The irruption of the Metaverse in 2022 is similar to the irruption of television in 1950
The arrival of the Metaverse is getting quite complicated
Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay
Technical posts abound with complicated explanations and lack a conceptual vision of this new mass media version.
Could it be that those who intend to take over the "new television" want it to be so in order to keep control?
It would be terrible if a tool born on Layer 0 of decentralization remains in the hands of 3 or 4 television networks, as it is today.
I haven't seen a single Metaverse explanation for Aunt Rose yet.
Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay
How would the advent of television be explained to Aunt Rose in 1950? Could she easily understand that a wooden box with a glass screen was going to be able to show moving images?
At the moment, when we talk about the Metaverse, we talk about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, Oculus, and terrifying devices that will invade our bodies and project us into a world of fantasies and contained desires finally fulfilled.
I didn't see anyone talking about the evolution of the mass media towards a new form of mind control.
Surprisingly, for the moment, very few brands have understood that they must occupy spaces in the Metaverse because marketing is going to move massively towards this new dimension of consumption control. In a future post, I am going to refer to the marketing that is expected in the Metaverse.
In this post, I want to dwell on the conceptual dangers of this new multimedia space. We no longer depend on a square device perched somewhere in the living room, in front of which families have gathered for the last 70 years to be educated, mainly on consumption and on the products and brands that must be consumed to be happy, especially, pharmaceutical products, which increase their investment in marketing year after year.
Now, instead, we have a large number of devices through which the Metaverse is going to reach us and make us consume.
Let's not just listen to the song of the sirens. Let us understand that we are in the presence of a new form of mass media that is going to enter our lives definitively during the next, at least, 20 years.
Please I don't want to be misunderstood. I am not against the evolution of technology. What I intend is to put a warning, since we now know what television meant in the development of at least 5 generations, especially with regard to the way of consuming and socializing.
Almost 100 years ago the first television broadcasts began, but only in the middle of the 20th century was the system spread throughout the world with black and white transmissions.
A huge quantum leap occurred in the 1970s with the advent of color television. In the 1980s, cable and satellite television appeared, and the world was interconnected through the silly box. In the 90s, television programs from all over the world began to be broadcast, and we were able to learn about different cultures, economies, customs, artistic events, and wars, real or invented. In the new millennium, technology advanced towards 3D devices, touch devices, motion sensors, streaming, Chromecast, and canned series and documentaries, mostly biased and unpresentable.
Television ends up being an addictive and dangerous drug to numb and direct the behavior of humanity. There is no question that television is the perfect system for mass mind control. The corporate capitalist system finds a perfect system on television to turn society into an automated consumer civilization that consumes products it does not need, sold through disgustingly lying propaganda that helps hide the outrages with which resources are squandered of the planet.
Image by Christian Dorn from Pixabay
70% of the global communication offer is in the hands of only six large media groups.
The concentration of mass media conglomerates began in the 1990s. The six communication supergiants control 70% of the business worldwide and own some 1,500 newspapers, 1,100 magazines, 2,400 publishers, 9,000 radio stations and 1,500 TV networks. They are the ones who decide what we have to watch on television, what we should eat, what brands we should use, what medications we should take to be happy, and which topic is more news than another.
To this we must add the entry into the television industry of the large technological conglomerates. Google bought the world's leading video channel (YouTube), Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram (and changed its name to anticipate its desire to take over the Metaverse), Apple made a huge bet on online TV to compete with Netflix and HBO, and Amazon did something similar with its Amazon Prime Videos bet.
¿Are we going to let this happen to the Metaverse?
It would be very sad not to have learned this lesson. We are at the same time that television was in the 50s. But now we know how that story ended, and doing nothing would mean that civilization has not advanced as a society at all in the last 70 years.
For that, the first thing to do is to inform Aunt Rose what the hell the Metaverse is and why it will be very important in her next 30 years of life and also in that of her loved ones.
Let's see what definitions I found of Metaverse on different platforms, some of them very reputable.
DEFINITION 1. The Metaverse is a virtual world, to which we will connect using a series of devices that will make us think that we are really inside it, interacting with all its elements. It will be like actually teleporting to a whole new world through virtual reality glasses and other accessories that will allow us to interact with it. The Metaverse does not seek to be a fantasy world, but a kind of alternative reality in which we can do the same things we do today outside home, but without leaving the room.
DEFINITION 2. The metaverse seeks to simulate physical experiences virtually in the most possible realistic way. Although these experiences can be rendered in two dimensions (2D), they are typically rendered in three dimensions (3D) to convey more realism. Thus, one of its main goals is to imitate a large part of our experiences in reality, but in a digital environment.
DEFINITION 3. The Metaverse allows us to play a basketball game on a physical field, but with a virtual ball and with people who are not physically there, but who are in another physical place. It also allows us to buy in a virtual store as if we were walking through it, touching the products and making the payment, except that the products will arrive at home by post mail.
DEFINITION 4. The Metaverse aims to reproduce experiences that could occur in a science fiction world, such as walking through the rings of Saturn or traveling virtually through imaginary worlds or past worlds. It is important to point out that the Metaverse is made up of virtual worlds. And each virtual world is a digital space that simulates activities, whether fictional or not.
DEFINITION 5. The Metaverse is an expansive network of worlds and three-dimensional simulations rendered in real time that offers continuity of identities, objects, historicity, currencies and rights virtually, and that can be experienced synchronously by an unlimited number of individual users.
(The latter is really to be analyzed in an ultra-resonant and nuclear telescopic underworld. But, as if this were not enough to understand that at the moment no one can explain well what the Metaverse is without falling into intricate pseudo-academic twists and turns of words that only exist in the troubled minds of those who write them, I still have a few others.)
DEFINITION 6. Metaverses are environments where humans interact socially and economically as avatars, through software in cyberspace that acts as a metaphor for the real world, but without its limitations. The Metaverse is composed of multiple shared and persistent three-dimensional virtual spaces linked to a perceived virtual universe.
(Did you understand mom?)
DEFINITION 7. The Metaverse is a new digital world that will be fully immersive and will allow users to interact just as they do in the real world. For this, it will be necessary to have VR devices.
(Of course, some device has to be bought. Microsoft, Nvidia and Facebook are already setting up their factories...)
DEFINITION 8. The Metaverse is a virtual space or world that is intended for users to use to find each other through AR spectacles or VR headsets. There they can come together to create, play, work, meet and even shop or just hang out.
(What will it be to hang out? The same as the Simpsons do spending their lives in front of the television?)
DEFINITION 9. The key to the Metaverse is that it can be fully immersive, or at least much more than current virtual reality. Yes, we will have glasses that are possibly similar to the current ones to immerse ourselves in it, but also sensors that record our physical movements so that our avatar within that metaverse does exactly the same.
DEFINITION 10. If with the Internet it is possible to interact through the screen of the computer, smartphone, tablet or other device, without restrictions of time or space, with the Metaverse the limit of that screen vanishes, offering an immersive experience, as if we were within a video game and we move through an avatar that represents us, and that is capable of touching and moving objects, interacting with other people (or avatars) and influencing the environment. Although it is possible to enter the Metaverse from a computer, devices such as virtual reality and augmented reality glasses, for example, offer an even more realistic experience. But beyond the way we access it, the key to the Metaverse lies in what we can do within it, thanks to web 3.0 or web3, as the third generation of the Internet is known.
Let's leave here. The latter belongs to a bank, and, as expected, shows total confusion, as in everything that concerns the cryptosphere, mixing web 3.0 with immersive glasses. Oh my good…
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I repeat, we are as television was in 1950. The difference is that, at that time, nobody saw that, with this device born to entertain, a centralized empire managed by six global controllers could be achieved. But now we do know that this can happen. If in, say, 30 years, the so-called Metaverse is in the hands of 2 or 3 centralized corporations that sell the immersive glasses and tell us through avatars what vaccines we should take and what foods we should eat to be strong and vigorous, we will not have learned nothing and we will deserve to be a herd of dirty rats managed by a piper who guides us through the streets of the cities of the Metaverse.
What would be a coherent and pragmatic explanation of the Metaverse for Aunt Rose?
NEGATIVE EXPLANATION. Look Aunt Rose. Times change. You spend a great deal of time in front of the television. But it seems that you do not consume as much as you should. You are afraid of the smartphone and the tablet, and the computer is only good for watching Netflix series when you travel. What's about to happen is that some bad guys figured out that if you lose your fear of electronic gadgets, you're going to be able to buy more. So, what they are building is a device that you will wear like a pair of glasses and with which you can go to buy a dress in Paris browsing through the best stores on the Champs-Elysées as if you were really there, and if you don't have enough money, a bank will give you a loan so you can pay in 18 interest-free installments and bring the dress. All of this without leaving the living room of your 30 m2 apartment you still owe half the mortgage on.
Well, okay, not everything has to be so negative. Let's look at some positive explanations.
POSITIVE EXPLANATION 1. You who like museums, through the technology known as the Metaverse and with the devices that support it, you will be able to visit the museum of your choice anywhere in the world, and go through it as if you were there, walking and interacting with the guides to ask whatever you want. You can spend as long as you want there. To enter you will surely have to pay a fee. You will also have to pay to buy merchandise, which you will then have delivered to your home.
POSITIVE EXPLANATION 2. If you like soccer, through the technology known as the Metaverse and with the devices that support it, you will be able to watch a match between Barcelona and Manchester City at Wembley Stadium, sitting at a virtual seat that you previously bought, and feel the entire climate of the event as if you were really there. The cries that you utter will only be heard in your bedroom, since you will never move from there.
POSITIVE EXPLANATION 3. You who always dreamed of seeing a concert at the Scala di Milano, through the technology known as Metaverse and with the devices that support it, you will be able to buy a virtual ticket to see the concert that you like in la Scala di Milano, without moving from home and as if sitting in the theater. The ticket to the Metaverse will cost you much less than the fly ticket and stay in Milano, and the feeling will be the same.
We are in time to turn the Metaverse into a paradise. Let's not make the same mistakes we made, or allow to be made, with the television and mass advertising industries. Please.
(This article was originally published on Publish0x)
As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research.
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