It has come to Plaintext’s attention that a Winter Olympics is underway. Should have bought tickets!
The Plain View
At 12:24 pm on January 11, the actor and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon made a startling announcement to her 2.9 million Twitter followers. “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity,” she wrote. “Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”
That final line struck a note of urgency. The metaverse is coming, was her message, and you haven’t packed your go bag yet?
Witherspoon’s tweet arrived amid a backlash against celebrities cheerleading the virtual world and pushing their fans into cyber currency. It was bad enough that for years we had been pummeled by crypto dudes for not diverting all of our cash reserves to bitcoin and HODLing no matter what. The Twitter history of “Bitcoin Billionaire” Tyler Winklevoss (who, with his twin bro, Cameron, has done very well since being punked by Mark Zuckerberg back at Harvard) is an endless barrage of FOMO pitches, delivered with the enigmatic faux-wisdom of a blockchain Buddha. “Because of bitcoin, the universe will never be the same,” he tweeted recently. Got that, God?
Such self-interested investment advice by those in the actual crypto business can easily be written off. But now the celebrities are piling on, and people are noticing. The creepy Matt Damon commercial where he likens crypto investors to heroes who explore the stars or scale Everest (pre-Sandy Pittman, presumably) has been endlessly and unkindly deconstructed. (Even South Park got its licks in.) Everyone hates on that Tonight Show clip where Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton bore us with their bored apes. Witherspoon herself has been critiqued for her NFT holdings, and whether her interest is as an investor or promoter.
I’m less interested in Witherspoon’s non-fungible tokens than her ominous public alert of an impending shift that we need to deal with, like, now. Life is stressful enough with Covid, inflation, and Lady Gaga’s Oscar snub. Do we now also have to worry that we’re behind on our avatars? Will the metaverse hit us like that comet in Don’t Look Up, leaving us tragically engulfed like the poor souls living in the Pacific Northwest who may be in the path of a deadly tsunami when the Cascadia fault quakes? Should we take a cue from the star of Apple’s TV’s Morning Show and drop everything to begin our planning?
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
No. If we wind up doing the bulk of our work, recreation, and vacation travel in some digital construct that supplants our senses—and that’s a tremendous if—it won’t be a sudden occurrence. You won’t wake up one day to find yourself homeless and naked on a virtual street corner. You’ll have plenty of time to make an avatar, if you need one. An AI might even be able to do it in a jiffy.
You can also hold off on buying digital goods and real estate for now. The metaverse is often described as a land rush, and if you subscribe to The Witherspoon Doctrine, you might feel compelled to put in your property claim now. People will take your cash for this: Just this week, a new company called Everyrealm, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, was claiming more than 100 metaverse real estate developments, many tucked into the worlds of various game franchises. But besides pure speculation, there’s no reason to hurriedly sign up for virtual open houses.
One upside to the metaverse is its potential to eliminate scarcity, the big factor in jacking up the prices for virtual goods. Actual physical property in Manhattan and Palo Alto is valuable because, as the adage goes, they aren’t making any more land there. But in the metaverse, you can make more land, anywhere. You can put a shoebox in a virtual lobby that can be a portal to a mansion. There are no long commutes in a virtual world, where simply typing in the address of a location can beam you there instantly. Sure, maybe if some companies set up private virtual islands for the super-rich, they may be able to get away with charging millions of dollars for make-believe beachfront property. But the vast majority of humanity will have no need to visit, or even think of, such elite preserves, in the real or virtual world. Let ’em have it.
If there’s anything to be learned from the big shifts in the past two centuries, it’s that those mega changes don’t happen overnight. I lived through the adoption of the internet, which seriously got underway in the mid-1990s. The hyperbole was just as over-the-top as anything we see with crypto and the metaverse today. My friend John Perry Barlow (who died four years ago this week) used to say that it was an innovation dwarfed only by the invention of fire. Amazingly, even the most puffed-up predictions proved to be understatements. (Maybe not the one about fire.) It’s hard to imagine our world without the internet now.
But if you didn’t “prepare for it” in 1995, you had plenty of time to catch up. While the internet's growth was dramatic, the impact on real people unfolded slowly enough to let everyone adopt it at their own rate. I remember a conversation I had around 1997 with one of the world’s top bankers. He told me then he wasn’t quite ready to use a credit card to make an electronic purchase. I assume he’s comfortable with that now, and made the adjustment just fine. So did your parents, and maybe even your grandparents. And you know what? Even die-hards who still resist today are able to get by. (I would suggest a burner phone.)
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
There is one worry I have, though, and that is whether our workplaces, schools, and social gatherings will force us to participate in metaverses where artificial scarcity makes goods expensive. I hope we don’t have to pay a user tax to enter virtual buildings. I’d hate to see dress codes that require digital clothes from authorized dealers. There’s also a danger that social pressures will hector us into draping our avatars with costly designer pixels. The solution might seem to be to procure our metaverse garments from open source designers, the digital equivalent of thrift stores. But then, the lords of fashion and the snobs who follow them might downgrade or mock those who don’t splurge for the prestige of high-cost digital goods with conspicuous labels.
I’m not anti-metaverse and I’m not anti-cryptocurrency. Indeed, I’m excited about a lot of the VR, AR, and crypto technology being built by companies like Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Niantic, and many others. I think there’s a likelihood that mixed reality and digital cash will eventually become a big part of our future.
But, with apologies to Reese, don’t worry if you are not “planning for this.” You have plenty of time. I just hope that when the day does come, you don’t have to go into debt to pay for your kid’s digital back-to-school wardrobe.
Time Travel
In June 1990—yes I know that’s a long time ago—I wrote about virtual reality for Rolling Stone. My guide was VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, whose vision for virtual worlds was far more imaginative than the ones that companies are building today. (We didn’t discuss the “metaverse” because Neal Stephenson had yet to publish the book that introduced the term.)
In Lanier’s vision, worlds will be easily made and instantly changeable. If you feel down, your world might be tinged with blue. To express anger, you might turn into a roaring tiger. Since there’s no limit to what you express, your options are infinite.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
Lanier is convinced that once people realize how exciting it is to create new worlds, or refine the worlds they find themselves in, few will want to be virtual couch potatoes. “People aren’t aware that creativity is a fundamental and universal human need,” he says. “The people who want it to be an escapist thing—who say, ‘I just want to be transported to Tahiti’ or that kind of corny crap—will be disappointed. Everybody else will be having these amazing experiences, going through a thousand and one things, and you’ll be sitting there staring at a bunch of polygons that look like Tahiti.”
Ask Me One Thing
Phillip asks, “If Facebook withdraws from the EU over GDPR as threatened, what sort of social network should we build to replace it?”
Thanks for the question, Phillip. You are of course referring to the European rules about where companies can store personal data. Meta, The Company Formerly Known As Facebook, isn’t set up to follow those rules—it scoots files around various data centers on different continents, and the data is intertwined with information involving friends who might live anywhere. So it informed the EU that it might have to bow out of the countries if forced to follow those laws. Later, Meta clarified that it wasn’t a threat, dashing the hopes of those who couldn’t wait for it to leave.
First of all, Meta isn’t going anywhere. Even though he’s obsessively focused on the metaverse now, Mark Zuckerberg won’t willfully cut off hundreds of millions of users. And especially not after a quarter in which Facebook’s user base sagged by a mere million, tanking the stock price.
But as an intellectual exercise, let’s say Europeans can start from scratch. How about restoring the original dorm vision—a network where people can keep up with their friends and family, period? Leave out the politics, and don’t even entertain the idea of viral posts. Make it a public utility, like the mail service. Yep, tax-supported, and with no ads. Leave everything else to other social networks, in the private sector. Meta will have its chance to win back the continent when it builds the metaverse.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Every time you turn on your gas range—and even if you don’t turn it on—you are killing the planet. Bon appetit!
Last but Not Least
Add Julian Assange to the list of NFT aficionados.
If Facebook leaves Europe there’s always Telegram. But you should think twice about that.
Good news or bad, depending on where you stand on lawbreaking—it’s actually not easy to launder cryptocurrency.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here’s a story about how technology really won’t improve your sex life.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
More Great WIRED Stories📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!Here come the underdogs of the robot OlympicsPokémon Legends: Arceus isn't great. It doesn't matterInside Trickbot, Russia's notorious ransomware gangUse these keyboard shortcuts and ditch your mouseThe unnerving rise of video games that spy on you👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database✨ Optimize your home life with our Gear team’s best picks, from robot vacuums to affordable mattresses to smart speakers