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Transit is the non-fictional place where normality, dystopia and utopia can manifest themselves in a standard, chaotic or fantastic way and the Metaverse, as a new place, could function as the new way of locomotion of (virtual) vehicles: cryptos, avatars, NFTs, et cetera. The rules will be like the universal rulebooks of real entities, but what will define their operation, above all things, will be the idiosyncrasy that governs it. The rules of the road are almost identical in almost all countries, but in Switzerland they don’t drive the same as in India, nor are the laws respected in Vientiane and Lake Placid in the same way.
The rules rule, they are known, they are accepted, they are respected, and they are enforced. This is what happens in the reality that tends towards utopia. On the contrary, in the realities that tend towards dystopia, the rules can be known, but they are not accepted, respected, or enforced. Argentina tends to fall from this last side of dystopian history, and as far as traffic is concerned, the rankings usually place it in the first positions of deaths due to accidents on the roads and streets, road insecurity, poor traffic flow and their metropolis among the worst cities to drive.
Speed limits are not respected, traffic lights are usually theatrical decorations. A steady red light does not mean STOP, and a steady yellow light means ‘Speed up not to stop’. Lastly, the solid green light symbolizes ‘Full speed ahead’. The vast majority of drivers also appear color blind to traffic sign colors, and pavement markings represent indecipherable squiggles, lanes, intersections and turns are optionable for the faint of mind.
Highway driving is the star extreme sport of the vehicular X Games. One of the most extraordinary performances usually happens when a driver passes an exit, stops, and always backs up on the highway to get back on track. Nor does the right of way govern, nor is there security and courtesy. “You must always yield to pedestrians,” Minga!+ Will be heard with Borgean prose and Italian temperament. Lastly, the passing rule serves the same function as toilet paper in a bathroom.*
In the concrete jungle of the Rio de la Plata Occidental Side, aggressive drivers who get in the way of other vehicles are in command; they exceed the speed limit; change lanes without signaling; drive near another vehicle; they do not respect when the traffic light is red; they prevent other drivers from passing them. And even if a few docile machine guides try to get out of the way of aggressive drivers, without defying or looking at them and ignoring the rude gestures, fatalities and accidents of this traffic dystopia, doesn’t seem to diminish.
The culture of the breakdown lane (drive thru there as fast as you can and as much as you want) and the anomalous idiosyncrasy of the driving group drive reality. The local concrete universe is governed by anomie and as a Latin American paradox or like the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this is how the virtual and fictitious Metaverse would be if confusion, disorder, muddle, chaos, anarchy and illegality dominate it.
How would be ruled the Metaverse? What ‘political system’ will reign? Could capitalism be the only system functioning in there? New socialisms can evolve and resurge? Will direct vote be tested there to eliminate Parliaments? Pure democracy, without legislative representatives as proxies, could exist? Which human idiosyncrasies will permeate to every corner of the Metaverse?
Like everything that is unstructured, options are almost endless. The individual pieces of the Argentine idiosyncrasy may seem like a successful formula for chaos, but it will be necessary to see how they coexist simultaneously with the others idiosyncrasies, in and for the same space. Something that does not happen in real reality!
- Welcome to MassachusettsRules of the Road
- Not in any way. / Interj. It expresses denial, lack or absence of something. (From the Milanese
