Reflecting on the Metaverse

The metaverse is a future iteration of the internet, made up of 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.

The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds but the entire spectrum of augmented reality. 

My Take

After watching Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of Facebook becoming Meta I can honestly say I've never been so excited, second only to being gifted my very first mobile phone. Yep, "the brick." The metaverse officially has my attention and intention, likely into retirement in a decade. (Oof...that feels weird writing that.)

I had a brief stint working at a virtual reality company in Southern California several years ago. I was able to immerse myself into VR experiences daily and fire synapses in my brain I never knew existed. The insane reality, textures, and idealism experienced in that VR headset each day was something that changed me as it gave me a very real, harbinger-like glimpse into the future. I always walked away from VR experiences a bit disappointed that I had to return to the real world and deal with the hierarchies, agendas, and work dramas within that company, especially this one, super annoying dude whom should never, EVER have the misfortune of walking in front of my car...in real life. I digress.

Admittedly, I'm geeking TF out and all-in on this metaverse thing. I've already opened a Decentraland account. I've focused my attention (and paychecks) on my new Voyager crypto account. I've purchased MANA and a few other new crypto coins and tokens alongside my BTC and ETH to hedge my bets a bit. I'll shortly be purchasing several NFT plots of virtual real estate to use for advertising rental space, a virtual museum for my growing NFT art collection, a virtual school (I still love to teach), and a virtual nightclub hosting virtual bands and NFT music played by virtual DJs. Yes, all money-making ventures because, well, #capitalism

The metaverse has blown a hole in a wall of the vault that is my imagination. The already overactive imagination of a 52 year old, Black, gay man who grew up on a Texas farm, cut his teeth in investment banking, lived through the beginning, middle, and end of Dot Com 1.0, witnessed/purchased the first Apple PC and iPhone, landed in Tech, and is now watching a whole, new world take shape that I actively get to participate in and profit from. I mean, c'mon!

The world, ahem, metaverse, being created right before our eyes isn't actually being built for us. It's being built for our children and their children's children. It's The Jetsons with an ETA of about 5 years. Today's kids will be tomorrow's builders and executives. They'll be perfectly comfortable wearing VR/AR headset for hours at a time. They'll be even more comfortable with less and less social contact and prefer virtual interaction over a face-to-face conversation any day. Isolation won't be the big, scary beast that COVID thrust on all of us. It will be a form of normalcy. Now, before you grab torches and descend upon my house let me explain -- or at least offer some thoughts and a prediction or two.

Let The Kids Game

As adults, parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, mentors, etc. it's easy for us to default to the tapes our parents permanently installed in some secret compartment on our person that only our expensive-ass therapists can access. "Get off that computer." "Your brain's going to turn to mush." "Go outside and make some real friends." "Put that phone away or I will smash it to pieces." These are the go-to, #okboomer commands I hear screamed up from the bottom of the stairs during home visits to my friends with kids doing their best to parent in this ever changing physical vs. virtual landscape. During COVID, no less. What we're missing here is the fact that kids today aren't just playing games. They're learning a new language, a new set of skills, and a new landscape that will become the reality within which they navigate in less than a decade. By denying them screen time, gaming time, and those varying levels of immersion and online community, we're literally setting them up for failure.

One of the main parental concerns I hear with the advent of the metaverse is our kids' perceived lack of socialization and appreciation of the simple things in life. But let's unpack that a bit. When you've completed your final of 4 or 5 Zoom calls that ate up your under accomplished workday what do you crave most? Yep. ME TIME. Something that doesn't involve another human being. Something chocolatey or indulgent. Something that makes you feel good, be that lacing up and going for a run, meeting up with a friend for a drink, hitting the gym, flipping on a thoughtless TV show, taking the dog for a walk, or just sitting quietly and reading a book...physical page turning and all. It will be no different for our kids in the metaverse. They will live in a VR headset. They will conduct their learning, gaming, interactions and, eventually, their business and jobs in a virtual world. They'll get the best views possible of the 7 Wonders of the World, but will still want to book a ticket, board a plane, and make the trip to see each one of them with their own eyes and take/post the selfie. That will exalt travel and physical experiences as a whole, new, more meaningful indulgence.

An Alleviation of a Number of Social Ills

An epiphany I had during a recent deep dive into the metaverse is the fact that it's largely anonymous. Avatars will created in the idealized versions of ourselves or our alter egos and we'll operate with a confidence that isn't solely dependent on the color of our skin, our sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or domicile. In a way, the metaverse levels the playing field. Worst case, it exalts those who know how to code and create vs. those with the means of buying their way to the front of the line.

Think about it. In the metaverse a young Black girl with a lisp, coke bottle glasses, living in The Projects, coding on an obsolete, gifted laptop with a broken hinge, who learned to code on Replit could be just as relevant and successful as a White, upper middle class, Lacoste-wearing, GATE educated peer up the hill with a newly-released Macbook Pro with the M1 chip, an LV laptop case, with CS graduate parents. All that physical shit doesn't matter in the metaverse. What you bring to the table does.

Sure, there will be bad actors. But I recently watched a fascinating interview with Anthony Pompliano and Tom Bilyeu which convinced me that bad actors are essential to innovation. Without them, we'd never know the extent of a platform's boundaries, security, etc. which helps us to develop the laws, regulations, Ts and Cs, and requisite guardrails to keep us individually safe from attack.

Since the metaverse will eventually lead to the lack of dependency on physical products, in a weird way I feel that a lot of the very real concerns I have about the biases baked into artificial intelligence will be moot or at least mitigated to a degree that feels less like the impending strangulation and low-key anxiety I'm currently experiencing about AI. Our societal obsession with lack of inclusion, hierarchies, and socioeconomic delineation will become less sexy and we'll focus our attention on some other thing by which to distance ourselves from our peers. (Insert eyeroll) But at least, I hope, many of the societal issues that have kept us all at odds with one another for centuries will cease to be in the metaverse. If so, sign me TF up!

I would dive into things like less pandemics, carbon emissions, drug use, inequality, consumerism, physical robberies, political avarice, etc. but I feel another book coming on so I'll save my grander concepts and thought leadership for that.

In Conclusion

I have so many more thoughts, hypotheses, and ideas swirling around inside my head. With each new metaverse announcement those thoughts multiply. There's something so immensely exciting about this evolution in front of us that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around all of the possibilities, let alone trying to get actual sleep at night lately. For those of you with kids this is exactly the same state they should be in and that you should actually help to foster vs. quell. The metaverse is their frontier. Sure, we'll get a little taste and have a hand in helping to set the joists. But the actual building we should leave to those whose imaginations are bigger, brighter, and better than ours. We had our chance and got the ball pretty far down the field. Now it's time to let our kids digitize that ball, configure the team, (all NFTs, btw), and take it over the goal line. Guess what? No broken bones, concussions, bruises, contract holdouts, or abject douchery involved.

Rounding this back to business, things are about to change, big time. I predict the whole debate about working remotely will be completely moot in 3 years, with many businesses becoming woefully obsolete. Virtual goods will be the new black vs. physical ones. VR headsets and AR/VR glasses will be our new credit card swipe. Over the next 5 years we'll be conducting most online financial transactions using some form of crypto. Don't believe me? Watch. Over the next 10 years housing, city planning, retail, transportation, infrastructure, even government will look completely different than it does today. Fortunes (and the best apps) will be created by teenagers. Mental health will actually improve even with all of the perceived isolation. Mom and Dad, even Granny and Paw Paw will be pretty savvy users of the VR. Adaptation will happen. It has no choice. And the world will be better for it. Businesses would be well advised to create a "Seal Team" to research and explore ways to claim your stake in the metaverse NOW and figure out how to appeal, be relevant, and profit there. The clock's already ticking which means, "You're late."