Metaverse?

Okay, let's talk about something a little different.

The ``metaverse''. An old concept that was recently made new all over again. For the lost, this is referring to the idea of having people interacting within a virtual world, with as many real-world equivalent concepts being brought into it as possible to literally be a space that people can live in.

I call it an old concept because virtual worlds have been the mainstay for much of the multi-player experience ever since computer networking was a thing. The key difference though is that the ``metaverse'' tries to have a stronger tie-in between the virtual world and this one that we live in, mostly in the form of linking what we would call ``valuable'' in this real world with what is in the virtual one. Another big difference is that unlike a multi-player game, the ``metaverse'' might not have game-like mechanics of goals and/or progression, both of which are replaced with metrics that are more closely aligned with how the real world operate, like real-world money.

Some might say that the ``metaverse'' is defined by the extensive use of virtual reality technologies, but I beg to differ. Virtual reality technology might be cool (well, cooler these days compared to before), but the technology companies involved in them aren't really looking at these technologies for the coolness---they are looking at them from the perspective of how much value capture they can exploit the way how old school industrial capitalism is always about exploiting the surplus labour of the workers to generate value. In the work by Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for the confused), it has been established that a large part of modern day capitalism is tied around the exploitation of behavioural surplus, an information-type resource that is used both directly and indirectly to manufacture real-world demands through [targetted] advertising. The ``metaverse'' can be seen as the extreme version of that surveillance capitalism, where the very physics of the world itself is controlled, observed, and milked by the companies that own the infrastructure to run and use them.

What separates the ``metaverse'' from the previous concepts of virtual worlds is the very strong tie-in with the real world, as I have stated earlier. Instead of role-playing a character in the virtual worlds like the old way, the ``metaverse'' demands that you appear in the system as yourself. This bit is important because it forces you to bring in everything that you do in the real world into the virtual world, and it also allows the owners of that ``metaverse'' to use the real-world clout of personalities/intellectual properties within their ``metaverse'' to create the strong false equivalence that whatever that happens in the ``metaverse'' is as valid as what is happening in the real world.

Suddenly no one can role-play their favourite celebrity any more---if Real World Celebrity So-and-So shows up within the ``metaverse'', it can be ascertained that it really is who it claims to be, and not one of their many fans who are role-playing as them. Similarly, if you are fed-up with being an office drone and want to go into the ``metaverse'' to role-play as a rock star, you probably can't do that because your real world identity is immediately shown to everyone---there's no way to hide that away.

Or maybe you could hide it away... for a price and a limited amount of time as dictated by the company who owns that ``metaverse''.

Real-world money that goes into the ``metaverse'' to pay for anything does not come out of the company that runs it---it is a means of capturing money. Throw in some equivalent of digital real estate and add the human value of prestige, and the most successful company running that particular ``metaverse'' will make bank.

I think that's too much power for any single company or even conglomerate of companies to hold. And I don't think that it takes a genius to realise that all that hype on ``metaverse'' is just the techno-gasm equivalent of Centrally Planned State Control. And that's not counting the obvious subscription fees that are needed just to keep one's place within the ``metaverse''. I mean, in real-life, we sort of have such ``subscription fees''---we call them taxes---and even then, the tax rules tend to be a little more progressive, with a general slant towards being used mostly for the social good.

Would a company do that? Especially for a company that is built around the modern day principles of ensuring that their quarterly reports show great progress?

Maybe this ``metaverse'' would be the equivalent of this duodecade's version of the dotcom bust in the early 2000s.

Maybe.