Communism vs Freedom

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When generations imagine the future, they are often pretty far off. This is because they can only use their past and present as the basis for those predictions. For the purposes of this post, we will classify the future as a significant jump in technology. However, the word significant is completely subjective. To you, sitting there reading this text on a computer that is over 100,000x more powerful than that which sent us to the moon only 53 years ago, a jump from a sharpened stone to what would now resemble a knife would not be a significant jump in technology.

That technological jump would have been monumental to our now extinct biological cousin, Home Erectus. Homo Sapiens have existed with the same cognitive capacity for ~70,000 years. Homo Erectus walked the earth for ~2 million years, yet their technology remained stagnant, never evolving past various forms of sharpened stones. With no evolution in technology, did they ever even have a future?

For the last 60+ years, humanity’s future has been underscored by the the world of bits aka the digital realm. This digital realm has taken many names: the web, the net, cyberspace, and now The Metaverse.

What will our Metaverse future look like?

Pretty much everyone who builds and invests in web3 technology falls into the futurist bucket. Futurists naturally look at the future with exuberance and excitement. They were the early adopters of the internet, they were the early adopters of web2 apps, and they are early adopters of web3. Futurists are okay with jumping off the cliff into the abyss of the unknown. Thats why they are also usually entrepreneurs as well.

The end users of these technologies are, for the most part, not futurists.

This means that they look at the future with exuberance and excitement only if it appears to be both safely rooted in their current reality and an improvement upon that reality.

Why do people look at Tesla and Elon Musk with awe and not fear?

Tesla is:

✅ Rooted in their current reality – cars
✅ An improvement upon that reality – faster, sleeker, electric cars

To most people, The Metaverse is somewhere between a video game and a VR Mark Zuckerberg hell hole.

The metaverse is not:

❌ Rooted in their current reality – people dont spend their waking hours in an immersive VR environment
❌ An improvement over their current reality – The connection of the metaverse being an improvement on the internet is not clear.

A convergence of many trends, not one trend

The mental model that needs to be inserted within the cultural zeitgeist is that the metaverse is not one big scary “thing”; instead, it is a collection of independent trends that are all converging into one.

The most important of these trends are: