Meta boy crazy for Web3

for now at least, it all seems far less seismic than its believers would like. More of an interesting cottage industry than the nailed-on future of all connectivity and commerce we were told it was.

In recent years, nearly every part of the contemporary human experience, from work to sex to church to sin, has been remoted and abstracted for our convenience.

If you work from home, shop online and carry out the bulk of your relationships in the digital sphere, your actual body might only be there as a kind of internal processor. An engine to run a largely digital concept, occasionally appearing in late night milk runs and family birthday parties. As Puri suggests, we are on the precipice of a moment whe... See more

Because of this, the language around the metaverse must be evangelical and unceasing in its conviction. There is a conspiracy of positivity at the heart of it all.

The metaverse feels corporate, inescapable, mandatory, whereas good technology should be liberating and exciting.

Warhol’s Factory, it is not. That being said, events like Ariana Grande’s Fortnite concert and a number of genuinely beautiful NFT collections, like graphic artist Ezra Miller’s Solvency series, suggest there is scope to create something exciting, youthful and important amid all the clamour. Maybe the problem is simply that Zuckerberg and Co’s imag... See more

It’s important to understand that Facebook’s “Meta” is just one part of “the metaverse”, with countless other projects – such as Decentraland and HyperVerse, as well as existing gaming platforms like Fortnite – all coming under a broad, hard-to-define umbrella concept known as “Web3”. Wired ’s Eric Ravenscraft sums it up well: “Talking about what ‘... See more