The commercially successful prophet is not the one history remembers. Kings don't pay for prophecies that don't make sense, and by the time Birnam Wood has come to your walls you are soon to be too poor and too dead to reward the retrospectively impressive prophet.
The only convincing future is the past.
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To be a successful prophet of strange futures, then, you have to predict something strange and new-seeming, yet familiar. Dreams, stories, the half-remembered past - they are all good sources of spectacular futures, strange because they are fictional, believable because we already know them. Nobody can invest in what they can't see with their eyes closed.
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Technologically sophisticated or impossible things the average person can visualize more clearly than a gravitational wave observatory or a causally disentangled latent space:
- A flying car.
- An exoskeleton (also flying).
- Software that can accurately predict complex events far in the future.
- Digital things you can own.
- A city on Mars.
- A murderous killer robot.
- A virtual world you can be uploaded to.
Would it be presumptuous to ignore the very diverse traditions, across continents and millennia, about "planes" or "spheres" that can be accessed during sleep, through a ritual, when you die or as an alternative to it?
Yes.
Would it be an oversimplification to say that Mark Zuckerberg — attempting to distract the world from at the very least passive complicity on at least one genocide in Myanmar, one attempted coup in the USA, and a large number of other bad things — said he would build the Matrix?
No. Come on. He did steal a different, less well-known but still deeply evocative term from science fiction, but he means the Matrix, most journalists writing about sees it as some form of Matrix, and most people reading about it feels they understand it, even if they don't think "it's the Matrix," because they remember the Matrix.
The same pitch in 1983 would have latched on the mythological resonance of Tron, such as it was. The relative usefulness of myths change.
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For some people it's Minecraft or Fortnite. Probably not the same ones.
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The difference between architecture and prophecy is this: you can build as many temples as you want, but only one Third Temple; it already exists, it just has to be built.
"Who's building a Metaverse?" is a business strategy question.
"Who's building the Metaverse?" is a theological one. There's no metaphysical Metaverse out there waiting to be built.
The theological question is the more common.
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If a lot of people with money think that something will happen, and fewer people but with a lot more money think that a lot of people think that something will happen, does it matter if it never happens the way it was supposed to?
The difference between engineering and finance is that for the second the answer is "only if you're slow getting out."
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Will anything be built, at all? Perhaps not. As world-wide distractions go, "Meta" has been spectacularly cost-effective for Zuckerberg. If it never shipped anything at all with a "Metaverse" name it would still be a success.
The opposite end of the spectrum of actual successful engineering is this: the dominant mode of using a computer in five years involves wearing goggles and using almost exclusively the paternalistic interfaces and isolationist applications approved by a handful of huge companies with spotty-to-abysmal track records in not making the world significantly worse.
The goggles would be the only new part.
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The ethical crime of Meta is that it's using a warmed-over science-fiction cliche to try and distract from more serious crimes. (A common professional malpractice among those covering them is to take them at their word.)
The intellectual crime of Meta is that it's trying to distract from more serious crimes using a warmed-over science-fiction cliche.
The thing you're reading this on is an universally programmable machine capable of performing, within its physical limits, any computation that can be precisely described. It's connected to a worldwide network of similar, even more powerful things, loaded with knowledge and data spanning a significant part of the breadth and depth of human civilization.
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Taking a significant fragment of this planet-wide universal machine, an unprophesized marvel of materialized mathematics, and using it to pretend we live and work in environments based on cinematic renderings of long-common science-fictional ideas as filtered through corporate aesthetics and goals, that would be both unsurprising of us and a cosmological waste of its, and our, potential.
Our tools are too powerful, our problems too dire, our possibilities too bright, to tolerate our imaginations to be constrained by self-serving second-hand myths. Let's build the strange new solutions to the here-and-now, the things that are hard to explain because they haven't been dreamed of before.
Let the future make them myths.
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