Are you done with crappy reading lists about success and leadership? Have you read enough top 100 nonsense? Wondering who was killing it and who was quietly quitting in the metaverse this year? Wonder no more. As we look hopefully to 2023 into a galaxy far, far away from mega winters, hot girl summers and Prime Energy Drink fights at your local Aldi. I wanted to take a look back at the complete and utter hype that was The Metaverse.
January Sales
Walmart: the giant of supermarkets, drugstores and everything massive. Foreshadowing what might come to pass later on in the year, the mighty Walmart started applying for a bunch of trademarks, which, though isn’t at all unusual (they have a data centre called Area 71 FFS), it did feel to me a little cart before horse. For the big leagues of commerce, this Metaverse-thingy was, and still is, uncharted waters for a lot of retail - you know what I mean when I say retail: sausages, loo roll, mushy peas. The “intensity” that Walmart was applying for these trademarks hinted at the direction of travel towards crypto, NFTs and digital ownership, so when, in September 2022 Walmart entered the metaverse via Roblox, we all took a collective sigh at the biggest anticlimax since Y2K. Literally nothing to see here. Let’s hope they up their game a bit in 2023 because I’m running out of Pringles.
Feb-book
In February, a little company called Facebook decided to do a massive pivot into the metaverse. On the surface it looked like this could pay off, after all, Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire techbro. This rapid shift away from the social media business it spent decades building seemed like a huge gamble. Not just controversial for their shareholders but also for mums everywhere. If Facebook became Meta, they thought, would we ever be able to casually stalk our children? I wouldn't like to surmise as to whether Facebook/Meta did or didn't pull it off. I think you can figure it out for yourself.
By the end of 2022 everything became Meta (which, you know, is quite meta).
And because of that, people who work in the metaverse like me, and are passionate about the metaverse as I am; well, we spent the rest of the year trying to explain to people like our mums that the metaverse is not Facebook. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg. No wonder the Guardian has been trolling him for the past nine months.
March Heirs
Capgemini, American Express, JP Morgan and HSBC jumped into bed with the metaverse. Totally missing the point of future banking, they set up Second Life-style embassies in The Sandbox, Decentraland and there’s even a metaverse mortgage solution - like anyone needs that in Gen Z but ok. What I like about what Capgemini are suggesting is using the metaverse to power two-tier banking putting traditional banking systems into hyperspace or something. We hoped that DeFi had shaken up the traditionality of banking and its boring nonsensical processes during the pandemic. I’m not entirely sure the world is ready for game and virtual currency in banking/finance yet, but it better get ready, because my spidey senses tell me that things are gonna change around here. BANK YOUR ITEMS!
April Fools
Forbes, of all business-facing services, decided in April that they might quite like to create an NFT collection on FTX.
FTX, do you know them?
Forbes thinks that FTX, is a leading global cryptocurrency Exchange, which was to launch an ERC-721 token on April 13th. Unlucky for some. Whatever happened to FTX I wonder?
Own goal? Forbes? Never.
April Show-ers
Also in April, YouTube decided to launch its own NFT so that fans could own their own videos. Wow, what a revolutionary thing this is considering that for the past 20 years “you’ve given up certain things to YouTube in exchange for the use of their platform.” However, now they're allowing you to own it as an NFT. Well, sign me up already! Now, this really is a revolution. My usual dose of salt aside, I do think that this has the potential to be quite a cool thing, but YouTube/Google are gonna mess this up. So grab the popcorn, sit back and watch how TikTok moves faster to keep creators creating. My take on this is that it’s a really messy business model, and considering we’ve heard nothing since it was announced last April, it may indeed have already been consigned to the Google Graveyard.
May The Fourth (Of July) Be With You
I've never ever wanted to be a Disney princess, because I have actual life goals. And I've never wanted to float around my living room singing Let It Go from Frozen by Adele Dezeem. I don’t even Star Wars. Sorry everyone.
I'm more of a Hasbro girl: I like robots, and I like bronies but I love web3, so seeing that the Walt Disney Company had announced that six companies were joining them for a Disney Accelerator kind of made me scratch my head a little bit, because suddenly WDC became pretty inclusive, from a future-tech perspective at least. One such company who joined the accelerator was Polygon and I wondered why? It’s already massive and it would have been already massive in mid-July. So I wonder why it joined an accelerator programme? I guess that’s for the birds. But it does make us think, like the Walmart story from the beginning of 2022 that something is going on in these empires. It’s way more than increasing the Dad-balance of Mandalorian merch purchases (try saying that after a few sherries). My feeling is that this is about entertainment and retail corps taking on banking and wealth in a totally different way. Meaningful? No. Data driven? Absolutely.
The Opposite Of August
Some people worship Mark Cuban. I'm not one of those people. But I somewhat agree with him when he said that buying virtual real estate was the dumbest shit ever in August of this year. He's a great investor, that’s not up for debate. In fact not much that Cuban has said or done has been off the Mark (see what I did there?)
Given that the metaverse has pretty much been built on virtual land ownership to this point, because it really doesn't have anything else to power it (you know, like good experiences for example). All those crypto bros needed somewhere to go that was a bit more legitimate than what it was that they were already doing. So invisible land sales seem legit, right? Well to some extent this works - particularly where brands want to rent land from an owner for a campaign or short term, but that quick buck could have been better made the Second Life way surely? And I know that Decentraland uses DAO to decide on land rents and ownership.
So I’m half with you Mark. Trying to kill an area of the metaverse that probably should have been dead a long time ago isn’t a crime. The perps are the creators of metaverses that give the end user absolutely no reason to be there - spoiling the experience for everyone who visits.
Cuban is a big DAO thinker, and that does fly in the face of land ownership metaverses somewhat. I feel like this is a puff piece where his bullish (they love using that word about Mark Cuban) approach to investments are actually rallied by what he predicts and says. Though I don’t worship Cuban as much as some of my contemporaries, I would love to know what he’s thinking.
Mocktober
Q: How many users did Decentraland have in October 2022?
A#1: According to @0x_shake, 30 daily active users. Well, they asked that question anyway.
A#2: 810.
Dapp.com, AtlasCorp, gosh, even my mum has done the detective work on this but we’re all missing the point. The question is not how many, but why. Why are we sifting through AFK and bots to get to the truth? It’s cheeky. I come from the world of game development where you are as good as your last shipped game and its metrics, stats and user data. In my metaverse experience, if metaverse creators create such a huge brand platform, then they also have to be able to satisfy the brand owners. Surely, the way to satisfy brand owners is putting users on the platform. But if nobody wants to go to your metaverse platform, what do you do? Fake it? No, you try harder.
Providing us with a good opportunity to be able to explore the metaverse in the means with which we want to explore it, is from a discovery perspective, rather than using bots to cover up your shortcomings.
Slowvember
I am allergic to coffee. That is something not many people know about me unless they're my friend, which means that if you’re reading this, you are now my bona-fide friend. So when people ask me to go for a coffee, I will often pay to avoid people ordering a cup of joe for me. Quite simply, coffee is the way that I will ultimately kick the bucket. I know absolutely nothing about coffee. I don't know the difference between Java and Arabica, for example and to be fair, I don't care.
Costa Coffee cares. It cares a lot. So it has created, and I feel like this is just for me, a way for me to participate in its brand. It has decided to create its own NFT-based drip or should that be a drop? An announcement by the company that they teamed up with footwear creator Artisan Lab to create a series of NFT backed sneaks. As a sneakerhead this is exciting! Even I can hear a *but* to my excitement. Another thing that you might not know about me is that I hate the colours brown and beige. Rancid, nasty colours that compliment no one and nothing but used diapers and doggy doo bags. But in their wisdom they have gone beyond the toilet to create coffee-related dye profiles for the most unique sneakers you will never wear. Based on Costa Coffee’s iconic Italian Mocha brand.
This NFT thing is quite literally hype. For idiots only. Why not stem the flow of folks crowding Costa Coffee on Saturday mornings, by actually using the sales of this NFT to hire more staff? Since Brexit the labour shortage has been real.
Overall, this year has been mostly rubbish. From stupid raises to crap celeb endorsements I’m frankly embarrassed about how technology is being used to gather greed. We’re just trying to work out how to overcome pandemics by putting technology to a greater use for everyone, as well as creating an inclusive environment for folks to learn and develop at the same speed with the same chances and choices as everyone else. I hope 2023 is filled with intelligence rather than the artifice of tech bros and machines. I wish for more of this, dear reader, a chance for us to discuss and debate the future of a world that we can only touch briefly with our fingertips because the future doesn’t even belong to us. And finally, I want to thank you for your continued support: from our stealth beginnings in 2022 to who knows what in 2023? It has been amazing so far! As long as you’re ride or die with me, I’ll keep the salt levels higher than this utter douchebag.
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