Are you missing the metaverse?

If you have an internet connection, you might know that feeling. Something new is starting to happen on the web. People seem very excited about it. Suddenly you’re curious (sure, I’ll be joining TikTok.) Or maybe you’re dreading (is it too late to buy crypto?) Everyone, at some point, is afraid of missing something.

To all this, have you heard of the metaverse? Even if you haven’t seen Mark Zuckerberg’s 81-minute video on the future of human interaction, which culminated in the renaming of Facebook to Meta, the term has been on everyone’s lips this year. Tech, entertainment and fashion leaders have been quick to appropriate this word, though few seem to agree on what it really is. The important thing is that it is coming.

Conversations about the metaverse sum up the sense of apprehension of missing out on something rewarding in its most generalized form. The term “metaverse” was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Cash,” and has recently been used so widely and diverse that it has come to mean something no more specific than the future. Who wants to miss that?

Well, to be honest, a lot of people. And they have their reasons. For now, talking about the metaverse is mostly a branding exercise: an attempt to unify, under a conceptual banner, a lot of things that are already taking shape online.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist writing about the metaverse, has described it as “A kind of successor state to the mobile Internet”, Which is helpful to demystify: the metaverse describes how various emerging technologies – cryptocurrencies, non-expendable tokens known as NFTs, online gaming platforms like Roblox, and virtual and mixed reality hardware, including Facebook’s Oculus, for example – can grow and overlap. In Zuckerberg’s words: “I think the metaverse is the next chapter of the Internet, and it is also the next chapter of our company.”

By way of comparison, Ball often refers to the era of smartphones, which changed our relationship with technology in such a profound and shocking way, but now seems to us everyday.

Think about how things were ten years ago, when smartphones and apps were new and social media was booming. Many people believed that the era of the super pocket computer would change, well, many things would change, even if they did not know very well how. The promoters of the metaverse, who may seem eager to shed the baggage of the last era, believe that we are on the cusp of even greater changes.

If this sounds more linear than visionary, despite the sci-fi brand and talk of “decades from now,” that’s because it is. Fortnite It has more than 300 million players around the world, many of whom see it as an option to hang out with friends and get involved with the culture in general. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are only speculative in the financial sense: They exist, and you may know someone who has one. There are tens of millions of virtual reality headsets in circulation, mostly for gaming. Try one. They are interesting!

You can even consider the obvious ways in which the Internet has become more present in your life, welcoming metaversion. The way you have cultivated personalities online in different contexts, en Instagram o LinkedIn o Slack. The way you play Scrabble on your phone all day, wherever you are. The gloomy virtual office of the routine in the Zoom due to the COVID pandemic. The group chat.

Using a label like “the metaverse” has the strange effect of making things that are already happening sound far away and impossible. People really is spending enormous amounts of time and money in rich interactive spaces, similar to a game, with cultures and economies of their own. Real entrepreneurs are building an alternative financial system using blockchain technology, buying and selling virtual real estate, and trying to figure out how a system without headquarters and state could be governed.

As several technology writers have pointed out, Zuckerberg’s approach is not particularly novel (Any Roblox fan you know could have told you.) The label also provides a contentious subject for criticism. If any of these trends are worrying you, don’t worry! Everything will be better when we are really in the metaverse.

What is the metaverse, the new digital universe that will transform our online experiences

For all his nods to a vague future yet to be built, Zuckerberg’s attempt to explain and appropriate the metaverse made one thing clear: who else may be feeling something is missing is him. For someone whose company can be said to have changed the course of history, becoming the center of the lives of billions of people, the prospect of another new Internet age could be truly terrifying.

The early winners of the social media era are aware that much of what excites people who are online right now – almost anything that promises a “decentralized” experience – is positioned, by definition , against big companies like Facebook (this would also explain why Zuckerberg spent so much time talking about virtual reality, where Facebook has a truly established position).

Not missing the latest big news is what has made technology leaders, and their companies, what they are. Missing out on the next big event, whatever it is, is not an option. Giving a unifying name to various promising and threatening trends is more comforting, from this point of view, than contemplating the chaos of dozens of competing technologies being adopted by billions of people rushing in directions that neither even the most clairvoyant visionaries will understand.

Today’s tech giants have resources, talent, and a sense of missing something to an industrial degree, so it would be a mistake to underestimate their influence on this supposed successor state to the Internet.

However, there are two predictions that I am comfortable making about the metaverse.

The first: the people who inhabit its vast and diverse environments yet to be determined will not call it “the metaverse.” If we actually do our work in virtual offices, we will just call it work.

The second: For most of us, the problem will not be missing out on a more connected lifestyle, in which identities, work and sociability are further mixed in physical and virtual environments, many of them designed for communication purposes. profit; rather, it will be to find out if we can abandon it. (I)