Years ago I came across a children’s book called You Will Go to the Moon. It was first published in 1959 by Mae and Ira Freeman, ten years before the first moon landing. The book predicts a future where space travel is a leisure pursuit for a baby boomer and his parents. It shows the rocket they will use to get to the moon, the gated compounds they will live in, and the golf buggies they will use to get around. It wasn’t just telling a story. The Freemans were shilling a future. The grammar of Web3 is similar. You will live in the metaverse. Rather than putting a name on somewhere that is already there, supporters are working hard to bring it into being—not with a game engine, but through meme-hustling. These are new realities, hewn from words. “The advocates of Web3 are quite explicit about this,” Evgeny Morozov writes: “we’ve got this beautiful map on our hands—all that’s missing is the territory it is supposed to refer to. Perhaps, this is the right mindset for the age of the Metaverse: if there’s no reality, we’ll create one by talking it into existence.”
The term “metaverse,” like the term “blockchain,” is both vague and capacious, mashing together visions for the future of gaming and augmented reality with scenes from Ready Player One. For all its varied meanings, most agree it refers to one place, in the sense that the internet is one place with shared standards and multiple offerings. Each platform wants to be the monopoly—a hermetically sealed “magic circle” where, as Mitch Zamara, a metaverse game designer for the pay-to-earn game Million on Mars, puts it, “You are the central bank, you are the regulator, you are the Federal Reserve. You get to do everything.”
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You Will Live on the Internet: The Grim Realities of the Metaverse
