| I agree with the thrust of this article, especially this line: "For a long time I felt somewhat unique in this regard, but COVID has made my longstanding reality the norm for many more people. Their physical world is defined by their family and hometown, which no longer needs to be near their work, which is entirely online; everything from friends to entertainment has followed the same path." The unbundling of physical and digital reality is certainly happening, but I also think new forms of rebundling are also happening. Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX. To see what's happening as only: 1) "the real world is the combination of the digital world and the physical world and that the real world is not just the physical world." or 2) "the Metaverse is the set of experiences that are completely online, and thus defined by their malleability and scalability" is to downplay the combinatorial possibilities of dis-aggregating and recombining the digital and the physical. It feels to me that a certain 'computational style' is becoming widespread tacit knowledge and shouldn't be identified only with the digital/online/virtual. |
'This is a place with no need for traditional money, or traditional art; the native solution is obviously superior. To put it another way, “None of this real world stuff has any digital world value” — the critique goes both ways.'
The Metaverse isn't a computer game, or at least isn't only a computer game made up of entirely imagined content. As an extension of the internet it's primary purpose is to do away with the physical separation and distance between real world people and resources.
Fundamentally networks are communication systems, whether it's a telephone network, the Web or the Metaverse. It's about taking resources that are physically distributed all around the world and making them function as though they were right next to each other, re-composing them in different ways.
The first phase was to allow you to log on to a server anywhere in the world, instead of only the one in your building. The next step with the Web 1.0 was to link and re-compose documents regardless of what server they were located on. The next step with web 2.0 was to give access to applications running on any server anywhere, rather than just applications installed on your local computer. Social media was another phase which did for interpersonal relationships and communication what the original web did for documents.
The Metaverse doesn't really add any new capabilities here, it's just a new user interface. It's a VR browser instead of a web browser. It's not a new world anymore than the combination of facebook and twitter are a new world, they're not, they're just a way for real world people to talk to each other. With the Metaverse they will virtually stand next to each other instead. My kids already do this in Minecraft, Valorant and LoL.
The bifurcation thesis works in terms of businesses, and that's what Stratechery is about, but the article doesn't actually analyse the business implications of any of this.