Metaverse, you’re cringe (right now)

The tech industry currently stands at a crossroads. At the twilight of social media, adtech, and crypto bull markets (bubbles?), tech workers and consumers are simultaneously exhausted by tech and starving for more. Shiny trends like Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Reality stand on the sidelines ready to transform latent frustrations into newfang... See more

The major themes of this shift are the metaverse and web3 movements. They are two sides of the same coin, creating a new front- and backend of the Web. Where metaverse uses new tech like extended reality and AI to create new ways of digital interaction, web3 is using blockchain and tokenization to build a more distributed data layer into the intern... See more

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

- In the first six months of 2022, the word metaverse appeared in regulatory filings more than 1,100 times. The previous year saw 260 mentions. The preceding two decades? Fewer than a dozen in total.- The metaverse, a 30-year-old term but nearly century-old idea, is forming around us. Every few decades, a platform shift occurs—such as that from mai... See more

I think our history with proto-­metaverses should make us more skeptical about any claims for the emancipatory power of technology and technology platforms. After all, each of them both encountered and reproduced various kinds of social inequities, even as they strove not to, and many created problems that their designers did not foresee. Yet this

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The insincerity, the rampant performativity, the illusion of urgency, the obsession with constructing futures at the expense of the present – for better or worse, these are all things I associate with being a technologist. And when I speak to my technologist friends, most of them share the same inkling that something is amiss .

Far too many of us g... See more