Happy Nice Mall

If you have an internet connection, you are probably familiar with this feeling. Something new begins to happen on the Internet. People seem really excited about it. You suddenly wonder. (Of course I join TikTok.) Or maybe you’re scared. (Am I too late to buy crypto?) Everyone is afraid of missing something at some point.

Speaking of which, have you heard? metadata store? Even if you haven’t heard Mark Zuckerberg’s 81 minute video review The term has been bubbling up this year, about the future of human interaction that culminated last week with Facebook’s rebranding as Meta. While leaders in tech, entertainment, and fashion seemed to agree on exactly what it was, they rushed to lay out their claims. The important thing is that it’s coming.

Talks about the Metaverse reduce the feeling that: FOMO in its simplest, most general form. “Metaverse” – the term – originated by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” and has come into such wide and varied use recently that it has come to mean something more non-specific than the future. Who wants to miss this?

To be fair, a lot of people. And they Have they reasons. For now, talking about the metadatabase is essentially a branding exercise: an attempt to unify the many things that are already taking shape online under one conceptual title.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist writing about the Metaverse, described it as “a kind of successor state of the mobile internet,” which was helpfully illuminating: how the Metaverse is a combination of several emerging technologies (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, online gaming). explains the path. Mixed and virtual reality hardware, including platforms like Roblox and Facebook’s Oculus, for example, can grow and overlap. In the words of Mr. Zuckerberg: “I believe this is the next chapter for the Internet, and this is the next chapter for our company.”

As a point of comparison, Mr. Ball often looks back to the smartphone era, which has changed our relationship with technology in ways as profound and shocking as it now seems banal.

Think 10 years ago when smartphones and apps were new and social media was on the rise. Many people believed that the era of supercomputing in your pocket would change a lot of things, even if they didn’t know exactly how. Eager to unload the latest era, Metaverse boosters believe we are on the verge of even bigger changes.

If that sounds more linear than visionary despite the sci-fi branding and talking “decades from now,” it’s because it is. Fortnite has more than 300 million players worldwide, and many see it as a way to hang out with friends and interact with the wider culture. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are only speculative in a financial sense – they exist, and you probably know someone who owns some. There are tens of millions of virtual reality glasses currently in circulation, mostly for gaming. Give a chance. They are interesting!

You can even think of some very obvious ways the internet could be more involved in your life, pointing to the general metaversal aspect. The way you develop online personalities in different contexts on Instagram, LinkedIn or Slack. The way you play Scrabble on your phone all day, wherever you are. The gloomy virtual office of the Covid Zoom grind. Group chat!

Using a tag like “metastore” has the strange effect of making things already happening too far and impossible. people really NS spending enormous amounts of time and money in rich, game-like interactive spaces with their own cultures and economies. Entrepreneurs really NS building an alternative financial system using blockchain technology, buying and selling virtual real estate, and trying to understand how a placeless, stateless system can govern itself.

As several tech writers have pointed out, Mr. Zuckerberg’s speech not especially the novel. (Any Roblox fan in your life could tell you that.) The label also provides a slippery subject for criticism. If anything about these trends interests you, don’t worry! Everything will be better when we are really in the metaverse.

Despite all his gestures towards an uncertain future that has yet to be built, Mr. Zuckerberg’s attempt to make a claim and explain on the metaverse made one thing clear: He may be the strongest FOMO. For someone whose company can be said to have truly changed the course of history, becoming a central place in the lives of billions of people, the prospect of a new internet age can be downright frightening.

It should be noted that in the early winners of the social media era, much of what people are excited about being online right now – pretty much anything that promises a “decentralized” experience – is by definition set against big firms like Facebook. (This also explains why Mr. Zuckerberg spends so much time on virtual reality, on which Facebook has a real basis.)

Not missing the next big thing is what makes tech leaders and companies what they are. Missing the next big thing, whatever it is, isn’t an option. In this view, it is more comforting to give a unifying name to the various promising and threatening trends than to reflect on the chaos of dozens of competing technologies adopted by billions of people heading in directions that even the most forward-thinking visionary can attest.

As Benedict Evans, another venture capitalist, wrote in October, current metastore discourse It’s like standing in front of a whiteboard in the early 1990s, typing words like interactive TV, hypertext, broadband, AOL, multimedia, and maybe video and games, and then drawing a box around them and labeling the box an “information highway.” .’” (His former employer, crypto forward firm Andreessen Horowitz — When he was a named partner on Facebook’s board — he leaned more towards the term “Web3.”)

Current tech giants have resources, capabilities, and industrial-grade FOMO on their side, so it would be a mistake to underestimate the effects of the internet on this supposed successor state.

However, there are two guesses about the metaverse that I feel comfortable with.

One: The expanding will not be known as the “metaverse” by people living in their different, as yet undetermined, environments. If we really do our work in virtual offices, we’ll just call it work.

Two: For most of us, it’s okay to miss a more inclusive lifestyle, where identities, work and sociability are more blended in the physical and virtual spaces, many of which are designed with profit in mind. He will decide whether we can leave or not.

For Context is a column that explores the limits of digital culture.