TRASHFUTURE - Dispatches from the Metaverse feat. Jathan Sadowski

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Mark Zuckerberg is building the future of the internet, and the future of everything, and it’s basically a much more exploitative version of Habbo Hotel. Where we’re going, you won’t need eyes to see… it’s the Metaverse! And thankfully we've got Jathan Sadowski, friend of the show and cohost of the This Machine Kills Podcast, to explain it further. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* See it all, for the low price of £5, on October 12 at 8 pm at The Sekforde Arms (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-voicemail-preview-tickets-181766928777 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to this free episode of TF. It's Riley and I'm here with Alice Hussain Milo and we are thrilled to once again be joined by a TF regular now firmly a denizen of the first class lounge and sipping one of his complimentary non vintage, but still complimentary champagne. It's Jathan Sudowski from this machine kills Jathan. How's it going? It's going well. Happy to be here. Happy to finally be recognized for the status I knew I had in my soul this whole time. Oh yeah. There are not many. There are not many TF first class executive club members there on there on, but I tell you what they are all enjoying the complimentary punch and free pasties. Yeah, of course.

And a mini Yorkshire pudding on your way in. It's great. Yeah. And you get, in addition to all of that, you get a free upgrade if there's a free business class seat. Walking into the trash future premium lounge to see Riley in a waiter outfit with a bottle of a bottle of champagne and each hand emptying them into a punch bowl immediately turning around and leaving. There was a time when you'd get like a complimentary glass of piss, but because of shortages that no longer is offered in the in. Yeah, there's no way back. Yeah. Yeah. That's not. Yeah, you can never suck in. They're stuck in Germany. We can't. We're not importing like this. Yeah, no, that's the thing. You can. We're getting British piss guys.

You can't just get it. You have to like queue up and get in, right? And you can like maybe you can get in. But what show do I have to go to for the punch bowl full of liquid natural gas? I guess that would be, well, that's your problem. The Romaniacs don't have it and they're arching their eyebrow over it being like, see, maybe Brexit wasn't such a good idea. The Romaniacs live in a big water tower. It's Brexit cost, but in order to get it, you have to like defeat Laura Kuhnsberg in a rap battle. Oh, let's talk about that for a minute. I don't want to talk too much about Tory Conference because mostly it was just the same people re-litigating a lot of like the same shit.

Yo, BBC raps. Yeah. So apparently this was all tweeted out and then deleted all evidence of it wiped from the internet in a moment of insane journalist solidarity where apparently Lewis Goodall and Laura Kuhnsberg of the BBC engaged in one of history's epic rap battles with Michael Gove. Yeah. It was actually convened by epic rap battles. And had a quote dance off, which I can't, I cannot imagine anything more embarrassing. Lewis Goodall went to the assembled crowd. Are there any Tory scum in tonight, which is some great crowd work, but also aren't you meant to be a journalist? Respects him for emceeing. Yeah. He was,

he was comparing the Tory Conference after part of it. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, like, look, all emcees are hacked. They all say stuff like any couples in tonight, you know, how long are you going to do? Exactly. Yeah. Anyone get a drink in the break? I just, I think, like Alison, I were talking about this earlier and like, look, the Conservative Party is a party for people with dying brains. But because everyone's brain is dying, they have a vice grip on on the UK that then Labour wants to get the people with dying brains because they're the only people who count and they can't prize the Conservative hands off them really. I welcome the dying brains. I would encourage them to go further by being totally brain dead, which means we have to have you

rap now. It's clearly what the people want. We're going to need you to, we've booked you on fire in the boot. No, come on. My name's Keir Starmer and I'm here to say I'm going to rock this club in a responsible way. Oh yeah. You can, you can just know that Coonsburg, Goodall and Gove all said their names and that they were here to say something in a major way and then sort of trailed off to much applause. But Alison and I were caulking, caulking, excuse me. Yeah. Riley and I were caulking each other off, whatever that means. Let me try that. Let me try that again. Excuse me. Alison and I were cooking up this idea that the way to destroy British electoral politics forever would be if there was kind of

footage captured of Mr. B, the gentleman, Reimer, doing rapping with all of the major candidates at every party conference, zero percent turnout, no votes. If we have to do, if we have to destroy the British political system, which we should, then the answer is to fully make them embrace the chat pop that all of the people who took roller briefcases to school love so much. Own that shit. Oh yeah. Bring back Professor Elemental. Professor Elemental is going to be Chris Elemental. Mr. B, the gentleman, Reimer can be the Tory one and then everyone will lose faith in the British political system. 100 percent. No one would get a single vote. It's like a very British coup, but it's us doing it and we're doing it through the medium

of chat pop. So that's right. Mr. B, the gentleman, Reimer, if you're willing to engage in some accelerationism, then we will hire you to play every party conference listening. Yeah. Yeah. Which we know you are. Of course you are. What else are you doing? You're certainly not doing chat pop because it's not 2010. Please. Mr. B was my father. Call me Chris. Oh my. Oh no. So the Tory party conference, useless, pointless, very funny thing to rap battle. It was kind of weird of both Michael Gove and Laura Koonsburg to drop all of those hard but, you know, it is very similitude, right? Look, I would much prefer, okay, imagine this, imagine this. Laura Koonsburg and Michael Gove, they're in the smoking area at Fould.

It's six in the morning and the party's still raging. Frill and Inigo Kennedy are doing a back-to-back set and the two of them are passing an unlit cigarette back and forth talking about how real they are. I would vote for that party. I'm trying to envision what the rapping is and you're right, the Govers chat pop, right? Like, obviously. But I just have this vision in my head that I'm unable to shake of Laura Koonsburg getting on the mic and doing some like actually pretty deep cut Wu Tang shit. But I think she was doing the verses from wannabe by the Spice Girls. Laura Koonsburg grabs podium liquid swords. Right, right. Anyway, but we're not actually talking about anything British today. That's going to be the end of the British segment for us for

a while. We talked about British politics too many weeks recently. I got a startup. Okay, startup, startup, startup. It's called improbable. All the fuck off. Stay in immediate fuck off. Is it the name of it? Is it the name of a chat pop rapper? Yeah, it's Senor Improbable. Senor Improbable, the saprous hill of chat pop. They call me Mr. Unlikely. They call me Mr. Unlikely because all the girls like me. There we go. We're chat poppers now intellectual raps. Bitch, I might be. Jay. As the guest, it's called improbable. What do you think it does? Please do not use your advanced knowledge of the theme of this episode. I was going to say, I know what it does. This

is unfair. I'm a ranger here. Well, you're disqualified. Go enjoy your champagne punch. Milo. Okay. Improbable. So, I mean, the name really doesn't help because all of the startups that we ever mentioned all do something that is objectively improbable. Speaking of, before we go on, Ginko BioWorks has now been apparently, which we talked about with Alex Skaggs the last time we talked with her, turns out Ginko BioWorks is a bullshit. One of the many things we've said was scams was a scam. Riley, are you saying I shouldn't have invested in them? Didn't invest all the Patreon and Ginko BioWorks along with Softback. Riley, was that not investment advice? Because you didn't clarify. Oh my God. Improbable. Come on. First thing comes to mind. I'm trying to

get into the headspace. The full name is improbable worlds, but it's registered as improbable. Oh, improbable worlds. They're doing something about the future. They're going to change the future. They are lending you money to start a business through an app. No. That's very low effort. Come on. Who's saying? So, my initial idea was that it's a gig economy app, but for like magicians. As fun as that is. Yeah, I love to see a magician and go, well, that looks highly improbable. David Blaine has fallen on hard times. Who would need that many handkerchiefs? Come on. I'm just imagining people aspiring magicians on penny farving, cycling around London. Yeah, going to various corporate events and being magic. Because now that we're getting back

to work and everyone's coming, you know, everyone's being encouraged to go back to the office, what better way to encourage people to come back than by saying that, you know, there's a guy who'll do magic tricks for you whenever you want. That's true. Improbable. The gig economy app for magicians. That's a good idea, but SoftBank did invest a half a billion dollars into it, which is also something they would do for a gig economy app for magicians. Alice. It puts the fucking betting shop on the blockchain. Blockchain. It is to do with blockchain a little bit. That was a gimmie. I was going for the gambling angle, because like improbable, probability odd. You're being too clever, Alice.

Improbable's vision is to reimagine how people play, work and live. We are dedicated to building blank. An enormous tower to pierce the heavens and assault the throne of God. I have to say this really quick thing just to get it off my chest. The same was saying, reminded me that Tom Walker was telling me he once did a gig in a magic club. Friend of the show, Tom Walker in Australia. Yeah, we love Tom Walker. The guy who ran the magic club, who was a magician, had been on like hard times. Almost like he's like sleeping in the magic club. And then Tom was saying to him like, oh, you know, man, how are you doing? And he's like, oh, it's been kind of a bad week. Like first of all, my rabbit died.

It's second of all these vaccines. Am I right? Yeah, that is right. No, no, it's not the tower of Babel who's saying to reimagine how people play, work and live. We are dedicated to building blank. What's blank? God, it could be so many things. It's like, we've just done so much. Really good. I'm not helping you with these. Yeah, I was going to say, it'll be like a gigantic orb and a necessary obelisk. If it's a hint, name improbable is more of like a prophecy for what this company will, how it will end up. I actually have their track record in front of me. It's less of a prophecy and more of a descriptor. Is this some kind of booth? Are they building some kind of booth?

No, I'm afraid not. Oh, fuck, are they building a virtual world? Yes, they sure are. They're finally building hentai you can live. If it's hentai you can live, I'm down. Just give me the details. I've got some cash. Alice, you're pretty much right. They're basically doing what they're trying to do, right? Is they're thinking, well, look, second life is basically going to be a gold rush once everything is second life. So let's do the picks and shovels. Let's build the operating system upon which these giant persistent multiplayer spaces that are games in some respects, but could be a meeting room in other respects or a simulation of a city and others.

Oh my God, it's like the Matt Hancock metaverse. It is, in fact, a metaverse company. Yeah, I want to go to my 9am HR disciplinary meeting about photocopying my ass as one of the characters from Team Fortress 2. Yeah, you could be the devil, man. I keep blowing stuff up in the room. I'm sure you're going to get into this Riley, but in addition to being a game studio with a bunch of game devs on staff, they also have a sideline and what they call improbable defense. Jason, that's not a sideline. That's where all their revenue comes from because they've never made a game that hasn't failed immediately. Awesome. They claim to have 100 plus dedicated defense experts either on staff or at tap.

In order to do what, like sell the army second life? To sell them virtual reality goggles. Like America's army, but this time it's an MMO. Fantastic. But also, the other thing is, guess what? Everything about it is British. Trapping on my VR goggles to do some war crimes in Northern Ireland. Good morning, men. It is 4am virtual time. You will strap on your VR goggles and use them to look at this hentai. Basically, they say we are a games company, but we imagine games in a very different way.

I can't get over this. I'm really worried about the effects of exposing British squaddies to hentai. Those are two things. It's like the demon core. Those two hemispheres cannot be allowed to meet. If it's British, right? And it's British VR. Is it re-creating Britain, but it's like ostensibly worse and more dysfunctional, invertional reality than it is in the real world? One of their big things that they do, so there's two improbables, right? There is improbable main, which makes games, all of which have folded and none of which have been successful. Like they've lost soft bank a ton of money, but what else is there?

They're doing practice. Yeah, exactly. They're basically just draining Masayoshi-san's Saudi money into the pockets of games developers in Britain. Because they have this thing, and again, this is a bit technical, but it is an engine for scaling compute power to render giant 3D worlds based on usage, but that uses an extremely esoteric and advanced programming language called Scala, right? That only really like sort of quite top-end computer scientists use. Well, it all technically works, and it technically works quite beautifully. It scales horrifyingly poorly. It's almost

impossible to use, and it doesn't really work well at scale. And so that's one of the reasons that none of the games they've ever made have ever succeeded. It's because it's like trying to apply the principle of Amazon Web Services to generating a potentially infinitely large 3D open world to interact in. That can be for games, or it can be for simulations, like for example, what they sell to the army. So they will simulate all of Britain. So you can see what would happen, for example, if a fistfight broke out at every petrol station in the country. And fortunately, we have simulated that for you. Leave your house and have a look. I love the language they use to describe this on their website. So they say in 2020,

Improbable's Defense Business announces contracts to supply its synthetic environment platform as a single synthetic environment technology distributor to the British Army and UK Strategic Command. I love synthetic environment platform. Yeah, it's a game, but it's more respectable language, basically. It's a game. You know what it is? It's a game you can have a meeting in, basically. That's what a synthetic environment is. Awesome. My favorite kind of game. We're having a little meeting in James Bond Nightfire. The guy's name in charge of it is guy called Herman Narula, who actually was at Gertin, apparently, and his son of a billionaire property developer in India. Oh, of course. Yeah, just a coincidence, Riley. You are a

conspiracy theorist. You see coincidences and you create meaning out of them. So he says, the feeling you get in stadium when thousands of fans around you are roaring is very different to going on a message board and talking about it. The utility of what we call the metaverse, which is these persistent worlds, is proportional to how many things can happen together at any moment in time. I was told to touch grass, and so I have invented this grass simulator. Synthetic grass environment simulator. Alice, grass simulator is absolutely something you would play in front of us. They literally have been playing grass mowing simulation. So, but this is improbable defense, as you mentioned, Jathan. This is from their website.

From uniquely immersive collective training to policy design and operational decision support, the latest synthetic environments can transform an organization's ability to address complex challenges and orchestrate a swift integrated response. Richly detailed and endlessly adaptable, virtual worlds integrate land, sea, air, space, and cyber with the information domain as well as abstract political, social, diplomatic, and economic systems. Now, Jathan, I want to just because I have my explanation as to why that's total horse shit. What's your explanation as to why that's total horse shit? I mean, it's total horse shit because, well, it's all a bunch of words that are strung together that mean nothing, right? Like it's very clearly just military buzz

words meant to be a pitch deck, right? Like land, sea, air, and cyber. I mean, on one hand, I applaud them for defrauding the British army out of what I'm sure is... I think that was difficult to do. Yeah, exactly. Like, go ahead. I mean, secure that back. Get those millions and billions of dollars from the army to provide them with a really low-poly second life. Actually, to be fair, it normally is quite hard to defraud the British army because the British army doesn't have any money. It's not that they're smart. It's like, well, we would love to spend a billion dollars. We don't have any on your silly game. So the reason I think it's horse

shit is because no matter how good your simulation environment is, all you're going to do is reproduce your own biases in it. So they're basically just saying, what if the millennium challenge had a VR element? Or a less. Also, this isn't anything new. The military has been training with video games for ages. Bohemia Interactive used fucking the arm-de-sort games for VBS too. It's nothing new. What's interesting to me is the sort of MMO-ification of this. That's what interests me, is like, okay, fine. Pretend to shoot people in a video game in order to train to do it in real life. Fine. Whatever. What's interesting is if they can get the military hooked on microtransactions,

if we can get the parachute regiment into loot boxes, it's fucking over. You're taking heavy fire in Iraq somewhere, and then a guy comes up and is like, oh, if you buy some special gold coins, we can drop you more ammunition. Oh, it wouldn't even be that. It would just be like a skin for your god. The freemium parachute. I mean, the thing with stuff like the metaverse and with this is you always have to ask, what really shitty, explicitly dystopian sci-fi novel are they trying to make into reality? I mean, the metaverse, we'll talk about it, it's an idea from Snow Crash, right,

the Neil Stevenson novel, but improbable defense sounds like Ender's Game, right? What if we could get like British teens to think that they are like fighting Northern Ireland, but in reality, they actually are fighting Northern Ireland. So before we go on out of the startup, the founder, Herman Nerula, did do a thread that I think sets up our conversation about this emerging technological, it's more than a platform or approach, a technological paradigm that's being pushed by the same fucking, you know, monsters and devil worshipers that have pushed all the technological paradigms so far. Awesome. Got to worship someone.

Nerula says, in some quarters, folks are simultaneously outraged by the possibility of the metaverse will also openly unclear on what it is. It's a curious phenomenon for something to be so triggering and also worthy of such analysis. We need a simple definition of a metaverse is a network of connected experiences which provide fulfillment, develop social relationships that otherwise provide value to community of users, including but not limited to entertainment. It's also very funny to be like, we need a simple explanation of this and then proceeds to say some stuff that means almost nothing to be a metaverse and not just a game. These experience have to must have an aggregate

real consequences, real property ownership, the ability to transfer value and build investable businesses or create real cultural outputs. And if you die in the game, you die in real life. Brain makes it real. And this is why I wanted to read this thread because if here's what it gets to one of the core tech utopian rejoinders to criticisms of this thing called the metaverse, which we will define more fully and on. Now the first question would be, why is anyone against this? The search for even deeper psychological fulfillment is so fundamental to our psyche that even closely related primates are motivated by the need for autonomy, relatedness, etc. Let's consider potential objections. You perhaps imagine quote unquote

virtual experiences are somehow less useful than quote unquote real experiences. Unfortunately, you are now then against dreams and basically all inner thoughts, which sounds like a dire position to hold. I've been fucking out logics by this guy. I'm sorry. You've actually been living in a metaphors your whole life. So I'm going to sort of just slowly slip into the main, the meat of the episode here. Now that we're done the startup, Jason, what is the metaverse? I mean, join me. The metaverse is everywhere. Yes, it is all around us. No, it's not. It's nowhere. It's in a bunch of idiots brains. Please, Jason, go ahead. I mean, it's a good question. What is the metaverse and Herman Nerula in the thread that you're referring to does a really good job of showing how even

somebody who has this company that is meant to be a metaverse, like a metaverse first company or whatever, still clearly has no fucking idea what the metaverse is, even as he brow beats everyone for also having no idea what it is. And that's because there is no such thing as the metaverse and even Facebook. So Facebook is the metaverse in terms of what it is right now or what it's going to be. It's going to be something that is completely directed, if not outright owned solely by Facebook. But even then, Facebook themselves are not clear what it is. Right now, it appears to just be like, you know how you hate your office, but then COVID lockdown happened. But then COVID lockdown happened and you were like, maybe actually I kind of miss my office.

Well, the metaverse is going to be the synthesis of that dialectic. You won't actually get to your office, but you will get a virtual office instead. That's the metaverse. You don't have to go to meetings, but you get to go to meetings dressed as Ironman if you pay to buy the premium Ironman. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you will never have to leave home. All you'll have to do is strap on your big giant Oculus Rift goggles and now you're in the office. But importantly, you're only in the office from the waist up, so you can't ever do a tubing. It's basically tubing insurance. So if we want to talk about this metaverse that we've been talking about, right? And interestingly, I think, remember, I hate, I really do hate to do Twitter review here,

but here it's sort of worth doing, that when Grimes posted a status after she was seen doing some moronic shit in Los Angeles, she said, I'm not a socialist. I believe in a radical form of UBI based on crypto and gaming. How could I forget? Eagles are always saying this, it's trapped and do it. Like I've fallen for this many times before. But the thing is, come on trash. The thing is, red flag, red flag. The thing is right. I suspect that she has been so in what is currently this really, this thing that's very big in fashion among techno utopians, this metaverse thing, that that's what she was talking about. She was talking about the metaverse.

And this is defined by a venture capitalist called Matthew Ball as, quote, an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments and entitlements and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of physical presence. This is something that people have been trying to push for like, do you have a PlayStation home? Do you have one? Your PlayStation came with a metaverse thing in there and nobody ever used it, but it was there. It's the same thing. I know, Alice. Let's be fair. Peterfiles used it.

But now imagine that, but also it's your work. You work on the PlayStation home app. Yeah, I have meetings with the Peterfiles. Exactly, yeah. It didn't work before because we didn't have the blockchain, Alice. That's why. And we didn't have all of those like, really... Whatever I need to make something functional, that's what I feel like I'm missing as the blockchain. That's right. I had spent like the last few months on VR chat, which is I guess like a metaverse-ish type of thing. Well, everything is because the metaverse means nothing. Yeah, but I mean like the whole VR sort of like interface thing, right? So I had spent

like the past couple of months on it because it was part of my dissertation research and everything. And it was really weird to sort of adapt to. I could understand why people enjoyed it, but even while I was doing it, I was very... There's a very small number of people who actually use VR chat, which is like quite an advanced kind of virtual reality, social media network, and probably like the main one that people use. I guess like my thinking about like metaverse type stuff, and Jason, I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts on this, is more just like, is this kind of... It's not going to be a thing that people enjoy, but rather that people are going to have to be forced to use. And that is very kind of similar

to lots of other Facebook products, where it's like, we know that you don't like using any of the platforms. They're all kind of fucking awful. They all kind of bring up the worst impulses into every user and like the platforms incentivize them, but also in order to kind of like maintain our dominance, we're going to like give you no choice but to use them. So you better love enjoying being in your VR office. I think that is broadly right. I mean, the metaverse right now is really... Well, you have people like Matthew Ball, and you have people like Herman Nerilla talking about it in these grand kind of ways of it being like this everyday thing that replaces social activity, but not replaces, because it's not virtual. It's real. And if you don't agree with that,

then you don't agree with the concept of dreaming. But I think you're exactly right here, who's saying where the business case for the metaverse right now is really... It's a B2B kind of service. I've heard from friends of mine who are like high up in some of the major consulting companies, like global consulting companies, that they're going all in on virtual reality as like a management consulting solution that they're pitching to other very large corporations. Oh, great. I can get fired by a McKinsey guy wearing an Iron Man suit. Yeah, exactly. It's virtual office space, right? But I think that's exactly right though, is that the way that we get pulled into the metaverse is by Hook and Crook, right? It's by our

boss being like, this is where meetings are being done now, right? This is where you have to go to hang out by the virtual water cooler, and you have to also go to mandatory fun at the virtual happy hour and all of that, right? And Microsoft becomes or Facebook becomes the big contractor not only for the software, but the hardware with the goggles and all that. To me, that seems like the real business case, and everything else about authentic social interactions and relationships and blah, blah, blah, is just like the sugar to try to help the medicine go down. Well, we talk a lot about lifestyle being the thin end of the wedge in a lot of these things, where the way that a lot of these developments that end up being sort of quite humanly terrible

end up getting sold is by saying, oh, it will free you from these inconveniences. That is to say, you will no longer be limited in your social interaction by having the physical distance having to go see someone. You can be... You're not owning a full Iron Man suit. Yeah, exactly. You can own an actual Iron Man suit and be within the reality of the metaverse, actually Iron Man if you buy the NFT, because the way the metaverse is pitched by people like Ball, especially, and by the sort of the VCs of the companies behind it, someone like Nerula as well, is what they say is, this is our opportunity to apply all of the wonderful impulses of small scale private property to a potentially infinite and limitless world. So we have these incentives

for new kinds of creators to make a big sort of fancy Minecraft Island. We have incentives for someone to make a rare for Disney to make a rare Iron Man suit that only one person can own, and then someone gets to be a real Iron Man as far as everyone's concerned. And then you can go to your meeting as Iron Man. I'm Iron Man right now. But what I find quite sort of interesting, and worth talking about about it, is that this is... Of all of the visions of the future that the Tetris and Tech companies have, I think this is the one that's most likely going to be enforced on the most people, and so is worth watching out for the most. This idea that you are going to have to spend more time in corporate controlled, virtual, spatial platforms that persist in economies

that you're going to be asked to labor in, and also labor to maintain. Oh, good. Let's have our next meeting in Eve online. Well, it's interesting you should say Eve online, because the next paragraph in Matthew Ball, he says, it has to span the physical and virtual worlds. So that means that, for example, I know you could buy a card, scan it on your phone, and then your persistent avatar that exists across Facebook's Metaverse, and Deloitte Consulting's Metaverse, and also the Dance Club's Metaverse, or whatever, that you can carry that card of the avatar that's got connected to an NFT or whatever that you bought through all of those worlds. Yeah, that interoperability is really interesting.

I mean, this is also bringing in that blockchain element of this is the use case for things like DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. But through blockchain, exactly, your property ownership of an NFT or some virtual landholding or whatever, importantly, is not just on one server, it's across all the servers. Because what we've done, basically, is we have now solved, according to the logic of your basic supply and demand, Milton Friedman logic, we have now solved the institutional problems that prevent us from having this perfect economy. That's the belief here. I love that, basically, based on my dumb guy's understanding of what you're saying, they've come up with the idea of having a virtual world, which they can't actually

do, but fine, whatever. Let's imagine they create this virtual world. Then the first thing they're making sure they can do with it is ensure that landlords still exist in some sort of virtual realm. There's still going to be virtual land ownership. There's so much virtual land ownership on the block. There's been a second London created that you could buy property in Mayfair in as an NFT. So you could have an NFT of that one kid, the Azerbaijani kid, you could have an NFT of his office building, and then you own it. No one can say you can. I mean, this is what we were talking about before the episode, Riley, is that this is like digital Georgism, but Facebook is the state. Speaking of Facebook, Facebook has said Musk and Bezos both have space travel. That is

their grand utopian vision of the future, is go to space and then it just so happens because utopian or dystopian visions of the future are all power fantasies. The Musk Bezos power fantasy is one about controlling a new kind of society in real life. The Zuckerberg power fantasy is the metaverse and that's why it's worth talking about because Facebook is dumping enormous amounts of money into trying to build it or rather into trying to kickstart the technologies that will build it because the metaverse isn't defined. I take them at this point. Just like the mobile internet isn't the iPhone or Twitter or a touchscreen. The mobile internet is kind of a phenomenon arising from all of those things together, as well as the labor of all of the people

who- Supervenient quality. Precisely. The metaverse is in the same sense, like the mobile internet. It is an emergent property of many different of these places that share things in common, like persistent economies, a sense of virtual spatiality and so on. Facebook is trying to do enough investment in it that it becomes a thing, that it's reified, that other people then start developing metaverse apps. They just happen to develop them on Facebook's platform. This is what Facebook says to define it. The metaverse is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you. Again, note those words, create and explore. This is basically appealing to Montessori educated

middle managers, right? But no matter how many, because remember, always remember, Uber was about middle management type people making extra money on the weekend to go to the craft beer bar. It's not how it turned out. The same thing here. This is pitching itself as being a technological vehicle. It's like a hobby thing. Yes. Or as a way to make your life better, more comfortable and more fun. And it never turns out like that. So to create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you, and also it's in a fucking kindergarten. What the fuck? I'm embarrassing to read this. It's great, right? Because we had all of these ideas of like a rapacious business

was going to bring us a sort of a physical internet, a cyberspace, right? That's what Snow Crash has. That's what fucking Neuromancer has. But that's all with the mindset of sort of what business guys were like in the 80s with the sort of gold Rolex, Greed is good type of thing. Whereas what Cyberpunk failed to predict was how fucking cringe business guys would be. And so what we have instead is fucking American Psycho. I can't believe Van Patten preferred Alan's Funko Pop to mine. Yeah, the subtle past all tones. What I was going to say was that I think it's also this acknowledgement that by the tech guys that material advancement isn't going to happen.

They've kind of exceeded the idea that tech kind of has a material ambition to it. So instead, what they've kind of done is suggest that digital items are just as valuable and just as important and just as useful. And digital experiences. And crucially, digital experiences. But I guess when I think about NFTs and digital objects, I think I don't know whether this... I need to read the story properly, but there has been a news article recently that in London that they have released the 4D monopoly experience. 4D. So it's a game of monopoly that goes through time. Yeah, no, you get pissed on it.

It might be like augmented, but I'm not entirely sure. But the idea is basically that it's a kind of like monopoly style escape room, but it's like everything is sort of like digital. And it kind of... It just like struck me as like very perverse because it's sort of... Again, it's that idea that like, yeah, you can use this game to buy a house in Mayfair. And like it can feel like you're sort of like owning something material. And I think that's like the metaverse really is like this kind of very pure example of, you know, create like taking the idea of like material ownership and like placing it within like this broader experience economy and then trying to sell that as like something like

ultimately good and valuable. Like the idea of owning something becomes like a monetizable product. It's not just owning, I think, is that that's capitalism, right? You've just... It's not just the ownership of things. I think it's also... It's exchange completely without production as well. Yeah, it's imagining sort of that. It's imagining a version of the economy that exists without producing anything, just people exchanging preferences. Right clicking save as is a form of labor and I'm not going to hear anything. Let's take a look at Paul Allen's Lazy Lion NFT. Oh my God, it's smoking a big joint. It's shimmering.

Oh, the tasteful cowboy hat on it. So in this universe is like the Salt Bay Restaurant, like the dossier. Yeah. So they say you'll be able to hang out with friends, work, play, learn, shop, create and more. Again, describing a fucking kindergarten minus shop. Basically. Please, please stop saying play. It's a... Yeah, that just sounds like you're doing sex stuff in second life. Yeah, not in a good way. It's a mall. It's a mall with a ballpark.

Usually in the Facebook best of us, unlike Second Life, you are not allowed to have sex. No. It's not necessarily about spending more time online. Yes, it is. It's about making the time you do spend online more meaningful. That's such an improving the quality of weight sentence. I can't wait for the UK to invent metaverse dogging. It is a matter of time. So they say here are a few key areas where we'll work with others to anticipate the risks and get it right. Economic opportunity, how we give people more choice, encourage competition to maintain a thriving digital economy. Why? Why? Why? Why? It's easy to say. We sort of agree that well,

material improvement in conditions is basically just beyond what we can handle. So what instead we're going to do is you're going to get a bunch of different soy style products and you're going to be able to buy them in such a way that burns down the last tree. Yeah. Privacy, that's obviously bullshit. Safety and integrity, obviously bullshit. Equity and inclusion, rather than talking about any of the actual threats to equity, to let's say, the actual things that Facebook does to make the world a more sort of unequal and dangerous place for minorities, they were like, are there enough women building the metaverse? You can have an Iron Man seat with your pronouns on it.

I have more women Iron Men. So here's the fun Iron Books. All of this is part of Facebook's, they had a newsroom post that was about how they're spending like $50 million over two years to invest in how to build the metaverse responsibly, right? That's what all of this is tagged to. Which I thought it would be, a lot of private capital outside of Facebook is getting deployed to do this. I thought that Facebook would put more in. I think I suspect what Facebook is doing is waiting for there to be a killer app that actually gets people onto the metaverse and

then spending big money on it because right now they're not, but they you can tell they want to and they're trying to encourage others to. But so here is of the initial partners of Facebook in the metaverse, the first one fucking threw me for a massive loop. Okay, the organization of American States, the people that called the Bolithian collection into question. My I'm not a CIA front group shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my shirt. Yeah. So they're going to, for first thing, they're going to build fucking, I don't know, they're going to build like a virtual Langley, Virginia for these guys to like, you know, if it go to, you could go to school of the Americas, but in VR, basically, we can have

VR Michaels. So in this partnership with like in this little tagline about how they're partnering with the organization of American States, they say it's on job training and skills development, which makes me think is the school of the Americas, which makes me think like, you know, in your guys's recent episode with Paris Marx, he brought up sleep dealer a couple times that movie and I'm like, oh, Facebook is just making sleep dealer into reality with the with the OAS, like that's like you just plug in a bunch of a bunch of really low wage workers in in South America into the metaverse and they can do, you know, real labor in North America without ever having to actually cross the border. So it's like you got British teens doing in gamer and you've got

South Americans doing sleep dealer. Like the metaverse is really shaping up to being a, you know, a thing of our fantasies. Yeah. And then you have like British middle aged, like middle managers doing snow crash. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. This is it's we've taken a bunch of these dystopias and we've filtered them through some of the most embarrassing people in the world, basically. So there's a little more from the from the FT and this is something, another thing I want to highlight, right? They say that many define the metaverse as this collection of shared online worlds, which are interoperable so that users can move through them while carrying with them their digital identities, money and property, meaning again, your private property in this,

again, potentially infinite Siri, an infinite amount of places, an infinite area where there is infinite potential for quote unquote production because things just have to be designed and imagined to exist, right? There is no materiality to it. There nevertheless is going to be identities, money and property, which is this very almost this, this strangely reductive assumption. But then at the same time, there's this very expansive assumption that of the real production that happens of companies, building servers and creating products that people then use, they say, oh no, it's going to be perfectly interoperable. So we've imagined almost no private property on the big important end where there's actual production happening and then

infinite tiny bits of private property on the end of personal experience, which feels very sort of either naive or someone is scamming someone. But the whole thing seems very on its face, like a very stupid idea, right? Like what do you think of the interoperability angle? I mean, I think the interoperability angle is interesting because in reality that only happens in a few very limited ways. Either there's like an international government organization like the ISO steps in and creates a standard that is then enforced on everybody. Or it happens through monopoly or cartels, right? Where it's like Facebook owns all the servers and that makes them interoperable. But you know, they're just owning the back end, right? They're just owning

the infrastructure and you get to build your own world on top of their infrastructure or it's a cartel, right? Or it's like it's like AWS and Alphabet and Facebook have all agreed to go in together to create a shared standard. And so they split the pie, you know, one third each. Like that to me, that that is the only way that this interoperability actually happens in practice. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, right? Like this idea that it's all going to be built on sort of open standards. It seems to me to be fantasism. Yes, right? Like this is going to be the bidding is for being an oligopoly at best, right? And one of the things we talked about with sort of before, right, is that the oligopoly experience escape room in 4D fantasies about

a totally transformed world, whether utopian or dystopian are always power fantasies. And this to me seems like actually a fantasy about the end of the world. It's a fantasy about moving from a primarily material reality into a primarily immaterial one that is being dreamed of most aggressively, you might say, by the tech, by the of the big tech companies, the one that is in the most trouble, basically, you know, on a kind of global scale, these kinds of fantasies intensify as material conditions deteriorate. But on an institutional scale, this kind of fantasy is Facebook saying, we will stem the outflow of our users by being the only place anyone interacts ever, you know, you won't go to you won't go to the club, you'll put on your

you know, cyber helmet, you'll sit on the couch, and then you will imagine dancing with your friends effectively. You will. Yeah, you'll imagine digitally piercing in someone's mouth at the Facebook Digital Club. Yeah, that's right. FaceTime. It feels trite to like constantly refer back to Guy Debord with this stuff, but it really does feel like capitalism is presenting itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles, right? Like we've moved beyond the commodity, we're in a post material, post commodity, post capitalist society, and it's just one based on Baudrillard and Debord. Like this is some real retro, like just in the same way that these ideas are like retro sci fi, like 80s, 90s type shit. So is the social theory and the political economy

underlying it like real retro, but a Baudrillard and Debord. Yeah, this is sort of what I find fascinating about like stuff like this is like some, you know, visions of a way of life, which, you know, they might be unsustainable, like the idea of everyone having a big house and four cars in the suburbs or whatever, but you can see how they're desirable, but the vision of the future where you're going to like the online burghine in your VR helmet and like, you know, getting virtually pissed on or whatever. It's like, it's not a burghine than that. No, there's not. I don't see what's desirable about that. Why wouldn't you just want to go there and get pissed on? Like satisfying no one was only desirable if like the material like alternative

like doesn't exist. And I think that's kind of what these tech companies thought like for all the kind of dumb ideas they come up with, like do recognize is like the truth, like the kind of like central trajectory, right? The idea that ultimately people aren't going to be able to afford like basic material indulgences. So instead, they're sort of like creating virtual simulations of it. And, you know, as, as because it's Facebook and like, you know, Facebook is going back to its origins, which is that it's all about kind of like creating personalized exclusivity. So that means like creating the exclusive, like virtual burghine with the virtual piss where you have to be in the queue, but by being the virtual queue for 10 hours.

I'm not getting laid into virtual burghine. You're wearing all black iron man suit. I've been wasting in the queue for four days to get into the virtual burghine only for virtual Sven to tell me that my, uh, that my skin isn't fashionable enough. Yeah. Virtual Sven who's dressed as Rick from Rick and Morty. But, um, but yeah, like ultimately I think that's kind of like what the sort of like really sinister backdrop to this is. It's like this reality, this, this thing that like tech companies kind of realized where, you know, you know, where like kind of real world is heading towards, they sort of know that it's going to suck and they're just trying to like get in on it early.

And like, and like, I don't, I don't think like the metaverse as it exists with like the weird VR like office is going to be like the dominant form of how it works. I think that's just kind of like one build of it. But I think like the general principle of like face and like Facebook have spent years basically scaling, you know, scaling its like platform and like getting loads and loads of users. It's still like the platform, I think with like the most amount of users of any social media platform. Um, like, so they've spent years trying to get this thing and now they can like seamlessly transition those, uh, those members into this new environment or like force them. Yeah. Or like force them to participate in that environment because like what is the alternative?

Yeah. Capital getting displaced first by geography and then by like time and then finally just out of reality altogether. Right. Well, I think you say what's the alternative? I think mostly what's how people are going to be interacting with this is through the levers of coercion. I think people are going to be coerced into this thing. Um, because, you know, yeah, again, maybe it's fun to go to a concert in fortnight, but what if the, oh, that's not, but if you're, if you're that age, I'm sure you're having a fine time, but is that a replacement for going out of your house is that what if the only version of that is there? What if you have to have a fortnight account and buy fortnight skins and then all of a sudden it's not just enough to have the clothes

you put your body in, you have to have clothes you put your avatar in as well, creating new elements for consumption and new places for production with to happen without production. Right. It is, if anything, it's, it's capital's dream because it allows, because exploitation is potentially infinite, requires no investment and can just be imagined. Right. And, and, and where pure coercion is pure and perfect coercion is possible, because you can just be deleted or kicked off or whatever, simply and on the basis of terms of service that you have no democratic accountability over because you're consuming a product, they come created by a company, but your consumption of that product becomes a precondition to you

living and going to work and doing all these things. We've got to go to the virtual Burkheim Morty. He's called the, he's called the Piskheim Morty. You're going to need to fist me Morty. It's, it's, it's about blending in. So the thing is, the metaverse is these people imagine it, right? This paradise is kind of a mall combined with a zoom call, combined with a ball pen, but my favorite things with the sense of spatiality, but it's a fantasy that the simulacra of activities can replace them, but it's also penguin and you're getting banned for talking about it. Also, it's about this fantasy that like property rather than production, just ownership of things rather than the making of things is central to how the economy works. Cause it's

just the communication of preferences and that production is totally disconnected from the economy that you can reproduce certain elements of our world by imagining this frictionless infinite canvas, which is another metaverse startup, by the way, upon which people can just project their desires and trade them back and forth. And you just skim a little bit of each transaction off that goes to the fundamental characteristic that the many definitions of the metaverse, which are basically a shopping list, by the way, rather than an actual, an attempt to get to the core of what it is. That's why they tend to include that tend to include things like a persistent economy with real world consequences. But why is that necessary? It's because like the

metaverse is about, at least in part, a more perfect version of capital with the exchange of communication and management, but no messy realities of actually having to make anything, actually having to exert ideological power. These virtual worlds aren't really a problem, but like who's the problem is that the people who are building them want to design these strange elements of ideology into them. And they want that to be where people can live. And I'm worried that people are going to be forced to live in them. Yeah. Meet your virtual landlord. He's not going to fix your virtual boiler. Who's making you live and have a hotel, which is also where you work.

Yeah. And next year, the next year, the conservative party conference will be in VR, or like not even next year, but like maybe in a few years, the conservative party conference will be in VR. And we all get to see Laura Koonsburg do a virtual reality rap battle with like, I don't know, some fucking guy who's like, got, oh, fuck, I don't know, like a Peter Griffin avatar. With an AI of Winston Churchill. Here's an example, though, of how, because one of the things that interests me most about this is work, labor, etc. And because some of these metaverse games advertise themselves as being more quote unquote real because they're games without NPCs. What they are is they're games based on crypto, where some players pay others to be

NPCs in their games. Right. So this is the gig economy angle to this, right? Like we always have to ask, like, you know, whether the gig economy, where is the low wage, like hyper precarious piecemeal work and any of these big technological systems and fantasies. And it's like there, that that's, that's where it is, right? Like, like there's no AI anymore. I mean, we all know AI is a fucking like wizard behind the curtain anyways, it's a fantasy. So like why might as well just lean into it and market the fact that, no, this isn't AI, there's no NPCs. These are actual people that you get to boss around, that you get to use to fill out your, your, your dinner, your virtual dinner party or your mystery game or, you know,

you're going to play Clue and you're going to actually get to kill one of these people in real life. It's really fun. So citizens of Decentraland, which is a metaverse game, are constantly using the areas in Decentraland that they buy with real money, using, or rather, they buy the crypto token of Decentraland called mana with real money. They buy plots of land in the game with, with that money. And then they use that to throw concerts, art exhibitions, or have games there that other players can come play. So there's an example where you can build a casino on your plot of land in Decentraland and then hire another player to go be the croupier at that casino and pay them in the cryptocurrency that the whole thing runs on.

You can be paid to be an NPC. Awesome. People will literally be NPCs in, in the metaverse. Right. It's a quite totalitarian vision, right? Because it's who, it's this, it's this controlling of all of this unproductive labor, but then all of this productive labor invisible around it from who builds and maintains the servers, who does the programming, who brings all of the people, all of the liquid slop that they need in order to not get atrophy while they're so plugged in. Right. There are, it's all of these, all of this actual real labor has to go on outside and all of this hyper exploitation happens inside. And it's just a smaller and smaller number of people who actually benefit from it. It's a deeply totalitarian vision, but made sort

of comfy and exciting for, you know, moronic bovine middle managers. Yeah, cool. Basically. Right. Fought to it. It's pretty fun, right? We'll be logging on. Finally, the petty bourgeois are ascendant. They will take their place on the throne. And replace Usain with an NPC. One thing, I mean, even when Zuckerberg talks about it, right? He talks about it in terms of a new workspace for middle manager type people. So he says, oh, it'll transform like the nature of work. He says, what you'll be able to do, and this is in an interview, you'll be able to, with a snap of your fingers, pull up your perfect work station. So anywhere you go, you can walk into a Starbucks, for example, and you can sit down, you'll be drinking your coffee

and then wave your hands and have as many monitors and calls as you want. And that's what work is, to the people who imagine what this is. That's what real work is. That's what you're trying to facilitate doing, doing sort of the minority report computer interface, but for having phone calls about like fucking business. Cool. Yeah, awesome. And doing deals. What I think is actually predicting the deals before they happen. I think it's very funny. He says, and this is really revealing, I think, about one of the other reasons in addition to sort of fantasies about not being or not having elements of your platform decaying. This is another thing that I think Facebook is so interested in it. They say, I think a lot about the computing platforms we have now. This is

Zuckerberg. We have phones that are relatively small and a lot of the time we're spending, we're basically mediating our lives and communications through these small glowing rectangles. And I think that's not how people really are made to interact. We're used to being in a room with people and having a sense of space where if you're sitting to my right, that means I'm also sitting to your left. You have some sense of space in common. When you speak, it's coming from my right. It's not just all coming in the same place in front of me. And he says, no, no, no, we're not meant to have phones. We're meant to be in meetings like this in a boardroom. This is how people are meant to exist with one another. And it's like, that's relatively recent.

That's a recent development. But also it's, it's Mark Zuckerberg saying, oh, what a coincidence. I found out how humans are actually meant to interact with one another. And wouldn't you know it? It's actually all going to be naturally, mind you, has to be channeled through this platform that I'm inventing. It's crazy. What a coincidence. Virtual meets says the interactions that we have will be a lot richer and feel real in the future. Instead of just doing this over a phone call, you'll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch or I'll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch. What is wrong with you? You fucking nerd. No, if you go into someone's house, then you have to go outside. You make it bullied.

Oh yeah, that is true. To be fair, that is true. I bet Mark Zuckerberg gets bullied every time he leaves this house. Oh, if only. Also, it sort of goes against all the research around like meetings and how useless and like, unproductive they are. Right? Why facilitate them? They're useless. This form of having a meeting doesn't do anything for product. There's a lot of extensive research and writing based on this and that the only people who enjoy it are like middle managers and bosses who just like the idea of having like being given a fake job with like a huge sense of authority, which again, it makes sense. Why Facebook of all companies would kind of think that this is a really great way of organizing a society or organizing a community?

It says also a last couple of things before we close out. He actually says the other thing I think is going to be pretty exciting is having meetings. Awesome. So exciting having meetings when I had a sense of space of being in the same room with people. It definitely wasn't more exciting when I could just like not be in the same room with people and not be having to wear like uncomfortable pants and shoes. Yes. Yeah. It's so exciting when I had to wear the uncomfortable pants and shoes. Love it. Even though the avatars aren't as realistic today as they will be in a few years, in a lot of ways, by the way, what they have looks like Habbo Hotel, right? He has basically made Habbo Hotel. It's like shit. But in a lot of ways, it almost feels more real.

Like you have a sense of space and he loves to talk about this, this feeling of realness, sense of space and all of this, right? And he says, but what he's really driving at that's all the stuff that's meant to sort of entice you towards it, even if it's moronic. But he says it's not just enough to create something people like to use. I'll say you certainly can't even manage that. It has to create opportunity and broadly be a positive thing for society in terms of economic opportunity, in terms of being something that socially everyone can participate in. So we're really designing the work that we're doing in the space for those principles from the ground up. This isn't just a product we're building, it needs to be an ecosystem. So the creators we work

with, the developers, they're not just going to need to be able to sustain themselves, hire a lot of folks. And this is something that I hope millions of people will eventually be working in and creating content for, whether it's experiences or spaces or virtual goods, virtual clothing, or doing work to help curate people, to help curate and introduce people to spaces and keep it safe. I just think this is going to be a huge economy. And frankly, I think that it needs to exist. It must. It has to. I'm sorry, there's no alternative to logging on with your Iron Man costume and then getting Facebook advertisements while you try to like do a spreadsheet, because that's the economy of the future. I feel like I feel like Sam, like Samuel Jackson in

Pulp Fiction, like say space one more time, motherfucker, say space one more time. But also it's like, I think that having to monetize people's interactions through sort of meaningless busy work is actually a kind of acknowledgement that that's was never really that valuable, because in order to actually get value out of it, capital has to show you ads while you do it, which basically means it has to be, it sort of counts as leisure time as opposed to productive time, because you don't actually have to be focused on it. You just have to be sort of sitting there for eight hours a day, right? That it's all sort of merging into a kind of fun where you being at work in your spreadsheet factory, or you being at the dance club,

or you going to the mall as Captain America the whole time, you're just sitting on your couch through all of it. Like it's just sort of an illusion, right? And I think that critique doesn't mean that I don't value inner life. It means I think I understand when I'm being lied to. I understand when I'm being hosed effectively, right? So anyway, I'll I'll see we're going along. So I'll I'll wrap it. Anyway, we're gonna wrap it like like a freestyle rap. Go for it, Riley. Hit the mic. Are you here to say something in a major way? No, I'm not. What I am here to say is thank you so much to Jason for coming on today and hanging out with us. Of course, always a pleasure. You are always invited to come and continue to improve your

lounge access and to recommend everyone once again to listen to this machine kills. One of the two technology podcasts that is very smart about it. It's that one and tech won't save us. So check those out. Yeah, this machine does not suck you off. This machine does not suck you off. Crucially, don't try right. I'll tell you it's not going to be good for you. No, don't put your dick in there. We don't have the metaverse yet. So yeah, that's right. But and also to remind everybody, we have a Patreon. It's $5 a month. You can subscribe to it to get a second episode every week. You can subscribe to it. That's true. And finally, should you? I don't know. Award the Trash Future podcast, Donkey of the Week Award to Ginko Bioworks for being another

soft bankback boondoggle that appears to be potentially unraveling at the seams. They will live on in the metaverse. That's right. So with all that being said, thank you very much, Jaython again. Thank you very much all the listeners to my co-hosts. And we'll see you in the premium on a couple of days. Bye.