The Metaverse Diaries, a History of the Future — Part 1
Chapter One. October 2025. The Great Reset.
“You’ll own nothing and you will be happy” — Davos World Economic Forum, 2020
You know how Elon Musk said that there’s only a vanishingly small chance that we’re not living in a simulation? Well, I’m convinced that we are, but not a shared one. My simulation was designed and built for me alone, and maybe yours was too. In fact, in 2025, it seems that we’re living in a simulation inside another simulation, like Matryoshka, those stacking Russian dolls. Let me explain.
It’s all part of the simulation designer’s plan. So far, I’ve had most of my life, an education, a career, relationships and children, seen some good times, but also enough sadness, sickness and death among dear friends and family, and now it’s my turn at the Golden Years. Middle age is just a distant memory. I barely remember working for a living. How are we going to wrap this whole thing up? A gradual decline to obscurity, or one final project, a last hurrah, a swansong?
To be fair, I have been lucky. The generation before mine lived through conscription, rationing, two world wars and a cold war that saw me growing up thinking that one day someone would drop The Bomb and we’d either be blown to bits or die slowly from radiation poisoning. Then I experienced runaway inflation, strikes and civil unrest, so pretty much like today, really.
My parents sought distraction in the radio, cinema and then TV. We entertained ourselves with TV, then computer games, and the internet. Despite having access to all the knowledge of humankind, all we seem to have learned is different ways to hate each other, thanks to social media. The left hates the right, the right hates the left. The rich hate the poor and the poor hate the rich. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But then, something else happened, and I’m still getting my head around what it was. A futurist, creator, gamer, technophile & believer in diversification of global wealth appeared, looking for followers. Earth2.io had arrived.
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Earth2 (E2) players came in large numbers in 2020, much larger numbers than expected. Some came and stayed because it was easy to turn a 10c purchase into a 20c sale again and again, and the cost of entry was a small number of dollars, rather than a small number of ETH. Some had read or seen Ready Player One and were keen to (re)create it for themselves. Then came the artists, the holobuilders of dreams, philosophers, NFT lovers, crypto moonboys, egg hunters, drone pilots, musicians, economists, writers, bloggers, miners, real-time strategy fans coming from Sim City or Civilizations, storytellers, filmmakers, and aspiring real estate moguls. A bit of a rag-tag bunch in some ways, but early adopters and tech-savvy visionaries all. Some arrived with the dream of ‘a place of their own’ because they could never aspire to one in what we used to call ‘real life’. Funnily, that’s an expression you don’t hear any more; now we just say ‘in E1’ to avoid confusion.
It wasn’t really until Essence launched on the exchanges in late 2022 that the world really sat up and took notice. The world is a big place, but after just 18 months, most of the world’s major cities had been bought up in E2 by the Pioneers, as we came to be known. E1’s largest corporations had to deal with us directly if they wanted to secure the best real estate. With the EcoSim well established and Essence’s growth writing its own headlines in the continuing crypto winter, the newest arrivals hit the E2 servers like a tsunami in 2023.
MC-One, one of the new E2 megacities based in Europe, had adopted a plan for growth based first on promoting E2 to its E1 location, opening a pop-up shop similar to that launched in Gangnam, Seoul in 2022 by Korean E2 players. In 2023 the megacity collectively agreed, via a democratic process, that they would promote E2 in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, where there was an educated population with newly acquired access to the internet via reasonably priced smartphones. There was also a deep desire to earn the new cryptocurrency tipped for stardom, Essence. The programme was known as #HelpingEveryone. Thanks to MC-One players waiving all commission, the African ‘scholars’ were able to earn 5–10 essence per day, which helped them support their families as well as buy tiles in MC-One. It wasn’t much at first, but their income rose with the value of Essence, and their E2 property holdings grew too, and in two years the city had spread across the Mediterranean Sea and into North Africa itself, making it the first Transcontinental Megacity.
In 2025, E1 is still hugely divided. The 1% have now got all the “stuff”, just like they planned, but they’re still not satisfied, somehow. Here in E2 though, everything we own is digital, and nobody is poor. You could say we own nothing, but we’re happy..
Coming soon:
Chapter Two: June 2026. How we made E2 ‘sticky’. Details on #HelpingEveryone from the biggest players to those with no tiles. #Rentacrowd and #Rentaparty
Chapter Three: April 2027. Artificial Intelligence in E2, “Pint of the usual, Jeff?”, Swimming With Dolphins, “Holidays in the Species of Your Choice” (Surgery Optional)
