Finally bury the hype! Living in the Metaverse? I prefer to eat stones

The Metaverse is coming. And I look forward to his arrival about as enthusiastically as a prisoner tied to the tracks watches a train approaching him. In five to ten years it is said to be so far. Since Facebook himself in last summer Meta renamed and announced that its thousands of employees will now work with all their might on this beautiful digital dystopia, sorry, exciting future, one ridiculous forecast follows the next: It is predicted that it will generate several hundred billion US dollars in a few years EpicGames-Chef Tim Sweeney. Possibly even more important than the Internet and book printing together, puts the journalist Richard Gutjahr on top.

The devil shits on the biggest pile, one of my aunts used to say. Well, so do tech CEOs, it seems. Under the term Metaverse, the bullshit seems to be piling up to the sky. Under this label, millions and billions are thrown after every idea, no matter how crazy. Patents for the Metaverse are granted by Nike until Gucci registered, virtual regions in Metaverse games like “The sandbox” Bought for huge sums. For the Metaverse prophets, the new digital world seems to be something like the glue that will one day bind together all the profitable mega-hypes of our time, from NFTs, blockchain to virtual reality. And they obviously sniffed it a little too hard.

The boundaries between the analog and digital world, which are already becoming increasingly fragile due to smartphones, are to be completely torn down by the Metaverse. We then exist online 24-7, work, live and love in the Metaverse, switch from one digital world to the next with our VR headset. All of these metaverses are of course connected to each other – preferably via blockchain. Then, finally!, we can go to a virtual Justin Bieber concert with our digital avatars and later give the Gucci NFT handbag bought there for some shitcoins to a dragon in “World of Warcraft” around the ears. MC Donalds announced plans to build Metaverse stores so we don’t even have to log out to order a Big Mac. Only Metaverse diapers are missing for perfect happiness.

Living in such a totally digitized world? I’d rather eat stones. And I say that as someone who spends a lot of time in games. Even as a child, my mother had to snatch the Game Boy from me regularly. I still don’t want to live in a Game Boy. And certainly not in the damn Matrix. Fortunately, there are signs that the hype surrounding the Metaverse is slowly dying down. Not only are they Google-Searches related to descent. More and more tech giants and game designers are picking the idea apart.

Does all this sound familiar? “Second Life” made possible in 2003 what Zuckerberg and Co. are dreaming of today.

Because whatever metaverse ideas can be implemented already existed – and failed. A virtual world in which you can live and date as 3D avatars and be bombarded with advertising by corporations like Toyota? That made “Second Life” possible twenty years ago. The success was short-lived. The inventor of the game recently said in an interview: We overestimated how much time people really want to spend in such virtual worlds. He sees the metaverse at best as a niche. Significantly, the active player counts of current Metaverse hype games like Decentraland and The Sandbox are bobbing around at a few thousand people.

And the big new promise of taking your avatar and all your belongings from one Metaverse world to the next is technically unfeasible. Virtual objects have completely different properties in each game world and are not compatible. John Carmack, inventor of “doom‘, warned: The Metaverse is a ‘honey pot trap for architectural astronauts’ who only want to look at things from the highest level. Gabe Newell, head of the largest PC gaming platform Steam, was even harsher: “Most people who talk about the Metaverse have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.”

Even virtual reality has never really made it into the mainstream since it started twenty years ago. Hardly anyone wants to play with it. An hour or two at most. Even if technology were to improve, the need to live with giant glasses strapped to your head is likely to remain fairly minimal for most people. Who wants to suddenly see a hologram of their boss appearing in the living room at a meeting in the home office?

The writer Neal Stephenson, who invented the concept of the metaverse in his book “Snow Crash” in 1992, is currently reminding us again: he didn’t want to create a blueprint for our society, but a satirical sci-fi dystopia. But the world’s tech CEOs don’t seem to get the jokes.

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