Sarah Morgan
If you moved from arcade games to floppy disks, from the NES to the XBox, from the Game Boy to the Switch…. it means it’s time for your calcium supplement. But also, it means you don’t need to fear the metaverse.
Because you already know how this goes.
Everyone alive today – but, I’d argue, particularly those like me in the “Oregon Trail Generation” – has been through the evolution of an increasingly immersive digital world.
Technology evolves and we (most of us) evolve with it.
As a comparison: If you’re my age, you had a rotary “house phone” with a dial and a curly cord. Maybe then you had a rectangular, push-button phone in your very own bedroom (still with a curly cord). Then, “the cordless” – a phone with an expandable antenna. Eventually, your own phones which, amazingly, fit into your pocket. Maybe they let you play Snake, or send T9 text messages (each one of which you were charged for), or even had a keyboard, or apps. Now, you have a device so capable that, while it still has the name “phone,” actual voice calls are probably one of the least frequent ways in which you use it. Each step, at the time, felt awe-inspiringly high-tech.
The immersivity of the metaverse, right now, is being called out as if that aspect of it is more unrelated from the rest of our technological evolution than I think it is. But I think forecasting always struggles with scope and language.
I’ve done a lot of musing on the future of tech. Search the archives and have fun. Specifically, check out my post, “Uncanny,” from Dec. 2018, this one from 2003 on “Oregon Trail”, or my master’s thesis.
Today, when we consider the metaverse, we’re writing a story that’s set in the future. But whether it’s “Star Trek” or “Back to the Future,” those stories usually get some things kind of right, and a lot of things pretty wrong.
Humans aren’t great at remembering the past very accurately – either as individuals or as societies. Yet we still trying to keep imagining the future. Perhaps it’s more fun: there’s no way to know yet if you’re wrong.
Right now, the metaverse is in its eight-bit phase. But folks are trying to tell you what it’s going to look like ten or fifty or a hundred iterations from now. We’re playing Pac-Man while they’re insisting they know what the PlayStation 5 will be like. We’re using a see-through push-button Conair phone and they’re trying to imagine the iPhone 14. It’s a lot of fun to imagine, but taking it too seriously might be like getting mad that your Roomba doesn’t look like the Jetsons’ Rosie Robot.
You won’t have to wait nearly as long as we once did. Iterations are coming faster and faster. To go back to the phone comparison, consider that it took from 1876 to 1963 to get from the invention of the telephone to the first push-button telephone, then until 1994 to get the first smartphone. As long as we’ve been a species, our technological snowball has been rolling downhill – very slowly at first, gaining speed as the millennia pass. (Whether it will eventually reach a maximum velocity is an interesting question for another post.)
(Sidebar: I read “Sapiens: A Graphic History” and I now know that I don’t really mean “as long as we’ve been a species” – I mean “since the cognitive revolution, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago.” SO GOOD. READ IT.)
Anyway, the point is: we don’t have to kick back for 40 years to find out what the metaverse will grow into. It’ll be interesting to see if we’ll even use that word in five years! Right now, we need to keep daydreaming – keep remembering how much we don’t know yet – and keep calm.
Also, keep taking those calcium supplements.
