The Metaverse That Never Was, Part 2

and pretend we never said all this ship. It's going to be the best Garrison, you know, Robert, remember remember when I was talking about um Seek City and all of the virtual venues. I just, I just I just got a message from our beloved parent company. I heart Media. We planned to extend UM shows into the Metaverse, which was which was announced a few weeks ago. Garrison but always thought that the Metaverse was a pretty good idea.

I think we we will talk about how the metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, I heard Media did announce the Web three in the Metaverse and the newest consumer platforms for I heart media. So sorry, I'm I was just working. It's I mean, it's working in a matrix for reference there, so yes, I see what thank you. UM. Anyway, so I'm guessing for non Neil Stevenson fans, many of you probably had not heard of

the metaverse before last year. UM VR. Sure you've heard of VR a R maybe, UM, but probably just as like niche gaming technology, you know, not not this massive, not not like a massive successor to the Internet. UM. Primarily three companies, Facebook, Epic Games, and Valve. Uh, the

later two being mostly gaming and software companies. UM. Kind of all decided the best way to push their niche VR and software technology into the zeitgeist was with this flashy new marketing, and it kind of worked metaversus now and many more people's like personal lexicon, But it's not really the metaverse, you know, like the Walmart thing. It's a way to attract investors and drum up free press, but it's still the same old VR and are applications

of the technology. None of these companies are trying to make metaverse a thing that we actually want or you know, working towards an interconnected immersive three D open source successor to the Internet, All of the different websites and services we use united under one digital roof, like a super platform that you know, is made up of all of

these sub platforms. You know, you have social media, online gaming, and all of like the you know, ease of life apps, all accessible through the same digital space, under the same digital economy. That that thing isn't happening. People like that. That's not what people with money are actually pushing towards, even though they're still using the metaverse term. Um. There was a great piece in Wired that came out last month.

It's a part of their Matrix VR issue. UM. It was called the metaverse is simply big tech but bigger. It was by a Cecilia di'antazio. It was so it's it's a wonderful piece and I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna say a quote from it right here. UM. By the mid two thousands, it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites that we could access on the open Web. It was making information sorders, channels, aggregators, and publishers open enough to scale with user generated content, but

closed enough to reap enormous profits. This was the evolution from Web one to Web two for nearly thirty years. The gravity of the consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together under the auspice of fewer and fewer corporate titans. The freaky little planets get drawn together, collide and make bigger planets call again and make stars or even black holes.

Facebook Eats, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Amazon swallows two dozen e commerce sites, and you're left with these few supermassive players controlling and appropriating the celestial motion of billions of users. This is how big tech got big end quote. So yeah, like now we have all of our isolated toolboxes, and they really fight against any inter platform integration. You have you know Microsoft Office and they're they're like off their

office suite. You have like Google Workspace, you have Apple's own like air Drop, Apple Pages, and finally cut Pro, plus the the nightmare that is Adobe's subscription tools. Like Google wants you to spend all day checking your Gmail, traveling with Google Maps, watching videos on YouTube, and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile, your friend texts you via I Message, uses Apple Maps, and calls his mom on FaceTime. This is the single person in the world uses Microsoft Edge.

That is true, but like this, this form of the Internet is the one that the metaverse is growing out of. Metavers is just a way for tech companies to add VR and a R and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to this poor foot to like their own portfolio of proprietary products. In order for that to happened, they need to convince us that we need headsets for the next evolution of the Internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook and Zuckerberg were the first ones to crack

this thing right open. It's they own not only four of the top six social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most popular manufacturer of VR hardware. VR has been relegated to niche gaming technology for like basically two decades, and Zuckerberg decided the best way to sell more of its headsets and software was to give the tech a fresh new paint job and call it metaverse.

And like it's sort of working that There were approximately nine point four million shipment severe headsets in two thousand one, three point six million of which were done during the holiday season after Facebook's big Metaverse event. It's suspected that the quest to which is made by Oculus a Facebook um, makes up for more than three quarters of all those headsets sold, So the Democrat demographics data isn't explicitly available, but probably a lot of kids received these things as

holiday gifts um Oculus Meta. Facebook does not release its VERR headset sales figures, but the Oculus app that that you need to have to make the headset work shot to the top spot in Apple's App Store on Christmas Day. That was the first time it's ever been in the number one app on the App Store, so indicating a spike and headsets received as holiday gifts. So they're selling a lot of headsets, like Oculus is is selling a

lot of their things. Like you know, I I got one a few years ago, but you know, now there's there's there's more and more of them circulating UM. But you know this, it's still all relegated to VR because I'm not actually metaverse. You know, arguably the closest thing we have to the actual metaverse is stuff like Roadblocks

and Minecraft. Now that is still not that's not immersive three D. It's you're still looking at it through a two D screen, But it is software that gives users development tools to create their own projects within this shared three D space. What separates these things and basically all attempts from making the metaverse from being the ideal metaverse is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is isolated islands. You can't take your Roadblocks game into Minecraft, right, It still

is isolated to their specific things. But you know. Nevertheless, robox Is CEO described the company as the shepherds of the metaverse in early and he is kind of right, like, that's not that's not totally inaccurate. Um, I'm gonna quote again from the Wired piece by Cecilia di'antasio. Um, if big text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple metaversees, if there are any at all, Each will be interoperable

under one Tech giants giant umbrella. The same way Apple is both a walled garden and a convenient, habitable terrarium for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of Apple's proprietary off proating system, the ambiguity of my message, and Apple presumably loves the commission it can charge on developers who sell apps in their app store. So Epic Games is the other big metaverse proponent right now, you know

they were. They were actually making announcements about metaverse a few months before Facebook did UM and the c a l Epic Games. Tim sween Ley has been outspoken against the metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple. But that's not that's not really genuine because his version of the metaverse entails of cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic Games. So like, it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an

open source thing. He just wants to be the one to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone else might. Um. He tried to sue Apple last year and and failed. UM and the College Fornia judge told him that Epic Games seeks a systematic change which would result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of Apple and Google, which are an impediment to Mr Sweeney's

vision of the oncoming metaverse. So it's not actually about like him being against big tech giants and being against a big tech giant wren Metaverse. It's just that he doesn't like that he won't be able to make as much money with it if multiple tech companies work together to make it, Like that's that's that's really what he's

concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing, um because like, yeah, it would be really interesting to see if multiple tech giants work together to create an actual successor to the Internet, like an actual like you know how the Internet is just when you open up your computer and you have access to the net. It's not it's it's not like running a specific program you get to go on all the things. It would be

interesting if people actually work towards creating that. But no, it's all about creating very isolated operating systems with a very isolated tool like tool chest. Like you can't access Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't These things don't work. Now you can Oculus, you can use the Oculus on Steam games, but not vice versa. They're making things the way they're making things because they're not trying to design a new Internet because for one thing,

the Internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of a bunch of people who were doing things that interested them. All kind of intersecting and building upon each other. And second, like they're in they're not They're making individual profit tunnels. They're not actually trying to create. Um, they're not trying to like actually trying to think about what people might want next, or what people might might want beyond the Internet. They're thinking, how what can we sell that we're not

currently selling? And that's never going to be the thing that figures out. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. On on that point, I'm gonna do one final quote from the Wired piece. Um, if if these companies dominating Cyberus Space did decide to collaborate simultaneously, piecing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a digital tech style, that would

be very polite. But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple, uh Navidia, etcetera combine all of their valuable products captain planet style into an architect of the metaverse under open source standards? Nobody in particular roops billions from That's sort of a tall task to overhaul your code and collaborate with your competitors. Why would three or four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades and billions constructing one of their own.

So yeah, it's it's never gonna happen the way the way society is made, the way internetworks, that's not ever going to be a thing. Speaking of companies and things that you can buy online and advertising, here's some ads and we're back and we're gonna talk about possibly the most successful version of air of of VR technology. We'renna talk about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit. So there is a there was a tweet a few days ago that I'm just gonna read the tweet and

then then we'll talk about the implications. Um, this one very very viral. UM. I caught this very early on, though, and I started writing about it, and then a whole bunch of articles dropped on the topic. A farmer in Turkey has fitted his cows with the virtual reality goggles to make them think they're outside in summer pastures. The farmer found out that these pleasant scenes make the cows happier and produce more milk. Futures metaverse, So we're gonna

talk We're gonna talk about the cow may tricks. We're gonna talk about Yeah, yeah, it is. It is to go back in time and tell people, Hey, you know that hit movie The Matrix in the future, We're going to do that, but for more milk to get So. The thing that went viral about it that kind of broke the story for a lot of people was this farmer in Turkey with the pictures of the cows with VR goggles on them. Pretty pretty pretty fucked up. Um. But the idea and the actual technology used came from

came from Russia. UM. Farmers worked together with developers of veterinarians and consultants at the Oh boy, here here's a Russian town name, or I guess a farm name, krag skernof. I don't know, Yeah, that sounds right. It's that. I think we can we can? Were we I think you

nailed it. It's it's it's this farm near Moscow. UM and they teamed up so all least you know, farmers, developers and vets and consultants teamed up to make this cow Matrix project UM And there was an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and Agriculture reads the global trend towards universal computerization. The significant significantly simplifies work processes in many areas that and allows you to achieve

unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep up with the world standards and are even ready to offer the market new and unexpected solutions. On a farm in the Moscow region, a prototype of virtual reality glasses were tested to improve the conditions for keeping cows. Employees of one of the largest farms in the Moscow region, together with i T specialists, decided to conduct an experiment studying the influence of virtual

reality and developed a layout of VR glasses. So the herd donned these VR systems adapted for the heads of cows. Um so. And they also had to they had to to to make the imagery work. They need to tweak the color palette in the software to make it suitable for the cow's vision, because cows can't see rudder green, so there's just shades of yellow and blue. So in order to replicate what grass click to them, they have

to you know, change the stuff. Um but yeah, and then they programmed a unique summer field simulation program and subjected it onto these cows. Uh. The ministry, the Russian Ministry of Our Culture concluded that the cow matrix does work. Um. In a statement from a few a few years ago, officials said environmental conditions have significant have a significant impact on cow health and as a consequence, the quality and quantity of milk produced. So you know, like this is

the thing. I I talked with, um, someone I know about this, and they're like, well, if it makes the cow like actually happier and healthier than like, what's the problem. And like the problem is is that like you're gas lighting and entire creature's reality. Like you're like you're you're you're like not consentually cast lighting their reality. And I that is I don't like that. I don't everything is

without their consent. So I it's one of those things where it's like we're also not gaslighting their reality and this like we're not depriving their senses of what the world is. No, this seems like an escalation in our war on the cow. Yeah, so you know this other farmer in Turkey heard about this and decided to try it out on his cows. Um, And yeah, the funked up Cow Matrix or the Cow Tricks does seem to do its job extracting more milk from the cow to

increase profitability. Quote from quote from the farmer said, uh, we get an average of two liters of milk per day from the cows in our farm. The milk average of the two cows that wore the VR glasses went up to twenty seven liters. So yeah, when when When the story first broke there was the most popular article was from a site called Futurism, which made made me made me very depressive about about futurism of depressed atism Garrison. Yeah, and it made me mad enough that I'm going to

read some of its to you. Thank god I haven't been naming green seconds. That cows produced more milk when VR makes them think they're in beautiful green pastures proves that keeping them in agriculture environments isn't healthy, nor does it make them happy. Putting them in a cow matrix does sound a little grim, yes, but you can't argue

with the results. Oh my god, I can't. I say you actually care if all this has shown is that, like potentially, if you put cows in this thing during the winter, when it's not sunny and bright outside, then they are happier. This is not shown that, for example, taking all cows out of pastures and sticking them in matrix boxes would make them because the thing is they're not they're on pastures. They're in little jail cells with VR goggles on their head. So like it's that that

was that was the use case. And like the quote from the farmers, like they're watching green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost. They are less stressed. Um, and the farmers that he plans to be plans to buy ten more. It's like you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized cal VR headsets, um, or you can you know, like use that money to buy more land

for the cows to spread out. And if we're at that point in society that in order to make in order to in order to make enough cow milk, we need to gaslight cows by overruling their senses with a clunky of your headset on their little fuzzy faces, maybe we should start having milk. Maybe we should like maybe that's it, like if we require this to have milk in our cereal, then nope, no more, not not gonna.

I'm not gonna do that. I refuse. That's not like it's already And if you practice, if you don't buy milk like like locally from a farm, you know, so if we're doing this that just like immediately checks me out of every like, no, I'm just fully fully not. Yeah, I think that's kind of evil. I think that's kind of evil. Like the whole industry way by which we produce meat at scale is pretty evil. But that's an escalation.

It's it's the specific thing of like of of of overruling their reality and senses um of another living creature like that is for some reason, for some reason that puts them into a way in order for you to get like meat, And that's just like turning them into food, but like making their living really shitty and then making

trying to trick them to thinking they're not. Yeah, it's even worse than just having them live in shitty conditions, I think from an standpoint, and maybe it's more pleasant for the animal, but from like our standpoint, it's worse to me. Yep. So speaking of uh, I don't know, don't is there some segment that we can work this in? You know, what does essentially force you to live in an alternate reality that allows you to be more productive for the people who make money based on your existence

buying these products and services that supporting this podcast. I was just gonna say podcasts in general do that. But yes, also cool. All right, we are back and my last, my last big section here is titled we are the Cows.

So this is that's gonna that's gonna give you a sense of how of how we're going to talk about what so what what what The cow Tricks really demonstrates, though, is that the end goal of all this is to make us the cow, right, you know we we and we already are to some degree with like the Internet and smart and smartphones. But this is more. This is an escalation, right Like the people, the ghoules, that Silicon

Valley and you know, the whole tech world want. They want a world where we are forced to down hardware rigs that block out our body's senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit. That's that's an Internet that tries to convey intoe that you're inside of it and it is inside of you. That that's that's that's that

is what they want. Really, Like, even if we get the metaverse that I would prefer, you know, like the mythical open source, interconnected successor to the Internet, with all these different websites, tools and games that I like all together and intuitively accessible through a share digital space. Even if we get that like, which we won't. And if there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in, which there wouldn't be, that doesn't actually make the real

world much better. Like in my opinion, air technology specifically could be really cool, um, but but redesigning the world to require headsets, goggles or air glasses would suck like now would not only for people who can't get a technology right if if we redesign the world to be like the only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens, that's gonna suck. We we now, we already had that to some degree with smartphones and the Internet,

but this is another escalation of it. And again, like like the cow, it's just gonna be a way to paint for our elite capitalist climate disaster of a world. Uh. Metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political and ontological problems. And I have used the bathroom really badly. Well, I'll talk for a little while.

I think a big part of what Garrison is saying is that instead of relying on these tech industry ghoules to build the future for you, which is a future in which they sell you a way to hide from the hell that they have made of the world and others like them have made of the world. Instead of doing that, you've just spend the rest of your life

listening to podcasts. Put put blinders on over your eyes, cover up all of your senses but your ears, and just exist forever in a concoon made entirely of my voice, and occasionally Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice. And you're saying, not listen to just any podcast but podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should listen to any podcasts that I don't do. That doesn't seem right. So where's my angle on that? Huh? I don't know. Um, I don't know how long we

should vamp. While Garrison just leaves in the middle. I really needed to I really needed to see. Well, it's okay. I just told everybody that we're the metaverse now, Garrison Archie. I drank so much coffee this morning. It was a problem. Okay, And similar to all this, you know, remember the John Carmike interview from Yes That's such a bummer. The Doom co creator and former CTO of Ovoculus. Yes, these bodies

are a curse. John on the journoun Show he openly said, the problems of yours to make the world you wanted. It is not possible on earth to give everyone what they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson private islands. People react negatively to any talking of economics, but it's a resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value

to a lot more people. In the virtual sense, we can have virtual devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these. Not everyone can have a mention. Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate, though to some degree in virtual reality, and the simulation is not as good as the as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater or

mentioned in private island. Good for you. You're probably not the people who's going to benefit the most from this thing. Most of the people in the world lived in cramped quarters and are not and they wouldn't that, and that's not what they would choose to be. And if they had a limited resources. There's this piece of art that goes around the internet. It's the this dystopian kid in a corner drooling with goggles on, with like rainbow pictures.

But it's a terrible looking place. And people say, this is the world you're trying to build, People plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them, And Carmacs responses and encouraging. He says, but is his life really better off if he takes the goggles off and he's in the horrible place? So I I think Carmack really has convinced himself that virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place. In the interview, he

compares VR to the invention of like air conditioning. He says, like, I live in Dallas, it's a hundred degrees here. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air conditioning. People don't generally go, oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of air conditioning.

This is what human beings do. We bend the world to our will, and this is how things get better by building, by building technology and distributing them to people so that they have something better than what we would they would have if they didn't exist. Now, if you dig into what he's saying, here's actually a few interesting things.

Because the one, yeah, air conditioning is actually kind of bad, like the way we're using it and what I represents it is a band aid solution to our continual problem of heating up the earth, and it's making the problem worse every single day. Yeah, and honestly it's it's yeah, it's like it's like a band aid that also makes the problem worse because a C contributes to a lot of energy human shit. But you know, air conditioning is also an actual material change, right like it can it

can actually help people not die due to heat. The Metaverse and VR has talked about does not improve a middle to lower class person's material conditions, and to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech bros are from a regular person's reality. The Metaverse and VR and like virtual worlds are going to be built based on the perception

of reality held by those who create them. That's why we're getting shitty digital private movie theaters, fake mansions, and metaverse concerts and h and M n F T stores. They're giving us a simulated version of the world that they actually get to live in for real. But we can refuse this. We we don't need to take them

up on this offer. If we're gonna be stuck with with multiple proprietary branded metaverses that are made by rich tech bros to mirror a world that the that the rich tech bro gets to live in, the best thing we can do is funk with it. We can saboage it from the inside. We need to spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen, because, like we all know, terrorism is fun, right, everybody loves terrorism, but there's horrible consequences for doing it

in the real world. In the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism. Yet you can terrorize however you want in the metaverse and it's just trolling and that's fine, So do that much of it as possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would go really well with this type of thing is the poet terrorism. Concept of this applies like perfectly to this idea of how we need to funk with these digital spaces that are trying to be created, because yeah, like they're like they're pretty bad.

During one bitcoin consumed all of the electrical energy um by equivalent to a country like Argentina. UM. The bitcoin network handled like nineties seven million transactions, so this is roughly zero point zero one two per cent of the

worldwide volume of non cash transactions. But bitcoin was responsible for zero point five four of global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical, Like that's all, like, that's it's this ridiculous on average, that's like, uh, like thirteen hundred kill about hours poor per bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy. The power consumed by a single bitcoin transaction on average could power an average US household for one and a half months. It's it is ridiculous how much and how

much it's getting used. And they're trying to build, you know, like the sex City thing. They're trying to build this metaverse off of crypto, which they're like, I'm sad because like crypto could be really similar to the metaverse. Crypto could be really rad Like crypto could be an actually super red thing, but the way it's being used right

now is really environmentally damaging. UM and this this linking of Web three, you know, the mythical Web three and the metaverse to crypto is showing like, yeah, it's it's is kind of like the band Aid solution, where it's not it's it's, it's not it's not actually fixing the problem, and it's kind of making the problem worse because they're so set on linking it to crypto right now that it's it sucks like it's it's, it's, it's gonna happen.

It's gonna suck. What you can do is you can spam Final Fantasy seven porn, you can spam Son of the Hedgehog feet picks. This is this is the only tool we have. But save for actual terrorism, which we're not gonna talk about on this podcast, you can, but we can't talk about poetic terrorism. That is something that you can do. You can funk with these systems from the inside and make them unusable. And that's that's really

the only thing. And that's what I'm gonna do in my spare time, because it's fine, Yeah, um do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Um, go funk it up for them, um. And maybe in the process, here's my dream, Garrison, that perhaps in the process of sucking it up for them, we build something that we actually like. That's the thing right. Yeah, that is similar to how the Internet kind of got originally created. Of course, now it's turned into this hellscape.

But that'll probably that will probably happen anyway ten years or more for the metal, But we can get a little bit of fun out of it and we can have some fun with it like we did on the Internet for a couple of years. Uh huh, it all got real bad. So that is that is the metaverse that doesn't exist. Um and yeah, so fight against the cow may tricks as best as you can do your best, pull them out, build the city for the cows in the center of the world. Make a cow's eye on.

It's up to us. This is depressing, all right. That's the episode. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.