The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse

Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) did a pretty fantastic takedown of the Metaverse/Decentra failure nexus a little while ago, "The Future is a Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse". Like all things Dan, long as hell be he makes it very much worth it. [VIDEO]

Dan Olson covers NFTs very solidly in "Decentraland is a dead mall" ( [VIDEO] ) and "Line Goes Up" ( [LINK] ). Both as well worth watching. Since this is also about GameStop specifically, his "This is financial advice" video addresses the GameStop cult, and to a lesser extent the bizarre cult around GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, really well: [LINK] Also, cue some apes/NFT investors coming in to ask "why do you care about my money?" and other oft-repeated talking points.

> I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the metaverse concept... If they had, is there even a compelling product there? For me, the definitive analysis here is Dan Olson's[1] (though in the context of decentraland). Doing a metaverse in VR is contradictory to having users walk from place to place (because a huge chunk of your users will get motion sick). Having a metaverse where you have to walk from place to place is contradictory to metaverse as a productivity tool (because walking from place to place is a lot slower than clicking a button). VR has some compelling standalone experiences, but the user is generally constrained to staying still or moving around a small, fixed area. Maybe a VR meeting is more compelling than Zoom, but is it worth the extra cost and effort of donning a VR headset? Likewise a large open world where you can, potentially, do anything is compelling (see Minecraft), but is it a space where you would want to do something productive? In Minecraft the inefficiency of walking around and working with individual blocks is half the point - it's what makes it fun - but it's not an efficient way to build or design or shop or even consume "content" if you value your time. So what's left? The metaverse itself as entertainment ? Maybe. But it's not going to be the next iPhone. At best you're aiming for the ubiquity of World of Warcraft. [1] [VIDEO]

Slightly off topic, but I quite like this video over Decentraland/the metaverse: [VIDEO] It's an in depth look/critique.

> It’s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world. I just watched Dan Harmon's new doc on Decentraland[0] and he raises some really good points about the functional impedance that exists in virtual worlds alongside of all of the grifting that currently exists. Grifting aside, so many applications of VR just don't make sense as a direct virtual representation of the world, at that starts with our inner ear our ability to process visual motion without actually moving. He shows how these virtual storefronts that your character can walk through are much less efficient at actually allowing you to transact as opposed to a search page on an e-commerce site. I think it's easy to have romantic visions of how a VR world will look in the future. But if it's driven primarily by profit, as all of the most mainstream attempts have so far, it's going to be an empty crypto hell. 0: [VIDEO]

Highlights include: - "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020): [LINK] - "Line Goes Up" (2022): [LINK] - "The Future is a Dead Mall" (2023): [VIDEO]

It's worse than it was. Here are some trends. (1) Big Tech in the U.S. is like the way the car industry was in the 1970s in the U.S. Still thinking it is the best of the world and many onlookers agreeing but deeply rotten inside. Facebook and Google, for instance, are still riding high on monopolies in two sided markets. Advertisers have nowhere to go because the audience is there, but without revenue from advertisers, new publishers and social media can't fund efforts that would get them an audience. Amazon, Netflix, and Uber on the other hand look "successful" because they are overcapitalized and able to lose money on all or some of their product lines. You'd have an easy time selling half-priced taxi rides too if you had $25 billion of investor's money to spend. The real innovation in e-Commerce and social media is happening in India and China because the markets aren't locked up tight by monopolists there, that's the real story behind Tik Tok. AMZN was a leader in e-commerce 25 years ago but... That was 25 years ago and that is how you say "Sears and Roebucks" in Internet time! (2) Crypto and NFT are obviously an effort to move money from one pocket to another without any value being created or transferred, not much more to say there except... (3) Facebook has been chasing the virtual reality dream for quite some time, you might recall there was an AR scam being pushed by "Magic Leap" in the last decade and Hololens was a thing too, the Army even was talking about buying

Underlying a lot of these discussions is the assumption that there is a future where this is an actually useful, mass-market device. I'm still not convinced this is true. For example, "killer apps/content" never arrived for 3D TVs and they have largely disappeared from the market. Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect. There were some compelling uses, like Wii Sports, but these were pretty limited and many other uses of these in games was a case of Nintendo shoehorning the technology into the game. I think the best pessimist argument is the one offered by Folding Ideas in his metaverse video[1]: Text is really, really useful, and a virtual 3D space is not a good environment for either creating or consuming textual content. [1] [VIDEO]