The Metaverse and (near-)infinite economic growth

Now, the digital economy doesn’t use 0 resources; you have to build the cables, launch the satellites, fabricate the chips, run the servers, and so on. But if the digital economy allows people to derive value from information in cyberspace rather than from physical stuff in the real world, it can increase GDP while cutting resource use.

There’s simply no deep reason that economic growth requires increasing use of any physical resource. Economic value is all about the configuration of stuff, not the amount of stuff. If you took a hammer and smashed your phone to pieces, the resulting pile of trash would still contain the same amount of silicon and cobalt and gallium arsenide and so... See more

Nowhere is this more clearly evident than software. Software is pure information — just 1s and 0s — but creating that information creates huge amounts of value. Software products alone are about 1.3% of world GDP, and the digital economy overall is over 15% of GDP.

First, let’s talk what economic growth does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean “growth in resource use”. What it means is growth in the market value of the things an economy produces — in other words, growth in GDP.

The Metaverse is just that process taken one step further. The more fun or useful stuff you can do in VR — games, business meetings, vacations, hangouts — the less you’ll have to suck up physical resources to do it in meatspace. The more you can transform your subjective world by overlaying it with AR, the less you’ll have to suck up resources tran... See more

But as long as people keep creating more stuff that people want, and finding ways to make people pay for that stuff, GDP keeps growing. The question is whether that requires increasing use of natural resources. Degrowthers say yes; the assertion that “a finite planet cannot sustain infinite growth” has become something that people intone online as ... See more

To sum up, we don’t actually know how much growth is possible for a given amount of resources. We need to limit resource extraction for environmental reasons, but we shouldn’t assume that this will cause a halt to growth. Instead, we should expect it to shift our production from bent pieces of metal to subtler means of enjoyment. The more we immers... See more