metaverse

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The metaverse is a concept of a virtual 3D world introduced in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” book, later adopted by the Second Life startup/service, most recently an early 2020s tech hype cycle, and was a topic of discussion at the 2021-10-09 IndieWeb Create Day.

Early implementations on the internet so far (as of 2021) are either silos (e.g. Second Live, Roblox, Fortnite) or attempt to create scarcity in some other fashion (e.g. Decentraland). An "Indie" metaverse would instead be built like the web: anybody can set up their own space, and link it with other people's spaces, without a central entity or other form of scarcity.

IndieWeb Examples

Johannes Ernst

Johannes Ernst built a concept on 2021-10-09 for how a personal site might look and interact in a metaverse that's built like the web: from individual, linked sites

• prototype: https://gitlab.com/j12t/indie-website-metaverse-prototype
• video of the 3-D indie metaverse website show-and-tell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvUenrIIECU (~6 minutes)

Other Indie Examples

3D homepage in CSS

An IndieWeb 3D navigable homepage example in pure CSS (no JS needed!)

• https://garethheyes.co.uk/

Brainstorming

Website equivalent of VR

Marty McGuire: a VR equivalent of a website could be a virtual space/scene, or several such spaces/scenes connected by portals, all under your control. webmention and microformats are just plumbing. webmention in particular could be used to create connections or responses between spaces.

• from chat 2022-07-27

Criticism

Worse version of internet

• 2021-10-29 PC Gamer: The metaverse is bullshit / You're not losing your mind: it really does just sound like a worse version of the internet.

Academic research without praxis

• https://twitter.com/mulegirl/status/1453153270763962368
  • "Get research papers out of PDFs into well-structured HTML with linked sources
    
    *then* talk to me about the metaverse." @mulegirl October 27, 2021

Leading with renaming

Facebook renamed itself based on vapor:

• 2022-01-31 NYTimes: How Facebook Is Morphing Into Meta / Shifting a 68,000-person social networking company toward the theoretical metaverse has caused internal disruption and uncertainty.

  …one employee wrote: “Who is the elephant in the room who is going to ask how all of it works? Not it.”

Leading with monetization

• https://twitter.com/bunchesofbees/status/1512274315097477121
  • "The metaverse is very funny because it’s basically everyone in corporate America being so horny for monetization they forgot to even make the thing they’re trying to monetize first and now they’re just hoping you won’t notice before you throw money at it" @BunchesOfBees April 8, 2022

Resemblance to a Black Mirror episode

In response to the infamous Torment Nexus tweet:

Led by BigTech

• https://twitter.com/solarpunk_girl/status/1486975397229211651
  • "Just got an email “help shape the metaverse for good”. I think this sort of behaviour makes the #techforgood scene lack teeth. If Big Tech defines the territory and tech activists imagine a new world by defining ethical principles on the metaverse then we’re all doomed." @solarpunk_girl January 28, 2022

Hyped and diluted to meaninglessness

"metaverse" has been hyped by journalists and media so much that it has become a synonym for "virtual reality" (VR), or in some cases, merely another word for a "virtual" experience of any kind. Thread: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1488508625706487809

• "In less than 4 months we've gone from the metaverse being a suss, dubious concept is to students now claiming "such and such game is a metaverse" and I would like to hold the entire journalistic establishment personally responsible for this" @Sierra_OffLine February 1, 2022

Articles

• 2019: Who Will Own The Metaverse? - a 2019 analysis by Digital Catapult UK https://medium.com/digital-catapult/who-will-own-the-metaverse-48c2912d7aae
• 2021-10-28 WIRED: The Genius Behind the Best Metaverse Twitter Thread
  • ^ https://twitter.com/MetaverseNoir

Tweets

Notable tweets about "metaverse":

• https://twitter.com/nealstephenson/status/1454217801757958153
  • "Since there seems to be growing confusion on this: I have nothing to do with anything that FB is up to involving the Metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they're using a term I coined in Snow Crash. There has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship." @nealstephenson October 29, 2021

• https://twitter.com/nealstephenson/status/1534225523554955264
  • "This is the 30th anniversary of the publication of Snow Crash. If you figure in the time I spent writing it, it's been half my life. It's been a wild ride, especially during the last year 😉" @nealstephenson June 7, 2022

Humor

• heavy graphic animated humor video https://twitter.com/skyler_higley/status/1508473426637463555
  • "WELCOME TO THE METAVERSE" @skyler_higley March 28, 2022

See Also

• VR
• VRML
• Mozilla Spoke
• Criticism: 2022-01-31 WIRED: Big Tech Needs to Stop Trying to Make Their Metaverse Happen / From Microsoft to Meta, the race is on to sell an amorphous concept that no one really wants them to build.
• Criticism: was overhyped as a "thing", appears overinvestment has burst and is deflating, e.g.: https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/109842201629123497
  • "Source: Microsoft shut its Industrial Metaverse Core team, formed four months ago to build tools for industrial settings, and laid off the team's 100 employees (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information)https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-kills-its-industrial-metaverse-team-after-4-months
    http://www.techmeme.com/230210/p16#a230210p16" @Techmeme February 10, 2023
• 2021-02-23 comic: brand experience and the metaverse
• 2022-02-13 comic: metaverse hype cycle