driver told me that he had invested a bit himself. It’s everywhere. Now I come home for a quick break before jumping into a VR lecture on a proposed cloud-first successor to the nation state, the network state.
The digital world is so big and it’s reaching into everything. The nerds’ sandbox has scaled to become a ubiquitous layer over the globe. It’s happening. The metaverse went from a term I saw occasionally on Tech Twitter, to Matthew Ball’s masterful essay, to normies’ feeds, and now it’s landing in my backyard. This is how fast ideas can develop when the time is right. And it feels pretty normal, actually. In the last couple of years, earth-shaking changes have become routine.
Maybe we’re primed for the Roaring Twenties. We’ve all been shaken up a bit lately. Maybe this is a chance to break out of complacency and meme a better world into existence. If the concept of the metaverse can go mainstream, what else can?
We have glimpses, flashes of better futures in tweets and blog posts. Developing into Discords, then into real products. Right now we need determinate optimism to prevail over pessimism and passive, fuzzy optimism. We’re in a revolutionary moment, judging by increasing political polarization in the US and the radical experiments being tried in US cities. We have to make sure it goes the right way. The techno-optimists have as good of a shot as anyone in this moment. It’s time to build.