The Metaverse, 2030: A Boring Virtual Future Averted by Inspired Entrepreneurs and Artists

Metaverse, Metahype, Metafun—maybe all three, or even none? As of 2023, there were three billion gamers in the world. Among these, the gaming platform Roblox had nearly 55 million average daily users. Some gamers wanted to help solve real-world challenges, and a game developer could become a well-known futurist by addressing challenges with a global impact. However, instead of focusing on the whole picture, these initiatives concentrated on existential risks and remained “boringly” focused on climate change, financial crises, and other issues.Then, when Facebook rebranded as part of Meta Platforms, Inc., in October 2021, it made clear that we would henceforth need to live with the “metaverse.” Stemming from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which the Metaverse was an urban virtual environment with avatars as inhabitants, it was praised as the successor to the Internet. Like an overarching architectural concept with a network of subsystems (or subverses), the Metaverse (Fig. 1) was implemented on several competing or coexisting private/business platforms.The XR (mixed reality) Metaverse community, combining virtual reality and augmented reality, involved fascinating people and was leading to collective intelligence, triggering the collective imagination. Millions of users entered a virtual world for playing, employment, and relationship-making: The online world was a “reality.”Seven years ago, in 2023, nobody really knew what the Metaverse would be like. Some said that the Metaverse was the next step toward an immersive experience of the Internet. The gaming sector was already larger than the movie and music sector, with more than three billion users. Web3 espoused decentralization and interoperability, and a full version of the Metaverse was developed to encompass daily activities such as socializing, commerce, fitness, and learning. Naturally the online existence reduced physically shared experiences, and public space lost some of its functions.The offline world was almost entirely based on local life, with trash and waste banned forever. A global monetary dislocation occurred, and intellectual property rights died by themselves. Space cooperation proved to be a new model, and a new logic of competition spread throughout various ecosystems. Self-management gained even more importance, and work/life balance became part of general well-being. People did not travel as much, simply because the virtual world had become a complement to real life, with the creation of entire new virtual cities.Whereas the modern Metaverse concept was first promoted in the United States and Europe, it rapidly received global hype. Centuries ago, Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi had dreamt he was a butterfly … or a butterfly dreamt he was Zhuangzi. Digital development patterns in Asia focused in particular on applications, whereas the Americas and Europe targeted the infrastructure level.Artists became creative explorers for the future Metaverse, which also challenged some features of humans as multisensorial interbeings. The neurons in our brain, as well as cells throughout the body, were able to integrate additional representations of digital worlds alongside our physical world. Space and time shrank through various beta concepts of teleportation. Over the years, incorporated hybrid functioning became part of human existence.Mark Zuckerberg was not our style of hero, which rather favors communities of inspired businesspeople and artists—even if he claimed that his Metaverse was about “helping people experience a much stronger sense of presence with the people they care about, the people they work with, and the places they want to be.” Right at that point, we said goodbye to the Facebook/Meta monoculture and engaged in a new way of looking at life, business, and Metaverse(s!).Imagine that the Metaverse became something other than an extension of American and Chinese mass market cultures, connecting physical and virtual worlds to create new spaces for overlapping private and business contexts. What if the Metaverse contributed something to us as biological humans, sometimes out of contemplation or boredom?Or suppose the Metaverse accelerated the ongoing shift from static individualism toward dynamic communitarianism, as a new version of tribal culture—interweaving culture, environment, and wellness. Could this have led to the proliferation of communities following fractal patterns, some of them crystallizing at a higher level of consciousness? Imagine conversations hosted by avatar communities of practice having a critical impact on what was happening in the world. What if these conversations contributed toward shifting our global energy and consciousness from simply searching on the Internet to deep immersive presence and relationships (Fig. 2)?Or imagine that the immersive, experienceable character of the Metaverse had a critical impact on education, and on the health and environment sectors; that digital technologies, and in particular AI, modified our connection to the nonhuman world and helped us in changing our auto-centric and patriarchal worldview.Suppose that such experiences helped us to rethink our relations to other humans, other beings, and matter beyond reflexivity. The Metaverse then did not narrow our perceptions and self-reflexivity. Could you have imagined that the world of poiesis as creative self-realization opened to us the world of our feelings, our social bonds, and everything that we meaningfully experience as a path from Enlightenment toward “Enlivenment”?What if a new school of philosophical thought appeared, linked to the emergence of human digital twins? Or a spectrum of collective fears of “no-community” spaces created by the big platforms in a context where nation-states were losing their substance? If these no-rules spaces were rather cocreated by on-the-ground, innumerable, fractal initiatives in a fragmented world?Most of us did not want the Metaverse to become a world, parallel to the “real” world, going backward toward social isolation and weakening ethical or ontological agency. We were able to cope with increasing political and ontological fakery, surveillance, and politically influenced capitalism. Scattered attention, mindless browsing, and states of disembodiment—perceiving others in “bits and pieces”—as induced by many digital environments, were not an inescapable destiny.Enlightened entrepreneurs, who were totally different from the big platform thinkers, were the architects of the Metaverse. They developed effective antennas in a fragmented world in which big companies started to scale down. They took the Metaverse paradigm as an opportunity to update the concept of strategic industries and self-sufficiency. Beyond a pure data economy perspective, business ideas were linked to creative commons and communities of practice rather than maximization of profit.The concept of “warm data”—contextual and relational information about complex systems—complemented “cold data” linked to a purely linear approach. Employee well-being, education, and engaging “brains instead of brawn” became the new workplace imperative, and a substantial value of Metaverse applications lay in the entrepreneurial context.Uniqueness of people and place became a key factor for interrelating with the Metaverse—community by community, bioregion by bioregion. Fluid entrepreneurs became interconnected, reenacting the concept of digital tribes and pan-connected nomadism, building on self-management and empathy. Regeneration flourished and even sidelined sustainability.Beyond the mania for XR headsets, 6G, quantum connectivity, and virtual assets/digital wallets, the new Metaverse business approach included the orchestration of various ecosystems, including the workforce, functioning in a fluid, organic (biological), unpredictable way, with humans no longer viewed as consumers but responsible and committed citizens forming part of complex societies’ experience between offline and online worlds, as the future was mixed reality.The Metaverse happened at the intersection of five fields of activity and technology, where fluid entrepreneurs became active and demonstrated their ability to: provide a well-designed interface and user experience between offline and online worlds for a mixed reality futurefulfill the expectation of hundreds of millions of active users to share and receive an emotional and empathic delivery of content and servicesbe resourceful in light of environmental challenges requiring that, even given fusion and solar energies, power consumption for Web3/virtual assets be considered seriouslyprovide a multisensory experience for humans in the context of a hybrid competition at the physical-digital intersectionconsider the worldwide population of billions of people in addition to other nonhuman lifeforms such as robots, animals, and plants.Artists were the other architects of the Metaverse, even though, for years, leaders had remained unaware of how artists were key in making sense of the unfolding future, not only in terms of coming up with meaningful proposals but also in avoiding tasteless ones such as pointless VR landscapes, kitschy animations, or questionable games. Whereas in the real world, creation was impacted by many constraints such as physical conditions or regulation by governments, the Metaverse appeared as a space or realm with infinite configurations.Artists triggered conversations on what was to be done, thus shaping what it is possible to do. They did the job firsthand in an experimental approach, as, over the past twenty centuries, they had been the creators of rich aesthetic worlds almost everywhere on the Planet. They created verses, poems, and novels, and made beautiful proposals about bodies and humans moving and dancing in space. Their imagination was connected to a “meta-world,” drawing inspiration from the invisible or untouchable. Artists also helped end a growing disconnection with nature, a diminished use of the senses, and higher rates of emotional and physical illness.While the Metaverse offered new opportunities for creators and users to engage and experience, Web3 heralded a new, decentralized ecosystem including all kinds of block-chains, in which users began to own, monetize, and utilize their data for their own benefit, and creators could monetize their content and talents in different ways.In addition, artists introduced a decision filter for companies’ involvement in the Metaverse to augment and elevate human experience to: build a people-first experience, always considering the needs of people; and to shift from social to societal, emphasizing relationships between people, places, and brandsensure people are not disconnected from physical realitymake accessibility and inclusivity a feature, andreduce physical and mental friction to ensure we engage with each other in a more human way across worlds.Artists promoted safe spaces and intuitive worldviews rather than a modernist (aka logical and rational) one. They pushed toward organic patterns and acceptance of transience and imperfection.In the Metaverse, artists expanded the sense of possibility, making us see that what is not there matters as much as what is there. They helped us in looking at organic design, inviting us into the blurred areas of the unknown. We started to become comfortable with ambiguity, and beauty became a dynamic, perfectly imperfect event occurring between us and other beings and things.Far removed from ancient Greece, where metaphysics was commonly understood as the science of what is beyond the physical, meta was later extended to other contexts as an understanding of beyond. Later still, when artists and fluid entrepreneurs stepped in, the Metaverse started to allow free movement between virtual and physical worlds, expanding our range of experiences.We were good at finding our way in complex and messy worlds. “Virtuality” had become a “reality,” and new time horizons had extended our appreciation of existence. In the end, the Metaverse had much to do with harnessing the necessary wisdom and spirituality to find our way in our complex world. We just needed to package it in a way that connected us with all.