Build Back Better!
Vinay Gupta, CEO of Mattereum and Ethereum launch co-ordinator in 2015 looks at how to survive the Crypto Winter and come out the other end with new purpose
Around 2017 I was looking at starting a VC fund. I didn’t know exactly how to do it: I’d worked in a fund in the 1990s but there was a lot about the business I did not understand at the time.
As part of the research, I put about 100 people through their first VR experience. I wanted to figure out if it was time to invest in VR projects. It was market research.
I came to the conclusion that we were years away from VR being a workable technology. The hardware was clearly ready: Oculus Rift was a little clunky but it was the Apple IIe of VR: the thing that tells you The Revolution is Coming. That was fine.
But the software was appalling. Back in the day they made movies by putting a camera on a tripod and doing a stage play in front of it. It took decades to make movies. A whole new art form (cinematography) had to be invented. Shocking and amazing things happened decade after decade for a century to get us to where cinema is now. Those changes were often driven by technology, but they were delivered by actors and directors portraying the human experience in new ways, creating ever-more-compelling works. VR is not ready for artistic reasons, far more than for technical ones. I could go on about this for some hours, but the lack of a “virtual cinematography” makes most VR experiences as compelling as watching CCTV footage of mall parking lots. It does not matter if I’m looking at the wheat fields of Gondor and scouting for Nazgul, if it’s not telling me a story I don’t want to know.
Also violence is overwhelmingly overpowering in VR. It’s literally just too much and reducing the violent content of our video games to the point that it doesn’t traumatize people to play (Arizona Sunshine, I’m looking at you here) is also going to take time.
So my prediction is this: the Metaverse is going to fail. The pandemic is more-or-less over, people are back out in the world again, and everybody loves this place! The stay-at-home culture which VR is fundamentally rooted in doesn’t provide the lived experiences which people want. There is something very much like VR which people do want, but until VR has solved the artistic problems of storytelling in the virtual medium it’s just chat rooms with better graphics. I have an Meta Quest II, and it’s gathering dust: there’s just nothing to *do* in there.
Not yet.
On the other hand, we have inflation. To inflate. The state of things being inflated.
The bubble of all bubbles.
Folks don’t remember inflation.
Realistically the US inflation rate is about 12% right now, if it’s calculated using the same measures used back in the day. If that stays up for four years, each dollar in circulation loses half of its value.
The whole economy goes through what the Ethereum community has gone through in the last few weeks, over a couple of years. It is devastating. In theory wages adjust to keep up with inflation, and interest rates too. Practically speaking without strong labour unions to negotiate, workers get poorer year-on-year.
Pair that up with the global supply chain crisis, including food, and you’ve got a recipe for global disaster.
The middle class don’t just get to retreat into the virtual world. There’s nothing there that anybody wants.
No, we have to stand our ground and fight for the real world: it’s where we live.
The metaverse is not going to save us. If we re-inflate the tech-hype bubble around the metaverse, it’ll produce a brief flare of innovation, some very inflated prices for assets which are inherently extremely volatile, and another flame-out like the one that we’re in, just a couple of years down the road (at most.) I quite liked play to earn as a concept. It didn’t seem inherently bonkers to me that the age-old practice of gold farming could be modernized by crypto into something that allowed essentially independent operators to do it in a defi way. But it’s stuck in the Perez spin cycle, along with everything else, and people in developing world countries are losing their entire livelihood in this chaos.
We have to change how this works.
We have to take the hard path now: we have to start building the kind of wealth that Warren Buffet can understand, the rebuilding that outfits like Southwest Airlines specialized in.
We have to learn how to make money.
