More Than You Might Think!

Above: SL Cosplay Taylor Tribute by Kylie Quinn

“Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse” is a totally random interview with Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic I just did that starts with a left field premise, but brings up fairly interesting new ways of thinking about the topic. Some favorite excerpts:

Nyce: How important is VR in this? Is that “and”—as in “VR and other devices”—really operative there?

Au: No, no, no. That’s another thing that drives me crazy: the assumption that it has to be in VR. In the book, Stephenson even mentions that it’s mostly just the wealthy who use VR headsets, and regular folks just use a regular computer.

Metaverse platforms exist. The biggest one is Roblox, followed by Fortnite. To be a true Metaverse with a capital M, you would need, like, 15 million people or more in the same virtual world at the same time. And we’re not there yet. We’re close.

This is something that’s not discussed much, but think it’s worth keeping in mind: In Neal Stephenson’s original vision of the Metaverse, the Metaverse has an average concurrency twice the population of New York — i.e. about 15 million people. We’re close to that now. (Stephenson himself was surprised when I pointed that out.)

Then I get to compare Taylor Swift’s progress on the Metaverse against what Mark Zuckerberg is doing:

Nyce: This is maybe me just being silly, but I’m also actually kind of serious: Is Taylor Swift doing a better job at building a metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg right now?

Au: Well, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg is almost totally failing, yeah. People building metaverse platforms, most of them think it’s a technology question. But it’s really a community and culture question. That has to be built. Horizon World only has about 200,000 to 300,000 users. So Taylor Swift could launch a Fortnite island on her own, and she would have 100 million users within a month.

She has what Zuckerberg does not have. She has a brand and an aesthetic and almost, like, a worldview that literally millions and millions of people—like, they have this world that is in their mind and that they share with people. And that’s something that Zuckerberg doesn’t have. People who play Roblox, they all share that. People who play Fortnite all share that. And people who are pervasive across social media, such as Taylor, have fans who also have that. They don’t necessarily have the 3-D-technology part, but she could do that if she wanted to, or she could not.

Read the rest here.