It Could Happen Here - The Metaverse That Never Was, Part 2

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Enter the Cowtrix. In part 2 we discuss why Big Tech spawned the Metaverse and how we are all cows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or whenever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. everything. Hi, I'm Mark Zuckerberg. Welcome to the podcast where we talk about the metaverse. I enjoy barbecue sauce. That was my Mark Zuckerberg. That was pretty good. That is SNL worthy. Thank you, Garrison. Because it's so bad.

All right. That was my only goal. This is part two of the metaverse that never was um here at it could happen here and we're actually going to be talking about like the i can't wait till we launch a show and pretend we never said all this shit it's going to be the best garrison you know robert remember remember when i was talking about um seek city and all the virtual venues yeah i-hmm. Yeah. I just got a message from our beloved parent company, iHeartMedia.

Oh, good. They planned to extend shows into the metaverse. Oh, great. Which was announced a few weeks ago. Well, you know, Garrison, I've always thought that the metaverse was a pretty good idea. I think 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, iHeartMedia did announce Web3 and the metaverse

are the newest consumer platforms for iHeartMedia. So, sorry, I was just working in a Matrix 4 reference there. Oh, yes, I see what you're doing there, Garrison. Thank you. for reference there so oh yes i i see what you're doing there garrison 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 ar maybe um but probably just as like niche gaming technology you know not this massive not like a massive successor to the internet

primarily three companies Facebook, Epic Games and Valve the later two being mostly gaming and software companies 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 metaverse is now in 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 ar applications of the technology yeah none of these companies are trying to make metaverse a thing that we actually want or working towards an interconnected, immersive, 3D, 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 is made up of all of these sub-platforms, you have social media, online gaming, and all of the ease-of-life apps,

all accessible through the same digital space under the same digital economy. That thing isn't happening. That's not what people with money are actually pushing towards, even though they're still using the metaverse term. There was a great piece in Wired that came out last month

as a part of their Matrix VR issue. It was called The Metaverse is Simply Big Tech But Bigger. It was by Cecilia D'Antazio. It's a wonderful piece, and I'm going to say a quote from it right here. By the mid-2000s, it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites that we could access on the open web. It was making information sorters, channels, aggregators, and publishers open enough to scale with user-generated content, 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 collide 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 interplatform integration. You have, you know, Microsoft Office, and they're, like, their Office suite. You have Microsoft Office and their

Office suite. You have Google Workspace. You have Apple's own AirDrop, Apple Pages, and Final Cut Pro. Plus the nightmare that is Adobe's subscription tools. 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 iMessage, uses Apple Maps, and calls his mom on FaceTime. Not a single person in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true! But this form of the internet is the one that the metaverse is growing

out of. Metaverse is just a way for tech companies to add VR and AR and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to their own portfolio of proprietary products. But in order for that to happen, 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 wide open.

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 his headsets and software was to give the tech a fresh new paint job

and call it Metaverse. And like, it's sort of working. There were approximately 9.4 million shipments of VR headsets in 2021, 3.6 million of which were done during the holiday season, after Facebook's big Metaverse event. It's suspected that the Quest 2, which is made by Oculus, aka Facebook, makes up for more than three quarters of all those headsets sold. So demographics data isn't explicitly available, but probably a lot of kids received these things as holiday gifts. Oculus Meta Facebook does not

release its VR headset sales figures, but the Oculus app 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 the number one app on the App Store. So, indicating a spike in headsets received as holiday gifts. So, they're selling a lot of headsets. Like, Oculus is selling a lot of their

things. Like, you know, I got one a few years ago, but, you know, now there's more and more of them circulating. But, you know, it's still all relegated to VR. It's not actually Metaverse. Arguably the closest thing we have to the actual Metaverse is stuff like Roblox and Minecraft. Now, that is still not

immersive 3D. You're still looking at it through a 2D screen, but it is software that gives users development tools to create their own projects within this shared 3D space. What separates these things, and basically all attempts for making the metaverse, from being the ideal metaverse is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is isolated islands. You can't take your Roblox game into Minecraft, right? It still is isolated to their specific things.

But, you know, nevertheless, Roblox's CEO described the company as the shepherds of the metaverse in early 2021, and he is kind of right. Like, that's not totally inaccurate. I'm going to quote again from the Wired piece by Cecilia D'Antazio. If big tech's unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple metaverses, if there are any at all. Each will be interoperable under one tech giant's 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 operating system, the ambiguity of iMessage, and Apple presumably loves the 30% commission it can charge on developers who sell apps in their app store. So Epic Games is the other big Metaverse proponent right now. They were actually making

announcements about Metaverse a few months before Facebook did. And the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has been outspoken against a Metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple. But that's not really genuine, because his version of the Metaverse entails a 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.

He tried to sue Apple last year and failed. And the California 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 him being against big tech giants and being against a big tech giant-ran 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. That's really what he's concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing. Because, yeah, it would be really interesting to see if multiple tech giants

work together to create an actual successor to the internet. You know how the internet's just when you open up your computer and you have access to the net it's not like running a specific program, you get to go on all the things. It would be interesting if people actually worked towards creating that, but no

it's all about creating very isolated operating systems with a very isolated tool chest. You can't access Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't 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 yeah 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 that point, I'm going to do one final quote from The Wired piece. If these companies dominating cyberspace did decide to collaborate simultaneously,

piecing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a digital textile, that would be very polite. But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. combine all of their valuable products, Captain Planet style, into an architect of the metaverse under open source standards nobody in particular reaps 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 never going to happen. The way society is made, the way internet works, 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. Woo! Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're going to talk about possibly the most successful version of VR technology. We're going to talk about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit. So, there is a tweet a few days

ago that, I'm just going to read the tweet and then we'll talk about the implications. This went very, very viral. I caught this very early on, though. 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 virtual reality goggles to make them think they are outside in summer pastures the farmer found out that these pleasant

scenes make the cows happier and produce more milk future is metaverse so we're gonna talk we're gonna talk about the cow matrix. We're going to talk about... Yeah, it is time. 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 milk. 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 uh came from came from russia um farmers worked together with developers uh veterinarians and consultants at the uh oh boy here here's a Russian town name, or I guess a farm name, Kragsganovka, I don't know. Yeah, that sounds right. That sounds right.

I think we can, I think you nailed it. It's this farm near Moscow, and they teamed up, so all these farmers, developers, and vets and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project. you know, farmers, developers, and vets, and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project. And there was an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and Agriculture reads, the global trend towards universal computerization significantly simplifies work processes in many areas and allows you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep up with the world's 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 IT specialists, decided to conduct an experiment studying the influence of virtual reality and developed a layout of vr glasses so the the herd donned these vr systems adapted for the heads of cows um so and they also had to they had 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 red or green, so there's shades of yellow and blue, so in order to replicate what grass looks like to them, they had to, you know, change the stuff.

But yeah, and they programmed a unique summer field simulation program and subjected it onto these cows. The Russian Ministry of Agriculture concluded that the cow matrix does work um in a statement from 2019 a few years ago uh 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 talk with um someone i know about this and they're like well if it makes the cow like actually happier and healthier then like what's the problem and like the problem is is that like you're gaslighting an entire creature's reality like you're like you're you're you're like not consensually gaslighting their reality and i that is i don't like that yeah i don't think everything we do to cows is without their consent so i it's one of those things where it's like but we're also not gaslighting their reality in 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. And, yeah, the fucked up cow matrix, or the cow tricks, does seem to do its job, extracting more milk from the cow to increase profitability. Sweet. A quote from the farmer said, We get an average of 22 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 27 liters so yeah when when the story first broke there was uh the most popular article was from a site called futurism which made me made me very depressed about this about futurism yeah um you should be depressed about futurismison. Yeah, it made me mad enough that I'm going to read some of it to you. Oh, good. Thank God. I haven't been angry in seconds. That cows produce 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. I say, you actually can. Also, 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 yeah because the thing is they're not they're not in pastures they're in little jail cells with vr goggles on their head so like it's that was that was the use

case and like the quote from the farmer is, they're watching green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost. They are less stressed. And the farmer says he plans to buy 10 more. So you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized cow VR headsets. Or you can 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 enough cow milk we need to gaslight cows by overruling their senses with a clunky VR headset on their little fussy faces, maybe we should stop 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, I'm not gonna do that, I refuse it's already an iffy practice if you don't buy milk locally from a farm you know. So if we're doing this, that just 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 that's an escalation it's it's the specific thing of like of of overruling their reality and senses um of another living creature like that is yeah for some reason for some reason that's not just turning them into a way in or for you to get like meat and not just like turning them into food but like making their living conditions really shitty and then making trying to trick them into thinking they're not yeah it's even worse than just having them live in

shitty conditions i think from an ethical standpoint it maybe it's more pleasant for the animal but from like our standpoint it's worse to me yep so speaking of uh uh i don't know don't do this to cows is there some segue 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 support this podcast oh i was just going to say podcasts for the people who make money based on your existence. Buying these products and services that support this podcast? Oh, I was just going to say podcasts in general do that, but yes. Oh, yeah, sure.

Cool. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley

into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in

the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German

and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities,

artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything

from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we are back. And my last big section here is titled, We Are The Cows so this is, that's gonna give you a sense of how we're gonna talk about what's happening don't like it

so what the cow tricks really demonstrates though is that the end goal of all this is to make us the cow, right? and we already are to some degree with the internet and smartphones, but this is more, this is an escalation, right? Like the people, the ghouls at Silicon Valley and you know, the whole tech world want, they want a world where we are forced to don hardware rigs

that block out our body's senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit. out our body's senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit. That's an internet that tries to convince you that you're inside of it and it is inside of you. That is what they want, really. Even if we get the metaverse that I would prefer, the mythical open source interconnected successor to the internet with all its different websites, tools, and games that I like all together and intuitively accessible through a shared digital space, even if we get that,

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. In my opinion, AR technology specifically could be really cool. There's stuff about it.

But redesigning the world to require headsets, goggles, or AR glasses would suck. Not only for people who can't get that technology, right? If we redesign the world to be like, the only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens, that's going to suck. Now, we already have that to some degree with smartphones and the internet, but this is another escalation of it. And again, like the cow, it's just going to be a way to paint over

our late capitalist climate disaster of a world. Metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political and ontological problems. And I have to use 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 ghouls 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. You could just spend the rest of your life listening to podcasts. Put blinders on over your eyes.

Cover up all of your senses but your ears. And just exist forever in a cocoon made entirely of my voice and occasionally Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice. But mainly my voice. So you're saying not listen to just any podcast but podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should listen to any podcast that I don't do. That doesn't seem right. So where's my angle on that? Huh? I don't know.

I don't know how long we should vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle. I really need to, I really need it to be. Well, it's okay. I just told everybody that we're the metaverse now, Garrison,

our content. I drank so much coffee this're the metaverse now, Garrison. Our content. I drank so much coffee this morning. It was a problem. Okay. And similar to all this, you know, remember the John Carmack interview from 2020? Yes. Oh, that's such a bummer. The Doom co-creator and former CTO of Oculus. Yes, these bodies are a curse, John. Yeah. On the Joe Rogan show, he openly said, the promise of VR is 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 talk of economics, but it's 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 mansion, not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate, though, to some degree, in virtual reality. Now, the simulation's not as good as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater or mansion 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 live in cramped quarters, and that's not what they would choose to be in if they had unlimited resources. There's this piece of art that goes around the internet. It's this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling with goggles on with 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 Carmack's response is 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 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 air conditioning. He says, I live in Dallas. It's 100 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 there's actually a few interesting things because for one yeah air conditioning is actually kind of bad like the way we're using it and what it 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 ac contributes to a lot of energy made out of 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 in VR, as 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 in VR, in 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&M NFT 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 don't need to take them up on this offer. If we're going to be stuck with multiple proprietary branded metaverses that are made by rich tech bros to mirror a world that the rich tech bro gets to live in, the best thing we can do is fuck with it. We can sabotage it from the inside. We need to spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen because –

Look, 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 as much of it as possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would go really well with this type of thing is the poetic terrorism concept. that would go really well with this type of thing is the poetic terrorism concept of yes this applies like perfectly to this idea of how we need to fuck with these digital spaces that are trying to be

created because yeah like they're like they're pretty bad during 2021 bitcoin consumed all of the electrical energy um by equivalent to a country like argentina um in 2021 the bitcoin network handled like 97 million transactions so this is roughly 0.012 percent of the worldwide volume of non-cash transactions but bitcoin was responsible for uh 0.54 of global electricity consumption on total which is astronomical. Like, all, like, that's, it's, it is ridiculous. On average, that's like, like, 1300 kilowatt hours per Bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy. The power consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction on average could power an average U.S 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 SeekCity 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 like crypto could be an actually super rad thing but the way it's being used right now is really environmentally damaging um and this this linking of web 3 you know the mythical web 3 and the metaverse to crypto is showing like yeah it's it is kind of like the band-aid solution where it's not 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 gonna happen it's gonna suck what you can do is you can spam final

fantasy 7 porn you can spam sonic the hedgehog feet pics 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 fuck 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 fun yeah um do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse um go fuck it up for them. And maybe in the process, here's my dream, Garrison,

that perhaps in the process of fucking 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 happen anyway. It'll take 10 years or more for the metaverse.

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 or it all got real bad so that is that is the metaverse that doesn't exist um and yeah so fight against the cow matrix as best as you can. Do your best. Pull them out. Build a city for the cows in the center of the world. Make a cow Zion. It's up to us. God, 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, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right.

An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. app, Apple Podcasts, or whenever you get your podcasts. who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Blacklit

on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.