The Metaverse is not a 3D Shopping Mall!

What is the fundamental change that the crypto-sphere proposes that economists, bankers, governments, corporations, and FUDers do not fully understand?

About 40 years ago I was presented with this situation to reason about a management problem at the university. It turns out that in a coal mine a foreman forgot to keep a huge hose that pumped water into the mine at night. An inexperienced supervisor saw the hose in the morning and immediately notified the authorities at the headquarters in the big city. "There is a huge animal entering the mine, I need immediate instructions to proceed"

The executive in charge at the office, not knowing what to answer, summoned a series of "experts" to show them the photos received from the field of operations. The first “expert” said that it was an elephant that had entered the mine and was trying to get out with its trunk first, and that it was going to cause “great damage to the facilities”.

The second "expert" said that it was actually a huge snake that was typical of that place and that it was entering the mine to cause "great damage to the facilities".

The third "expert", well known for his great "creativity" to solve problems, said that it was an alien being with a cylindrical shape and that it was probably preparing the ground for a massive invasion of Earth, based on that mine, and that by, of course, it would cause "great damage to the facilities."

The fourth "expert" said that all those things were hoaxes, in reality, the object was a robot-spy-nuclear bomb skillfully installed by communist terrorists who were trying to make disappear the mine that represented the western industrial machine, and that surely it was going to cause “great damage to the facilities”.

The fifth and last "expert", probably influenced by recent events of public knowledge, said that it could be a variant of Covid19, a kind of quasi-anthropological mutation of the virus that threatened not only to “cause great damage to facilities” but also with starting a new possible plandemic.

Words more, words less, what we hear daily from the mouths of scholars who teach us about economics, politics, health, and international relations (possible sources of war), through the four news networks that are the owners of all the media misinformation of the world, closely resemble the situation described in the management problem above.

But the problem is magnified in the cryptosphere, as humanity has found a new class of assets never known before, that alters the status quo so much that it makes the bullshit trumpeted by scholars multiply a hundredfold.

The "new asset class" is not cryptocurrencies or their natural evolution, NFTs, but the concept of eliminating the middleman.

Until about two weeks ago, the word "Metaverse" was wielded by a handful of virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence enthusiasts. But since this boy Zuckerberg renamed his company, even my grandmother today talks about the Metaverse with her friends. (In Argentina the word Metaverso has a very bad, derogatory connotation, applicable to a “big lie”, so probably it will be necessary to think of a substitute word).

The Metaverse concept is so gigantic that, given the impossibility of finding profound explanations for the magnitude of the change that is coming, what is being done is an evaluation with the tools of the past, projecting them into the future with an evident consumerist vision. That is to say, what is usually called "gatopardism": that everything changes so that nothing changes.

The news is not good for these babblers. The Metaverse is not a 3D Shopping Mall. Still, big brands are buying land on The Sandbox and similar platforms, because their marketing managers recommend that, for something called FOMO. But there is no difference between buying from today's eBay and one that shows the canned food tin can in 3D. It is almost a mockery of the "new asset class" concept.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors

What is happening is one of those things that happens every 1,000 or 2,000 years. Humanity has created a form of consciousness that replaces trips to Mars and/or the deep ocean. Instead of colonizing these spaces with a spectacular expenditure of resources, some nerds were able to create an interconnected network of relatively cheap computers, which use relatively expensive energy at the moment, a situation that can be solved very quickly. Instead of embarking on breathing with artificial mechanisms in the afterlife, we continue to breathe as always, but with a unique perspective of forever freeing ourselves from intermediaries.

Thinking of intermediaries, one thinks of a fat man that allows us to pass or not to a train station. But no, the intermediaries are corporations, governments (their puppets), and international organizations that legislate for corporations to legally prey.

Cryptocurrencies will soon be an anecdote. They served to show that there is a concrete possibility of "short-circuiting" the establishment. In fact, in anarchy, money is not necessary. First, they laughed, then they got scared, now they try to ban them, and tomorrow they will try to get on the bandwagon. The indicators are lapidary, the growth of the acceptance of cryptocurrencies, and the insane values ??of crazy capital in DeFi, showed them that they are in a chess ZugsWang and that the only possibility they have is to get on the boat, although they know that little they will be able to do to handle it.

Can you imagine what a world will be like without intermediaries?

1) Musicians will be owners of their works and will be able to record and sell them directly to their fans without having to go through killer production companies and representatives.

2) Film directors will be able to obtain capital for their projects without going through parasitic mechanisms. They will be able to film and save their works on a blockchain. Those who want to see the films are going to pay the directors and the artists directly. Nobody is going to be able to parasitize and keep a part of the work.

3) The two previous points can be applied to practically all artistic expressions, literature, plastic arts, photography, etc.

4) We are going to buy food from small local producers, rather than large supermarkets, largely eliminating the need for logistics, transportation, producer, and distribution corporations. That means cutting out the middlemen. (Remarkably this is happening more and more in many places on the planet). The agricultural producers will work for themselves and not for the huge corporations that own the land, the production, and the massive distribution of food. Those are the middlemen.

5) We will never again consume the news of four corporations that handle the humor of all the citizens of the planet to their liking, according to corporate needs. A plandemic will never again be able to organize itself. The news will be produced by independent journalists and dumped on the blockchain without censorship and without premises. This alone already represents a monumental step for humanity that never ever in its entire history could live with freedom of the press anywhere in the world.

6) Little by little, the industrial infrastructure created in the last two hundred years will be reconfigured, sold as "progress" and flawed with defects and inefficiencies that become clear when global unemployment is analyzed, a product of this system that only benefits a small elite. There will be more trains than cars, and more ships than planes. The distributed computer network has rendered business travel useless. The pleasure trips will be financed by the interested parties, building their means and transport infrastructure. We do not need any intermediary. Only factories that know how to make that means. These factories will be more like artisan workshops than frenzied robots that make thousands of products per minute. The guitars of the musicians and the cameras of the film directors will be constructed in this way.

7) We will generate our own energy. We are very close to this. What is the use of mega engineering works such as dams and nuclear power plants, if each household unit can manufacture its own energy and, if necessary, transport it to the surroundings at practically no cost? Factories will no longer be large consumers of energy.

8) The clothes, the footwear, the carrot cutters will be manufactured by ourselves and they can never be sold again for a "call now!"

9) There will continue to be face-to-face events, that is, band recitals, symphonies, theater, sporting events, and of course, sex. But all these activities will be possible thanks to a direct interaction between the players and their fans. Nobody in the middle.

I certainly hope to spark the debate.

What Satoshi Nakamoto launched, then Ethereum's EVM blockchain solutions perfected, then the NFT revolution performed, and now the Metaverse is promising,  was, nothing more and nothing less, a line of thought that until now no one had seen as possible: the elimination of the intermediary. Impressed in the furious and anguishing day-to-day life of capitalist industrial society, no one imagined before that what had to be defused was the bomb of intermediation.

That is the Metaverse. Not a 3d Shopping Mall where Amazon can build a voxeled image of a pair of Nike shoes for someone to examine it from his/her tablet. Or in any case, it is also that, but the concept of Metaverso goes far beyond consumption for its own sake, as capitalist society has proposed to us in the last two hundred years.

Satoshi Nakamoto is going to be remembered less for the invention of Bitcoin than for the revolutionary concept of eliminating the middle man.

By eliminating the concept of the intermediary, humanity will face in the coming decades the dismantling of mass production and unbridled consumption, eliminating an immense infrastructure to support this mass production, basically the logistics infrastructure and its financing.

If you don't believe that, look at how the inhabitants of the planet NFT are producing their own income today, even though this ecosystem or metaverse is just in its sweetest birth. That is to say, there is already today and now an enormous derivation of wealth from the traditional apparatus towards a series of artist cyberpunks who had never before had a chance to generate wealth with their work. The world didn't even know they existed.

This is a Metaverse.

Let us not forget that revolutions are a process and not a specific event and that this is just beginning.

As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research.

Thank you for reading!

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