i feel like we don't talk enough about how most metaverse science fiction stories are set in dystopias this video is sponsored by brilliant hey all welcome back to my channel today we are talking about a topic that i have been trying to untangle for a few weeks now and ended up falling down a research rabbit hole on so that is why this video is up on a tuesday instead of on a monday and that topic is of course the metaverse in fact if you want to know that i've fallen down a research rabbit hole you should subscribe and turn on your post notifications you've probably heard a lot about it lately due to facebook's recent rebrand but it turns out that there is a lot to unpack here for one what do we even mean when we talk about the metaverse somewhat unsurprisingly we don't have a very consistent definition for what the metaverse is so depending on who you ask it can be anything from high-tech NUMBER_TOKENd renderings of immersive virtual worlds to virtual spaces where you can interact with people that you just can't interact with physically the best definition that i could find was actually a set of attributes essentially from the verge which described the metaverse as digital platforms that have some of the following characteristics so features that overlap with either real world activities or older web services real-time NUMBER_TOKENd computer graphics and personalized avatars a variety of person-to-person social interactions that are not necessarily competitive or goal oriented in the way that stereotypical video games might be support for users creating their own virtual items and environments links with outside economic systems so that people can profit from virtual goods and then designs that are well suited towards virtual and augmented reality systems even if they support other things too interestingly the term the metaverse actually originates from neil stephenson's book snow crash which came out in NUMBER_TOKEN and there's a lot of interesting metaphors in this book it's set in the NUMBER_TOKENst century where the federal government has ceded power to entrepreneurs and private corporations and where rampant hyperinflation in the us has pushed people toward digital currencies i.e cryptocurrencies on top of that global economic turmoil has forced certain populations to migrate from their home countries towards other countries that may not want them there so nothing like what's happening right now now if you're my age ready player NUMBER_TOKEN which came out i believe in NUMBER_TOKEN was probably your first introduction to the metaverse and if you're younger than me something like hank green's second book in his sci-fi series a beautifully foolish endeavor may have been how you kind of came across the idea but when you think about the broadest definitions of the term the metaverse we've had that for a while so thinking back all the way to aol instant messenger which is before my time and more recently a lot of examples of mmorpgs so massive multiplayer online role-playing games things like second life world of warcraft sims club penguin neopets wait were neopets the original nfts hold on i might have just broken my brain anyway if we're talking about digital spaces where you can interact with people that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do in real life physically because of geographic reasons or if we're talking about immersive digital spaces a lot of these things we already have in fact the more recent
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