In case you hadn’t heard, the metaverse is coming. Maybe Facebook will build part of it. Maybe it’s already here, in the form of video games such as Fortnite, digital collectibles known as non-fungible tokens and even cryptocurrencies. Maybe there will be more than one metaverse; maybe there won’t ever really be any. It’s all a bit unclear.
What is clear, however, is that we are meant to think of this amorphous metaverse as a place of infinite wonder and possibility. It is envisaged by techno-utopians as an interconnected web of virtual worlds in which our “digital twins” can wander about buying virtual art, attending virtual gigs and having virtual relationships.
“The metaverse is the new land of opportunities,” crypto investor Vignesh Sundaresan (known by his crypto name MetaKovan and for spending $69m on an NFT by the artist Beeple earlier this year) told a panel last week. “It’s not about the commerce behind it, but having a place where people from different parts of the world can . . . have an opportunity for prosperity.”