A letter to Zuckerberg: The Metaverse is not what you think it is

Dear Lord Sugar Mountain,

Attention: to my Facebook friend who is building a version of the metaverse that nobody wants as a headline.

Certainly the last few years must not have been easy. Their business model was focused on polarization, and subsequently outrage has ironically unified many of us against relying too much on their social media platform. Your government, whose sniper rifle accuracy you know all too well, as they pulled out their ill-conceived stablecoin project shortly after their expensive global ad campaign was launched, has tuned in to the many whistleblowers exposing how their company captures and sells. attention. He called you to question you. Although to be fair, they also needed to talk to you to better understand the basics of digital ad revenue.

What do people do when they are cornered? One of two things: fight back or flee the scene. When the walls close, it seems that you have chosen to flee. Rather than address the deep-seated issues of his business model, he has simply changed the company name, borrowing from a cyberpunk term coined in a 1992 dystopian novel about escaping a decaying world and latching onto reality. illusory alternative, only to completely ignore the shortcomings of the real world. That's probably not the connotation you had in mind when you changed the company name, but it is the most accurate version of what it promises to build.

Related: What Facebook's rebrand tells us about Big Tech's 'Platform Game'

Understanding the metaverse

There is no definitive definition of the Metaverse yet, but the grayscale intent in your recent report is getting very close. It depicts the Metaverse as a set of interconnected experimental 3D virtual worlds where people located anywhere can socialize in real time to form a persistent, user-owned Internet economy that spans both the digital and physical worlds.

While most of the adjectives in that definition are subject to debate and interpretation, one, in particular, stands out and is perhaps the most aligned with what we are building at Cryptoland: user ownership. In the metaverse, we are building projects like The Sandbox, Decentraland, Axie Infinity, My Neighbor Alice, Star Atlas, and Revv Racing. It is the users who ultimately own the content as NFT assets in the game. The idea is that everyone has equal access to the means of production, the gambling economy and consumption rooted in verifiable ownership of digital assets. Additionally, these in-game assets are transferable, ready to be traded in the markets, and at some point even to slip between worlds - your Revv Racing-designed race car design could be sent to another wallet connected to another game. racing, giving his FlameBoi Design another chance to cross the checkered line and take the gold. Yes, one day, our game assets owned by users to slide savagely as they sneak through the Metaverse.

This vision of the Metaverse has little to do with your corporate version of a nauseating virtual reality (VR) ping pong game with a childhood friend in a different time zone, wearing disorienting headphones that scan everything in the room, just to be fed. in the sidebar "Recommended purchases for you" minutes later.

Related: New Metaverse Tribes: Community Owned Economies

Building something new

It talks about replacing precious real-world social interactions with an immersive digital "experience," conveniently overlooking that your company will own everything about that experience, from the visible interactive elements of the game to the metadata. Instead, the crypto version of the metaverse is driven by the same motivation as other Web 3.0 projects in this space: rebuilding our digital world to restore individual property. It has nothing to do with virtual reality or your vision of a "better world".

We are building a new environment in which to spend our time and creative energy. One that is equally accessible, rooted in the crypto economy, and, at some point, perhaps largely managed by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). And while the corporations Welcome In order to participate and produce their own assets in the crypto metaverse, they must not own any hulking parts, as it disempowers the individual and the main goal in question: creating a Metaverse that is owned by the user.

Centralized dreams don't have to pry into the metaverse. I'm not going to make it.

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