Who Cares about the Metaverse?
This piece is written as part of a 7-day writing challenge with The Tech Progressive. Join the build_ Discord to join the discussion.
The metaverse is a shared vision of a culmination of trends that have been developing for decades: ever-improving 3D graphics, massively multi-player online gaming, and now the idea of ownership via digital scarcity. The idea of each person having their own chunk of an immersive, expansive digital world. It has captured the imaginations of many techies.
But who cares, other than a few geeks? Maybe we shouldn’t be just indifferent, but hostile to the idea. There is the much-mocked photo of a conference room full of geeks with VR headsets with Mark Zuckerberg (gasp!) grinning as he walks through.
What, we’re all just going to blind ourselves to reality and plug into the alternate reality of a hyper-ambitious billionaire? Okay, that does sounds sketchy. We’ve literally seen this movie before.
But let’s get past the conditioned dystopian reflex and try to imagine something different. Zuckerberg is not actually omnipotent, though he has has show an incredible ability to foresee and capitalize on tech trends in the last decade. But he is not the only person interested in creating shared, immersive, broadly accessible experiences. Lots of ambitious technologists are, and have been for decades. The term Metaverse originated with Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash, published in 1992.
So why is this idea interesting to technologists, people who ultimately love to build? Because it’s a green field, a blank page, a fresh canvas. Balaji Srinivasan foresees aligning an online community around a shared vision, designing a city in VR, and materializing that city in the physical world. That’s what’s interesting, the ways the metaverse could actually change the physical world, in addition to just being cool and fun.
On a smaller scale, it could be valuable just for people to have a new space for their imaginations to run wild. To design their dream house, make friends from every corner of the globe, and prototype their ideal life.
VR goggles don’t have to blind us to the real world. They can instead help us envision a better real world and prototype it and ultimately make it real. This isn’t certain, far from it. Much remains to be built. But it’s something worth striving for, and it’s within our reach. It just takes getting back some of that nearly-lost space-age optimism, tuning out the dormers, and daring to build again.