The metaverse should feel like a Walkman
Shouting sense into the void of multi-billion dollar budgets
At the risk of sounding like an old man, I’m sick and tired of hearing about the metaverse. And my solution to that? Writing about it, obviously.
As with many of my life’s problems, I blame one a single human: Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook’s rebrand to Meta and its subsequent multi-billion investment into the metaverse has catapulted the technology from a backwater to city hall. And honestly? I couldn’t be less excited.
This isn’t anything to do with the idea of the metaverse itself, but more how the industry around it is transforming. Currently, the technology is being pitched as a marketer’s wet dream.
The discussion isn’t around how it’ll improve our lives. Instead, it’s dominated by companies and advertisers finding another route into our bank accounts.
Then there’s this gap between action and the hunger for it.
Businesses are spending hundreds of billions on the metaverse, yet the majority of the population… don’t give a solitary fuck? I mean, how else could Decentraland, a metaverse that cost $1.2 billion, be operating at times with only 38 active users?
We’re in this bizarre post-capitalist area where tech companies are building a place that no one wants, whose sole goal is advertising to people that aren’t there.
If things continue this way, the metaverse is doomed — unless it follows the example laid out by the Sony Walkman.
First, let’s get some definitions out the way. What actually is the metaverse? Without wanting to wade too deep into into that stinky quagmire, if we strip away all the marketing bullshit, the core idea of the technology is the creation of a virtual world.
Currently, this is being sold as a new idea. And, by god, it’s not.
Trying to uncover the first virtual world is tough. If you wanna be That Guy about it, you could argue that humans have been using stories as a way of transporting each other into virtual worlds since time immemorial.
But, friends, let’s not be That Guy.
If we keep things technological, we could argue books are a portal to a virtual world, yet that doesn’t really fit the bill. Let’s get electronic. And, if we go that route, there’s a strong case for that being the Sony Walkman.
Of course, radios, televisions, and cinemas had been around before the Japanese portable music player, but the fixed locations of those technologies, to me, make them feel less like virtual worlds, and more like location enhancements.
The Walkman, though? Pure magic.
Released in 1979, Sony’s machine was the first, low-cost portable music player. It’s tough to comprehend the impact the Walkman had at the time — but I think we can get close to it by imagining what it was like getting our first on-the-go media player.
For me, there’s something spellbinding about listening to music while you’re moving through the world: it’s evocative, emotive, it makes you feel like you’re the main character in a movie.
Whether you’re watching night lights blur past on a bus, or meandering down winding streets, music alters that experience. In other words, you’re living in a virtual reality.
If you think of portable music as transporting you to another realm — and you wanna be a bit of an asshole — you can view the Walkman as a sort of proto-metaverse.
It was a bit of hardware focused on a key task: enchanting users. The Walkman had a job, and it did it well.
This is where the metaverse has failed.
In its current incarnation, all it’s promising to do is strip away all the things that made something like the Walkman a transcendent experience, replacing that experience with shitty advertising.
What we need is a metaverse that has the ethos of the Walkman.
Undoubtedly, this is idealistic. The world has moved a long way from the days of cassette tapes. We’re too connected, technology is too advanced, and there’s too much money to be made.
But things can still be good.
Games are an excellent example. Yes, poor quality cash-grabs exist, but you also have titles that are high-budget, lovingly crafted, and designed to serve a community. They make money, yeah, but they do so by being, you know, good.
And that’s what the metaverse should be like: something created to give us an experience we want, rather than a place to serve us more fucking adverts.
We don’t need a new Facebook, we need a new Walkman.