The Metaverse: Utopia or Dystopia?
Metaliv.es will probably have to move to Substack. - Will the Metaverse be utopia or dystopia?
Dear Avatars,
Before we talk about the Metaverse, we have to talk about Elon Musk: Revue - the service with which this Metaliv.es issue was sent - is probably up for disposal and to be closed as early as the end of the year.
To be on the safe side, we have already created an alternative at Substack and are asking you for an additional subscription at: Metalives.Substack.com
Inside Twitter’s product roadmap under Musk — www.platformer.news
A new Vine camera is in. Notes and Revue are out.
What you can learn here once again: Don't trust a single central platform! And that unfortunately also applies to Twitter - and the Metaverse to come.
For this reason, we continue to rely on our own Mastodon instance and only in parallel on LinkedIn and Twitter, even though the user figures are of course exactly the other way round, even if Mastodon is growing faster in the meantime...
Decentralized social network Mastodon grows to 655K users in wake of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover • TechCrunch — techcrunch.com Open source, decentralized social network Mastodon has been benefiting from the chaotic Twitter takeover by Elon Musk.
Utopia or Dystopia?
A majority on Twitter and a huge majority on LinkedIn expect positive and negative developments in the Metaverse: However, 25.7% expect a dystopia on Twitter - but only 7% on LinkedIn.
Louis Rosenberg has soundly pointed out the challenges we are likely to face with his important guest contribution in VentureBeat:
Mind control: The metaverse may be the ultimate tool of persuasion | VentureBeat — venturebeat.com In an unregulated metaverse, a controlling force with deep knowledge of users can use feedback loops to drive them toward a desired goal.
As a reminder and in a very abbreviated form, the consequences of the previous 2dimensional new media, which were certainly immersive for their time but difficult to compare with the effect of VR, AR, MR:
Gutenberg's book printing and the mass dissemination of ideas divided the Catholic Church, by far the most powerful organisation at the time, and plunged Europe into wars for centuries.
Cinema, radio, newspaper were elementary instruments for controlling the masses through modern ideologies in the early twentieth century - along with their machinery of destruction.
Can you go a little smaller? Hopefully, but completely new media have always had and will probably have massive impacts on people, their thoughts, opinions and ultimately their behaviour until they have been able to adapt to them in the long term.
What's News?
Ready Player Me launches API for avatar interoperability | VentureBeat — venturebeat.com Ready Player Me has launched its Avatar API that improve interoperability for cross-game avatars so they can roam the metaverse.
NVIDIA Omniverse: The Useful Metaverse — www.forbes.com The Value of Digital Twins creates a comprehensive and photo-realistic design platform The technology is finally reaching critical mass of users, connections, and applications where people around the world are doing real work in the un-real world.
How democratizing the metaverse will drive its growth | VentureBeat — venturebeat.com Miami-based Mozverse is helping companies establish a presence, create digital asset marketplaces and launch virtual worlds in the metaverse.
Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’ Has Somehow Lost 100,000 Players In Eight Months — www.forbes.com A new report from the Wall Street Journal says that Horizon World’s, Meta’s flagship VR social app now has 200,000 monthly users, according to internal documents, a drop from 300,000, the last public figures Meta shared back in February 2022.
Meta Myths – Stratechery by Ben Thompson — stratechery.com Meta deserves a bit of a discount off of its recent highs, but a number of myths about its business have caused the market to over-react.
Join the Metaver.se!
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PPS: Actually, we are in the Fediverse on Mastodon, Metaverse-ly decentralised and interoperable: Metaver.se
PPPS: Sooner or later we will expand our presence on TikTok audio-visually, but don’t forget to join us right now: MTVRS.TV