Young people will play video games and create entire new worlds inside various digital metaverses.
The COVID shock just accelerated these trends. Now a large percentage of the world is locked in their dwelling; their only means of interaction is through internet-connected machines. Whether you like it or not, your online avatar will only grow in importance. The metaverse is now, and you are participating in its creation.
The metaverse will be anything the human mind can dream up and it won’t be held back by the traditional physical laws we take for granted in meatspace. Entire new economies and occupations we cannot imagine will come to be in these worlds. Hopefully these jobs create the same sort of self-satisfaction as traditional employment such that the population feels content with their lot in life. The alternative is billions of restless souls that will lash out at perceived and real inequalities especially as capital is further concentrated amongst our tech overlords.
The most powerful man in the world — as defined by the number of users he influences — is Mark Zuckerberg. He is betting all the marbles that the true Facebook-enabled community of the future is the metaverse. AR and VR devices that allow humanity to create communities in digital space is what Facebook believes the next iteration of digital community represents.
China is fashioning a mobile-first online society. All data and interactions are networked, monitored, and policed by the state. The Chinese metaverse is complete with social credit scores that encompass the entirety of your on- and offline lives. Given the amount of R&D spending on AI and 5G, Beijing believes the future is a digital first connected population.
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Our online avatars need to flex.
As we imagine what the metaverse could become, how will its inhabitants flex their social standing? Turning back to gaming, an already burgeoning economy around skins worn by your online avatar points to a digital future of worthless artistic digital objects representing large amounts of value.
Scalable Flexing is a tech person’s dream. The ability to appear wealthy and cool is not limited to physical proximity, but the entire addressable market of your avatar.
Flexing is integral to the human experience. We don’t question the value of physical meatspace items used to project social standing. We understand and value fashion, paintings, jewelry etc.
Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably important.
But as things get more and more abstract, as we move evermore towards a world of abundance — the ability to weave a good narrative out of a tapestry of little stories is more valuable than it ever has been.
In a world of abundance, attention is the scarcest resource, and peoples’ attention is hard to earn.
That means telling multiple, related stories, and telling them over and over again. It means making your overarching story clear enough that others can repeat it themselves.
a narrative is shaped by, among other things, the number of stories told, the number and credibility of storytellers, the consistency of the positive aspects of the stories, and the persistence of the stories over time.
the next decade will be all about organic, community-driven narrative creation and distribution.
