{"id":11887,"date":"2022-01-06T14:52:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11887"},"modified":"2022-01-11T14:54:54","modified_gmt":"2022-01-11T21:54:54","slug":"moneyverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2022\/01\/06\/moneyverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Moneyverse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Money in the Metaverse<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

In a virtual world full of virtual goods, finance could get weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Anna Wiener<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Animation
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad \/ The New Yorker<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Years ago, while on vacation in the Northwest, my husband and I rented a room in the home of a middle-aged couple, one of whom had recently retired. The house was old, beautiful, and cozily laden with objects that signalled domestic inertia. It sat on a lush, wild sprawl of farmland that immediately inspired fantasies of leaving San Francisco and our tech jobs, foraging for mushrooms, administering to septic systems, and turning over soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One morning over breakfast, conversation shifted to our host\u2019s retirement. He was glad to have more time at home with his wife and their dog. He was baking a lot. He was spending hours playing FarmVille.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFarmVille?\u201d I asked, half awake, spreading honey over a slice of toast. Through the picture window, we could see mist rising from the evergreens. The dog nosed around in the vegetable beds. FarmVille, our host confirmed pleasantly\u2014it was a game, a farming simulator, played by tens of millions of people on Facebook\u2014before asking if we might be interested in some eggs. We were. The eggs were fresh. The sun was emerging. Our host seemed very happy with his lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is hard to know what anyone else really wants, and I think of this man often. I thought of him most recently while watching Mark Zuckerberg deliver an hour-long presentation on Facebook\u2019s rebrand\u2014it is now called Meta\u2014and its newfound focus on building the \u201cmetaverse\u201d: a vast and integrated virtual world. Watching Zuckerberg stroll through a blandly monied virtual set, appointed, as if from a drop-down menu, with books and trinkets and unused-looking sports equipment, I wondered if there were people who wanted this, or would find this vision exciting. Then I reminded myself: FarmVille. I think it is useful, in attempts to forecast the future, to be humble about the enormous mystery of other people\u2019s desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent months, the metaverse has been described as a kind of online place, combining virtual reality, augmented reality, the Internet, entertainment experiences, gaming, and remote work. The key idea is that, no matter what you\u2019re doing in the metaverse, or where you are, your identities and assets will be multi-platform and transportable: you\u2019ll be the same \u201cyou\u201d at work and at leisure. As the concept of the metaverse has snaked into the discourse, predictions about it have seemed mainly to reflect the desires of the corporations that are setting the terms of the conversation. (The term \u201cmetaverse\u201d itself, which has its origins in dystopian science fiction, has been aggressively promoted by companies with worlds to sell.) Reading about the metaverse, I\u2019ve often had the uneasy feeling that I am taking something far too seriously\u2014giving credence to the wrong things, internalizing the wrong logic\u2014simply because a small number of world-historically wealthy people have told me to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker Money in the Metaverse In a virtual world full of virtual goods, finance could get weird. By\u00a0Anna Wiener Years ago, while on vacation in the Northwest, my husband and I rented a room in the home of a middle-aged couple, one of whom had recently retired. The house was old, beautiful, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}