In the first chapter of The Reality Bug the fourth novel of the Pendragon series, Bobby Pendragon is walking through Rubic City in Veelox, a foreign metropolis. Rubic City has paved streets, towering skyscrapers and is very similar to Bobby’s Earth. However, there is a striking difference. There are no people. Rubic City is a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, where the society has vanished but its structures remain.
Bobby meets Aja who tells him that although the planet is not empty, most of the inhabitants have chosen to spend their time on a digital environment called Lifelight which is located in a large metal pyramid overlooking the town.
Lifelight is a virtual reality program which allows users to experience their deepest desires. The experience is so captivating that many of the users did not want to leave the virtual world once they had experienced it.
Bobby found that 99% of Veelox citizens spent their waking hours in Lifelight. The remaining outsiders worked as computer technicians maintaining the virtual world, and physical caregivers looking after the participants’ bodies.
As millions of people lost themselves in their digital wonderlands, real life around them slowly began to rot away.
The term “Metaverse”, which was popularized two years ago as the pandemic spread, brought to mind images of Lifelight, and Black Mirror episodes.
In October 2021, one of the largest tech companies in the world, formerly known by the name “Facebook,” changed its name to “Meta,” heralding the dawn of a digital era.
Every company was suddenly faced with a choice: create a Metaverse division, or risk falling behind. Mark Zuckerberg has invested billions in his company’s virtual reality, “Horizon Worlds”, which is designed to facilitate communal gatherings. Nike created Nikeland, a virtual world on Roblox, to allow fans to meet, socialize and participate in a variety of brand experiences. The “Metaverse”, of course, became intertwined to “Web3” with platforms such as Decentraland, which allowed users to purchase digital plots of lands on the Ethereum Blockchain.
Venture capital firms invested $600M in Metaverse and the Metaverse was a hot topic. Corporate Twitter accounts started using the jargon-heavy Web3 jargon.
It seemed inevitable that our future would be spent in Wii Sports Resorts playing virtual reality with eight billion of our closest friends … but then, one day, something funny happened: No one cared anymore about the Metaverse.
Sandbox and Decentraland are two Metaverse platforms valued at over $1 billion. The daily active user counts peaked at 4,503 and 675 users respectively, before dropping to 522 and 37 in October 2022.
Meta’s Horizon Worlds had 300,000 monthly visitors in February 2022. The company management predicted 500,000+ users at the end of the calendar year. Eight months later, the monthly usage dropped below 200,000 visitors as many visitors did not return after their initial month.
It’s difficult to blame users who don’t return when Metaverse’s own Vice President of Metaverse, in an internal memo, had to ask his employees to spend more in Horizon Worlds. He said, “For most of us, our dogfooding Dashboards clearly show that we do not spend a lot of time in Horizon.” Why? Why do we not love the product that we have built so much we use it every day? If we don’t like it, then how can we expect that our users will love it?
As company after company closes their Metaverse divisions I think this digital experiment has reached its end.
Why did “the Metaverse”, as it was called, become so popular?
Here are some thoughts I’ve had:
It’s not surprising that the web saw an increase in activity during the pandemic.
This Metaverse-centric world was not a permanent evolution in the human condition. It was a response to Covid-19, a tail risk that only occurs once every century. This risk would be mitigated sooner or later.
The Lindy Effect says that the life expectancy of a non-perishable item, like a technology, or an idea, will be proportional to how old it is.
Lindy enjoys a walk through the city on a sunny summer’s day with her family and friends.
Lindy loves to attend concerts and sporting events.
Lindy is crushing cold ones with her boys.
In the 18th century BC, ancient Sumerians wrote a hymn dedicated to their goddess The ancient Sumerians created a hymn to their goddess of beer in the 18th century
What is Lindy not? You can watch a Travis Scott digital concert in Fortnite. It’s not surprising that socialization in real life quickly returned once pandemic restrictions were
It is only natural to expect that a temporary shift of consumer trends will become a permanent We live in a world that is prone to mean-reversion, so bold predictions
2) When interest rates are at historic lows and cash reserves are at record high
Spending $36B on a new version of The Sims is stupid, until you
Investors will deploy to if fixed-income assets do not
I’ve joked that a few things are low-interest rate phenomenon Low-interest rates don’t necessarily create crazy ideas. But the desire for yield when faced
The assumption was that T-Bills will always pay nothing, and cash reserves are always Get back to reality. Gravity is gone.
Would JPMorgan publish a research note on the economics and value propositions of token No, of course not. The words used in the sentence above are not even in use in 2019.
In 2022, things were different.
If you are a college freshman who wants to be accepted on Greek Row and is considering buying
You become more self-conscious and your logic is thrown out of the window. “I We should also get involved.”
This is how a $377B banking institution sponsors a lounge within a Metaverse
