Metaverses — A Stage in Evolution: 11 Theses on the Path to Entangled Worlds

Matrix — a series of ForkLog podcasts in which we discuss how the digital environment is transforming with the advent of VR and augmented reality technologies, and speak with the pioneers of metaverses: businesspeople, researchers and philosophers. Vladimir Menaskop, a Web3 researcher and IT entrepreneur, explains why metaverses are the inevitable future and how to prepare for it. 

1. Human-centrism is no longer relevant. A metaverse is a space for interaction not only among people but also machines, algorithms and digital agents. The science of the 21st century — and, in particular, 2023 — is a fusion of technical and humanities knowledge. Ideally, metaverses are the result of this fusion.
    
2. The metaverse remains too abstract an idea for most. It was the same abstraction for Bitcoin 11 years ago. Even when Mt.Gox operated and pools like 50BTC existed, you could not touch the digital gold. Back then Bitcoin was a matter of faith and a creative attitude, as are metaverses now. When metaverses become part of everyday life — no one knows. We will simply have to believe. No one believed that someday a buttonless phone would be more convenient than one with buttons.
3. Irrationality — part of our experience. Many are unsettled by the word “faith,” but in the 21st century we must get used to working with irrational moments; 20th-century philosophy prepared us for this.
4. The transition process is nonlinear. We may end up in a metaverse not in 30 years but in three years. It is quite achievable for most to complete the transition cycle by 2035.
5. The metaverse is not a space for consumers. If you look at books and films, any sources touching on metaverses, you will see that everyone seeks to show the pleasures. The metaverse user will derive a lot of pleasure and not much effort. But the world will change, whether we want it or not. The consumer who appeared in the early 20th century in the United States will disappear. Otherwise, he would go mad from the endless content in the metaverse.
6. Entangled realities, where there is VR, AR, and other forms of reality — this is the zone of evolution. We originally evolved in the biological world. That evolution is very slow. For a simple finger to change, many years must pass. The digital revolution is much faster. There will be exponential growth, as in crypto. And we must participate in the evolution, or disappear.
7. 99.9% of existing metaverses today will inevitably die. The reason is simple — we are still trying to create an economy of action, but doing so within a consumer economy. We do not yet fully understand how the economy of action will work. Of course, it’s easy to discuss how the IT business is structured in 2023. And how people discussed this in the last century?
8. The metaverses will offer more zones of freedom. Offline life is now so regulated in terms of laws and moral rules you must follow because you were born somewhere.
9.  The world lives in utterly different temporal regimes: some countries live in the Middle Ages, some in slave-owning regimes, some in super-totalitarianism, some in super-democracy. The same will happen with metaverses. New forms of slavery, attacks, evil, gaslighting, new diseases and new forms of life will appear in them. But this is not bad — it is inevitable. Humanity must confront the issues of the new. Our heuristic mechanism at some point froze and stopped evolving through consumption. The question “why create just for the sake of creating” has faded for many. And the answer must arise by itself — because there is a new space.
10. Metaverses — a testing ground. This is merely one way of knowing the material world. We are currently at a stage of maximum scepticism, because the new space is only forming. The consumer is, after all, built to be a super-skeptic.
11. One day humanity will reach a stage where there are too few skeptics, and that will be a far more troubling story.

Projects followed by Vladimir Menaskop

“Decentraland.” This project should be regarded as a metaverse-DAO. There is a lot of rough edges there, but the moment of synergy between the two trends genuinely astonishes me.

​In the context of the trend toward globally distributed computers — Render Token appeals to me greatly.

Reef I also like. It is an aggregator of everything.

From near-game mechanics I would highlight the project Shark Race, they have a very cool programmable game economy.