There ain’t such thing as the metaverse

One of the few bragging rights that we have here at Llama Towers is that this blog has gained a reputation as a place where new legal issues get a discussion before they hit the academic mainstream. Virtual worlds, open source, software patents, cryptocurrencies, blockchains, AI, and NFTs, all have gotten a discussion well before they became buzzwords. And not just any technology gets a look-in, there are a few fads that never caught my eye: 3D printing, smart cities, the Internet of Things, just to name a few. My disinterest perhaps proved to be justified.

I’m sitting on the fence about the latest buzzword, the metaverse. I’m a bit conflicted about whether to put it in my list of topics that have no future.

Why am I conflicted? I’ve been writing about gaming and virtual worlds for years, and somehow this has made me an early expert in what people call the metaverse. And yes, I’ve been writing about that very same topic recently in this blog, and I have been invited to speak about it in several workshops and conferences. Yet the more I look into it, the less impressed I am that there is anything requiring a detailed legal scrutiny, and on the contrary, I’m tempted to start actively canvassing against it. So in many ways I’m arguing against my own relevance in a subject that is gaining a lot of interest.

But career advancement has never been my forte, so here it goes.

The main problem is of course that we don’t really know what the metaverse actually is. There are conflicting definitions, with anything from text-based MUDs to VR environments being defined as part of the metaverse. I was recently watching an episode of the documentary series called “Engineering the Future” dedicated to the metaverse, and it soon became clear that the documentary was not sure about what the metaverse was either. It begins covering Roblox, which it described as “immersive virtual spaces where people can play and interact with one another”, but if you take that to meet the definition of the metaverse, then so does World of Warcraft. The documentary moves to some cool and flashy 3D scanning technology used to digitise real places and objects, but that also felt off. The documentary ends with virtual reality, haptics, and sensory input suits. Pretty nice stuff, but not what one could describe as the metaverse that everyone is talking about.

So what is the metaverse? What if I told you that it doesn’t really exist, and it’s just a marketing ploy? After all, most of what is being described as the metaverse has been in existence for a while, so we don’t really need a new concept that nobody can agree on. We have indeed been here before, virtual reality headsets were already available in the 90s, and we experienced a bit of hype in the shape of cyberpunk novels and movies, but the technology was not ready yet, or so we were told. Then we had the virtual worlds hype of 2006-2009, where Second Life was presented as the future of the Internet, and we all know how that ended. Similar hype-cycles have come and gone, particularly blockchain gaming and Web3, so the metaverse feels very similar to all of that.

One thing that is making me even more sceptical of the metaverse is that we have seen real technological revolutions on the meantime, and the speed with which they are adopted are often forgotten after the fact. Remember the meteoric rise of the smart phone, social media, the iPod, and the gig economy, and contrast it with the complete lack of user interest for the metaverse. Moreover, we are currently undergoing a real revolution in the shape of creative AI, and the contrast with tools that nobody wants to use couldn’t be more stark. Meta is spending billions in a niche technology with no proven track record, and on the contrary, there’s evidence that people do not want VR. We were trapped indoors for months in 2020, and if VR didn’t take-off then, then I don’t know how it will.

Let’s assume that VR will remain a niche interest, what then is left for the metaverse? Many have pointed towards Web3 as a possible metaverse, but that doesn’t track with reality either. Leaving aside the fact that crypto is undergoing a downturn, most Web3 sites like Decentraland are ghost towns, the injection of blockchain to 3D interactive spaces makes everything slow and clunky.

Nonetheless, there’s lots of money riding on people adopting this nebulous concept. From Meta to a constellation of Web3 startups and wannabes, so we seem to be stuck with this for now, and my calls for it to die will fall on deaf ears.

I’ll leave you for now, I have to prepare another metaverse law presentation in which I tell people that there’s no metaverse.