After “crypto”, the “metaverse” might be the biggest buzzword for tech Twitter in 2021. Everybody has some thread about how those two abstract concepts will intertwine, and we’re one step closer to the metaverse, and so on. But as Tim Urban put it in his incredible post on AI it doesn’t feel like we’re all that much closer to an entirely online world. That’s an enormous change. As he puts it, standing on the corner there would be pretty intense.
While a lot of the last 20 years have actually looked pretty similar to this chart, they don’t quite feel like it. Think of what has happened since 2000: we’ve got computers in our pockets infinitely more powerful than the supercomputers from the 90s, there are cars that DRIVE THEMSELVES, and we can video chat with anyone in the world using just a link. As Urban follows, “you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right. So here’s how it actually feels to stand there:”
Right now, despite all the technological wonder happening in front of us every day, we feel like we’re on a barely up-trending curve. Curves that cover human progress are always exponential, they just don’t feel that way. My girlfriend’s grandfather is 95 years old and got his first iPhone less than a year ago. He was stunned by the fact that he could FaceTime with his great-grandson with just the click of a button. He’s been around and aware since the iPhone first came out, but it didn’t click until he actually got to use it. If I traveled 75 years back in time showed him an iPhone he would probably think it was literally magic.
The lead up to a sharp curve is where the magic happens. We just don’t realize what sensation we’re feeling until liftoff. A lot of these major transitions take decades, with the years in-between essentially serving as what I’m going to call the “revving period”. In racing, the cars’ drivers will rev their engines at the starting line in order to do a couple things:
They are causing their fluid to pressurize, which makes it easier to circulate, shift gears, and helps the transmission
They are enabling torque to be immediately available for acceleration while preventing stalling
All that said, what is the metaverse? The best overview can probably found on Matthew Ball’s site where he covers it in detail, through both an overview and his 9-part primer. Parsing things down, the metaverse is often described as the “successor to the internet”. It’s not quite web3, which is what the new internet will be built on via crypto networks, but more like the presence people feel while on the internet. web3 is a graduation from protocols, the metaverse a graduation from going online. A few common examples of early metaverse phenomena are Fortnite and even The Matrix.
That’s not to say that the metaverse is just a game, virtual reality, online world, an economy, or a digital platform. Ball lays out some of the core tenets of what the metaverse might be like in his overview. Instead, he suggests that the metaverse will differ from existing phenomena by continuing indefinitely, being real-time (albeit with scheduled events and history), all-inclusive, and without barriers to entry - meaning anyone can join. It will not only continue linearly for all, but enable economics to exist through “work” and “value and be transversal across both digital and physical worlds. That’s how it maintains synchronicity and persists forever. Lots of jargon in there. It lastly will be a universe of creator driven content and experiences that are interoperable no matter where you are or who you interact with. The car you buy in real life could come with an access token that you can use in the metaverse which enables you to drive that same car to your next Fortnite battle, or even during it. Then the same skin you wear while in that Fortnite battle can be worn to a work meeting… if you really want to.
The metaverse could become the entryway for anyone with a digital presence to any digital experience, a linkage to physical ones, and even a creator/labor platform. The last point here is an important gateway to the metaverse, and one we’re already seeing today. In the metaverse, virtual labor should be able to be completed anywhere. Given that many purchases are shifting to online goods and services like NFTs or online therapy, connectivity will reach new levels we haven’t even conceived yet.
Can you think of anything that has already started to connect the labor force despite all of us sitting at home for much of the last two years?
Zoom.
Zoom has done two things better than all of it’s predecessors thanks to countless hours of work to make its experience ideal.
Made us feel immersed in a conference room with our coworkers despite being thousands of miles apart
Minimized any friction to do so by enabling room access with just a click. No account necessary
Like I mentioned earlier, we aren’t in the metaverse yet and it won’t be a zero to one transition. But the idea of being able to speak and interact with anyone anywhere, simply, with the exact same experience is groundbreaking. It’s an early form of a portion of the metaverse. A critical piece of the revving period, that to us feels intuitive from the jump. Skype fumbled the bag. But as with any other major technological shift, remember, that what we see looks a lot like the flattest part of the curve. Until it doesn’t.
Right now we use Zoom, its links and virtual experience for the shared reason of work. We don’t have a ton of other reasons for Zoom aside from playing games, catching up with friends, and events. But that’s always because there is a reason to do so. People often gather on the internet without a concrete reason, but not Zoom. As these two experiences start to blend, the engine starts revving . This isn’t to say that Zoom is the gateway to the metaverse, but Zoom and similar frictionless experiences pushing people to the same place for the same reason is a future step.
Other experiences like watching a Travis Scott concert in Fortnite, streamers, and companies like Topia who are trying to revolutionize the way we work with people online symbolize our gradual movement to the metaverse.
All of the examples above fall somewhere in the spectrum of not that surprising to “huh, that’s odd but whatever”. Ten years ago we would be absolutely floored by any of them. More than twelve million (aka the entire population of Bangalore or Moscow, firmly within the top 25 largest cities in the world) people watched Travis Scott perform on Fortnite while live in the game. Phenomena like these pile up and culminate in bigger waves of transformation over time. Each step of the ladder is built upon the last, so we won’t one day cutover to a single “this is it” moment where we’re all in the metaverse. It’s also a concept, so there’s a good chance any definition you see is lacking a huge principle that hasn’t yet been thought of. We didn’t one day become entirely dependent on the internet as a human race, it happened gradually. Similarly, over time we’ll all be in the metaverse and therefore “within” the internet, as Ball puts it.
While momentum is clearly building while we’re in the revving period, there’s still a long way to go before we’re fully *in the metaverse*. We probably won’t fully grasp what’s happening as it’s happening. Enjoy the ride.