A map of the metaverse: Hashtag Trending Weekend Edition

Welcome to Hashtag Trending, the Weekend Edition with your host Jim Really like.

Before this 12 months we did a sequence on the Metaverse for another podcast collection I host with my colleague Doug Sparkes called a “Deeper Dive.” That sequence is nonetheless very well truly worth listening to in its entirety, but over earlier months I have been thinking a lot about one particular distinct episode we named a “map of the metaverse(s)”

We took the concept from the guide Snowcrash, where the phrase metaverse was first made use of. In that book, there were several nations or city states each and every with their own principles. They experienced there possess citizenship and regulations. Quite a few of them were being run by firms or eccentric abundant men and women who were the “dictators” who ruled those worlds. Sound common?

You could journey concerning them but you did so at some chance. They were tribal and normally addressed immigrants and travellers with suspicion and often with hostility.

The concept in the ebook was so near to what we noticed rising in the metaverse as it was unfolding IRL (in genuine life). We noticed a competitive set of contenders all trying to make a stake in the new metaverse(s). So I assumed, what if I described the rising metaverse as if it was a globe and we could map out the the several wannabe city states.

The end result was this episode. I hope you’ll find it attention-grabbing. It might help make conceptual sense of some of the factors that are rising here and now.

1 final be aware. There are a variety of articles or blog posts rising now that discuss about how the metaverse is failing, how Zuckerberg is losing hundreds of billions or how the metaverse has develop into what athletics icon Yogi Berra stated about places to eat in New York. “Nobody goes there since it is way too crowded.”

We preferred to skirt both equally the posture of the true believer and the cynic. In our view, the metaverse is inescapable. What type it requires or in our parlance, what country or alliance of nations gain is not.

Enjoy!

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