The Dystopian Future and the Metaverse
It’s raining. You hear futuristic police sirens wailing in the distance. It’s a cold and gloomy night, fit for only the criminal underbelly of the city to conduct their business. You lift your gaze from the wet, stained sidewalk and see, adorning every building, the familiar pink and navy blue neon signs in Blade Runner font that have come to represent the dystopian age that you now live in. It’s 2025, and it turns out that all the sci-fi writers were right. Stephenson and Cline predicted this would be our future in Snow Crash and Ready Player One, and here we are.
Except…no. The dystopian sci-fi settings we’ve all read about are not the dystopian futures that we’re headed toward. We’re not headed toward whatever the f*** was in Meta’s Super Bowl commercial.
But unfortunately, we’re already living in a dystopian future — thanks in large part to the big corporate culture of today.
Think about it…
Because of Old Work, your movement is restricted. Dystopian.
The location of your company’s office dictates where you are allowed to live. Got a new gig at a top company? Great — prepare to move to a big city, where rent is high and traffic ain’t fun. For many companies, you’ll commute, you’ll have to swipe in and swipe out daily past those security guards who never seem to get any nicer no matter how many times per week you see them (what is up with that?). You’ll probably sit in a cubicle, isolated, so you can put your head down and ‘serve your purpose’. You’re even told what you’re allowed to wear. Don’t like ties or heels? Too bad. Got messed up feet and need to wear runners? Sorry — you need a doctor’s note.
Because of Old Work, your time is not yours. Dystopian.
And, your overall life is dictated by where you’re allowed to live. Your kids have to enroll in a school near your work, because that’s where you have to live. You can’t see your spouse whenever you want — because you’re at work downtown and not working from ‘anywhere’, even though you do your work on a laptop. You’re not allowed to travel either — doesn’t matter if you get your work done. You stay in this zip code. You do not have control over your life, your family situation, or your time. Clock in. Clock out. Then a year goes by. Then 5, then 10, then 30. How much of that time was yours? How much of your life did you live?
Because of Old Work, you are a faceless drone. Dystopian.
In Old Work — the dystopia — order is the goal. Because order brings productivity, and productivity brings profits. But that’s not human. That’s not us. We’re individuals, with unique personalities, tastes in dress, and schedules. And that’s part of our human condition — because we’re all so different, the individual is the ultimate minority, and individuality is frowned upon in Old Work. You get your tie on, and you get to your cubicle.
The Zoom-Slack (Sloom? Zlack?) push over the past 2 years — even though you access them from home — doesn’t bring out your inner you. In fact you’re reduced to even less of a personality, because now you don’t even get to show the body language that you would in-person. You’re now ‘tile with a background #27’. All of your decades of being you — constrained to 2cm x 3cm and no more. That’s not good.
And the ‘hybrid’ work environment maintains these constraints.
The idea of a hybrid workplace appears on the surface to be a good one. A few days per week in the office, and a few days at home. But it naturally constrains employees in the same way that a fully in-person workplace does. Does this mean I need to live by the office…still? When does my direct team come in? Do I have to organize with them to be in on the same day? Is that my job or a manager’s job? If work is so good in person, why are we even doing hybrid? Shouldn’t we be all in the office every day then? If it’s not, then why don’t we spend all days working from anywhere?
I’m writing a separate piece about the hybrid ‘situation’ soon, so look out for that. But suffice it to say, the hybrid environment is a halfway evolution — it’s not where we’re ultimately going.
And so this is the present. This is our present that we — the most intelligent beings — have created for ourselves.
This is the real dystopia. We’re already living it. But fortunately, the Workplace Metaverse has the potential to blow it all away.
I recently wrote a 3-Part Series called ‘Why We Need the Workplace Metaverse’ (read that Series: Part I, Part II, Part III). In it, I describe in detail how despite the fact that we spend ~80% of our lives at work, it should still be lovely, and it shouldn’t disproportionally dictate how we live our personal lives. Have a read. There are pretty pictures, if nothing else.
The pandemic hit in 2020, and we all scattered across the globe. And it hasn’t been working. Profits are up, but connection is down. Belongingness with your team is down. There’s a reason you feel disconnected from your team while on Zlack. But the answer isn’t to go back to in-person work, because then, for many of us, we’re hit with the dystopian realities I described above. The answer is to find a way of distributed work that is actually compatible with the human condition. This is what the Workplace Metaverse fundamentally provides. It doesn’t lead us down the road of some dystopian Zuckerbergian future — in fact, if done right, it enables us to live our richest lives.
Here are four ways that the Workplace Metaverse will significantly impact our lives.
Population redistribution will create richer communities. Utopian.
The knowledge that millions of people have redistributed from large city centers to smaller communities in their countries — the ‘semigration’ — is heartwarming. They will have the opportunity to enrich the lives of others, and to have their lives enriched by others who live in their new smaller communities. Because of the likely more intimate environment, they will be likelier to get to know their neighbors, to partake in civic activities, to have lowered living expenses, and to feel safer than they perhaps did in the bigger cities they used to live in. It’s certainly been that experience for me and countless of my peers. And it’ll keep happening.
Richer experiences in the real world. Utopian.
Constraining work to the Metaverse means agency. Choice. Freedom. You are at work on your own terms, through the portal on your phone or laptop. It doesn’t mean ‘always on’ — it means agency.
And if agency is what you get by virtue of working in the Workplace Metaverse, then you can work from anywhere. It means you can be anywhere on the planet that you want, and be just as productive as if you were stuck in that city center in downtown New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles. Or Tokyo, or London, or Berlin, or Vancouver, or Sydney. You do you — work on your terms while living life on your terms. That’s a good life.
More time to be human around people that you love. Utopian.
Escaping the dystopian Old World World means life on your terms. And life on your terms means never missing your kid’s first steps. It means being able to look after your aging parents while maintaining a skyrocketing career. It means balancing being a high-performing operator while still managing to take your kid to dance classes. Or your spouse out for lunch. Or breakfast in bed. Once we abstract away the ‘unnecessary’ of today’s dystopian work norms, we get to live simpler lives filled with the human moments we actually live for.
And hey, maybe we save the planet. That’s kind of Utopian, too.
Planetary health is dictated by business practices. Think: commutes, parking lots, skyscrapers, private jets — immense carbon footprint all in the name of the bottom line. But that’s in the Old Work World paradigm of what work means. These practices draw a straight line to the eventuality of the Zuckerberg-dystopian Meta Super Bowl commercial, or Stephenson and Cline’s dystopias. The Workplace Metaverse gives us one of those rare chances at a ‘do-over’ for what happens to Earth.
Meatspace isn’t so bad, if we turn toward ‘right’.
‘Meatspace’ is kind of a misnomer. We’re more than ‘meat’ — we’re real people, with real goals, dreams, aspirations, and families. The Metaverse, at least Workplace in the non-dystopian Metaverse — allows us to radically change our dynamic with work. Instead of work dominating 80% of your day — your alarm clock timing, the morning rush, the unhealthy breakfast, the commute, the constraints on your vacation time — flip the script. Open your laptop — now you see your Workplace. Close your laptop — now you don’t. Flip the script on work. The dystopian Old Way of Work in which we currently live won’t let you, but the Workplace Metaverse sure will.
Our 2022 world is in flux. And when things are in flux, it’s a great time to roll up your sleeves and get to building something better. The ‘behavioral norm infrastructure’ of New Work is being forged today atop a pile of habit-rubble — so we have a real opportunity today to change the rules of work. And if we do that, then we set ourselves on a course away from our present dystopia and sharply toward ‘right’.
Vish
CEO, SoWork
PS: We’re also hiring for almost 50 positions. And we like to put our money where our mouths are, if you haven’t noticed. We endeavor to give our team the most impactful experience of their entire professional careers. The company was founded by two men of color and a woman, we have women on our Board, and 5 of our 6 teams are women-led. We also endeavor to only do business with divested banks. If you want to be part of the mission-driven company that’s building the Workplace Metaverse, let us know!
Vish (@vishy_vish) is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork. In his free time, he likes reading, playing video games, dancing, doing martial arts, playing with his cats, dog, and chickens, and dabbling in emergency medicine. (Update: the dog annoys me. Still love her but damn).
Note: Read the 3-part Workplace Metaverse Series here: ‘Part I: Human Compatible’ here, ‘Part II: Work today doesn’t work’ here, and ‘Part III: Building a Workplace that works for everyone’ here.
