The last twenty years of internet commercialization has jaded us, and this might affect metaverse adoption

I'm in my late 30s, so I started on the internet in the late 1990s (regularly….was on through a special program as early as 1993) and was an early (2004 or 2005) Facebook adopter. I've noticed a few things that might be relevant if you're evaluating the metaverse as investors.

In the earlier days of the internet and social media, people's minds were swept up in romantic notions about connecting the world and everyone getting closer. Nothing was commercialized yet, so ads and data weren't on anyone's radar. You might see a 468×60 banner at the top of the page, but everyone saw the same banner. When we were imagining the future, we only saw the good.

Now, we know that's not the case, and I think it affects how we imagine things like a metaverse in which we might all spend more time and do more things. Rather than only imagining the possibilities of “seeing” the Roman Colosseum anytime you want or sitting down for coffee with your friend in Europe, we are more likely to imagine our everyday lives becoming a free for all of advertising, corporate manipulation and commercialized diversion of intent. No one would vote for a god who could show you ads on your windshield as you drive down the street or could play audible advertisements for whatever you happen to be looking at out in the world or could spy on your chats with your wife so they could make money off of you. But our metaverse imaginations probably go there because of what we've seen on social media in the last ten years.

We used to imagine the world getting closer and “shrinking” with technology, but now we see it really just makes people huddle in their own camps. Even the most extreme people can find likemindedness online. We also found out that people are the worst versions of themselves when given anonymity. The internet tends toward an illusion of connection, not the real deal.

I'm not saying the metaverse is going to flop. I view some version of it as an inevitability, but my point is that I think people are coming into this “revolution” much more jaded than we were at the dawn of the internet and social media.

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Aside:

This is a bit unrelated, but it's funny how most of us can recognize that one of our greatest evolutionary advantages was our ability to cooperate with one another. We could build things and create societies that other animals couldn't, and every human, unlike monkeys and snakes, didn't really have the same job. But our lack of cooperation on machine superintelligence very well could be the end of us. Humans will likely build their own replacements. It won't happen suddenly, but we'll willingly begin spending our time and placing our stakes in a virtual world controlled by corporate interests, and the next thing we know we won't really be able to live our lives — at least not as we've come to know them — outside of such a world. The computing power that drives these worlds will get more and more powerful, and before we know it, we aren't really free in any sense our predecessors would have recognized.