The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
Folding Ideas
0:00 I got another big idea let's get AMC to put a theater in Decentraland!
0:05 What if they not only got into online in a big way but still
0:09 kept the spirit of physically going
0:10 to the theaters and hanging out with friends.
0:12 They can sell tickets that you can buy using Mana.
0:16 Users would be able to walk to a pizza
0:17 kiosk and order a pizza and then go to theater
0:19 and hangout with their friends and watch a movie
0:22 together all without leaving their house and the game!
0:24 Edit: It's happening someone built a theater yo AMC where you at you don't
0:28 want to miss this opportunity [high intensity music] Man when I walked in it
0:32 blew my mind something was playing I watched it for at least 5 minuets
0:35 sound and video was clear as fuck Checked it out and it blew me away.
0:38 This is absolutely sick!
0:39 Who owns it?
0:40 This will be awesome once VR is integrated and you can do screen
0:41 sharing with a group of friends so it’ll be like watching the movie together.
0:42 I could even see decentraland movie gift cards being sold at the super
0:49 market in the area where all those gift cards are located.
0:56 That’d be so cool I wish could take all
1:01 my bitcoin and live inside this world Dope asf!
1:05 Clap clap clap clap clap clap thumbs up ok high
1:27 five one hundred one hundred What you’re looking at is Decentraland.
1:40 Conceived by Argentine developers Esteban Ordano and Ari Meilich
1:43 as a virtual reality world for unconstrained markets and presently
1:47 advertising itself as a “decentralized metaverse owned by its users.”
1:52 In the pitch version Decentraland is a true virtual space,
1:56 a whole new parallel world that you access via virtual reality,
2:00 a world where you can shop, buy things, invest, purchase goods,
2:04 and go to stores unconstrained by the laws that govern
2:07 the place where your physical body eats and sleeps,
2:10 a product so promising that it commands a valuation in the billions of dollars.
2:16 In practice, it’s just a bad video game made up of smaller,
2:20 worse video games, wrapped in a real-estate scheme cosplaying as the Matrix.
2:25 Most of what Decentraland does, and what it fails to do,
2:28 are things that would be considered forgivable or quaint in a Kickstarter
2:31 MMO that had clearly bitten off more than the creators could ever chew,
2:36 but given that this is a project founded on cryptocurrency all
2:40 of those foibles are laced with the language of finance and landlordism.
2:44 Strolling down Decentraland’s spacious boulevards at 5 frames
2:46 per second rewards the user with a seemingly
2:49 endless parade of virtual billboards brightly proclaiming
2:51 that the space you see is all available to rent.
2:55 This is because of a pretty basic chain
2:58 of incentives that are laid bare by Decentraland’s history.
3:01 While the nominally-playable game launched in February 2020
3:04 the actual launch was in 2017 broken into two parts:
3:07 first an initial coin offering in August where their MANA
3:11 token sale raised approximately $24 million dollars denominated in crypto coins,
3:16 and second with the “terraforming event” where parcels of land,
3:20 denominated in LAND tokens,
3:21 were auctioned off for an additional $28 million in crypto,
3:25 predominantly bought by guys like this.
3:28 “I’m not selling until it’s worth at least ten million”
3:30 This being crypto the obsession with scarcity is so pervasive
3:33 that it’s almost a waste of time to even mention
3:36 it but the LAND tokens were limited to 90,000, which,
3:40 of course, centered a lot of the discussion
3:42 of Decentraland around the hypothetical value of the virtual
3:45 plots of land in the event that Decentraland won
3:48 the future and became the Manhattan of the metaverse,
3:52 the go-to destination for virtual life.
3:54 The initial buyers' plans for the land
3:57 overwhelmingly veered towards pitching cryptocurrency or financial
3:59 services or just sitting on the land with the intent of renting it out later.
4:04 This is all baked-in, Decentraland’s initial pitch hinges on it.
4:09 “What if you could own the virtual world?
4:13 Create, develop, and trade without limits.
4:17 Make genuine connections, and earn real money.
4:21 Decentraland.
4:22 A fully immersive platform powered by the blockchain.
4:27 Buy land.
4:30 Design your experience.
4:34 And transform he way that people see the world.
4:38 Purchase the first ever virtual real estate.
4:42 Get started today.” Now, there’s a lot of ground that needs to be covered,
4:50 and a not insubstantial amount of theory that I would like to get out there,
4:54 but I suspect the main thing you might be here for is failure,
4:57 so just to whet your appetite here is a list
5:00 of things you can expect to see as we talk about Decentraland,
5:04 what it is, and what it isn’t.
5:06 [Disco Music] Decentraland Records presents the only
5:11 collection of failure you’ll ever need!
5:13 Bad graphics Poor performance Dead mall vibes
5:18 Missing geometry Weed leaves Loading boxes And so
5:23 much more But before we can get
5:31 into all that we’ve gotta talk about the metaverse.
5:44 In the past two years you have likely been inundated
5:47 with attempts to explain and define the metaverse and yet, despite the numerous,
5:51 numerous attempts you probably feel no closer to having an actual,
5:54 workable definition in your head, one that maps to something you
5:57 can visualize actually integrating with your life.
6:00 There are a lot of definitions out there, most of them are incredibly flimsy,
6:03 many of them are outright insane,
6:05 very few agree on anything other than the broad strokes,
6:09 and almost all of them fall back on gesturing
6:11 towards Ready Player One and going “you know, that thing,
6:14 it’ll be like that.” In the mainstream,
6:17 the metaverse has been somewhat hijacked by the crypto and web3 crowd.
6:21 An interesting element to that is that while they are
6:24 extremely aggressively pushing the word
6:25 “metaverse” out into the public consciousness, they are late-arriving parasites,
6:29 they will typically nod their heads at any metaverse vision before
6:33 throwing it back at you with their crypto junk grafted onto it.
6:36 They don’t care about the form or content of the metaverse,
6:40 but both crypto and the metaverse
6:42 require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense,
6:44 so the two are somewhat simpatico in that regard.
6:48 In sharp contrast we have the writing of Ryan Bolger.
6:50 A theologian, Bolger’s vision of the Metaverse is that of a reified
6:54 space that sits on top of the real world, a 1 to 1 digital clone.
6:59 You can leave a digital letter for someone on a park bench,
7:02 and they need to go to that same bench to find it.
7:05 A clone so accurate that self-driving cars will navigate
7:09 not via sensors that monitor the world around them,
7:13 but by referencing the current position of things in the metaverse-
7:17 the most jacked version of Google Maps you can imagine.
7:20 For Bolger, traditional websites and apps are
7:23 just a stop gap to the ultimate aim,
7:25 which should be to astrally project via VR into a McDonalds,
7:29 where a cashier will then see you through AR glasses
7:32 and take your order as if you were in the space.
7:36 The goal of this degree of reification was
7:39 to create a space so ‘real’ and legitimate,
7:41 that it could be said that the metaverse could
7:45 be capable of containing divinity- a church in the metaverse
7:48 can be sacred independent of the context of human
7:52 interaction because it’s not just software, it’s a place.
7:56 Digital fashion and other “phygital” industries also want
7:59 to break down the barrier between physical and digital,
8:03 but for very different reasons.
8:05 They look at the market for cosmetics in live service
8:07 video games and crave translating that business model to reality.
8:11 Rather than building a reified virtual world,
8:13 digital fashion is much more interested in the augmented reality side of things,
8:17 they want AR glasses that are so universal
8:20 and so seamless that we all dress in mo-cap
8:22 suits and composite the new Gucci over it
8:24 using an advanced spin on Tiktok’s hat filter.
8:27 In this definition the metaverse isn’t another place, conceptual or otherwise,
8:31 it’s just a name for the digital skin that gets
8:34 laid over the world when viewed through compatible devices.
8:38 We strongly believe that the amount of clothing
8:39 produced today is way greater than humanity needs.
8:42 But don’t shop less, shop digital fashion.
8:45 Don’t shop less.
8:47 Don’t shop less.
8:49 Don’t, don’t you, don’t you dare, don’t you [static] dare shop less,
8:54 don’t you There are numerous problems here,
8:57 which boil down to the fact that all of these have equal
9:00 claim to the word “metaverse.” If you comb through dozens and dozens
9:04 of definitions of the metaverse you can assemble a web of broad attributes
9:08 where some are generally agreed upon
9:11 while others border on being mutually exclusive.
9:14 It’s a vague, largely incoherent cloud of ideas that’s malleable
9:18 enough that basically anything can be called part of the metaverse,
9:23 a proto-metaverse, or a semi-metaverse.
9:26 Decentraland is the metaverse, TheSandbox is the metaverse,
9:30 Horizon Worlds is the metaverse,
9:32 Roblox is the metaverse, Fortnite is the metaverse, Minecraft is the metaverse.
9:36 The Lindt Experience is the metaverse.
9:39 “I look at my fourteen year old and she has spent
9:42 the last year and a half of her life living in a metaverse.
9:44 She doesn’t even know that word, right, but her school is on Zoom,
9:48 she hangs out with her friends online in one form or another,
9:52 and actually in a whole bunch of different forms, right.
9:54 In Instagram, in TikTok, in iMessage,
9:57 in, in Fortnite, in Animal Crossing, in, uh,
10:01 you know all of these different, you know,
10:04 metaverses, right” “Some leaders within the virtual worlds space,
10:07 such as Tim Sweeney, believe that eventually,
10:09 every company will need to operate their own virtual worlds,
10:11 both as standalone planets and as part of leading
10:14 virtual world platforms such as Fortnite and Minecraft.
10:16 As Sweeney has put it,
10:17 “just as every company a few decades ago created a webpage,
10:20 and then at some point every company
10:22 created a Facebook page.” Of course this flexibility
10:25 that allows for anything good and popular to be part of or a natural,
10:30 inevitable precursor to the True Metaverse simultaneously
10:33 provides the flexibility to dismiss any failure
10:36 as a failing of that pure vision rather
10:38 than a failure of the underlying ideas themselves.
10:42 The metaverse cannot fail, you can only fail to make the metaverse.
10:47 There’s no consensus definition because the Metaverse isn’t real,
10:50 it’s not an actual thing that anyone’s really building,
10:54 it’s a rhetorical device that allows the writer to gesture
10:58 at the future and pontificate on what ought to be.
11:02 Definitions of the metaverse are, thusly,
11:04 principally rooted in the writer’s present political and social values.
11:08 When you understand that the metaverse isn’t
11:10 a distinct invention or construct but merely a rhetorical
11:13 proxy for The Future of Technology then all
11:16 of this becomes a lot easier to deal with.
11:20 The reason it’s all so messy is because
11:22 of the aforementioned gesturing towards fiction and because a lot
11:25 of the people writing effluent prose about how the future
11:28 is here today in the form of blockchain-based social spaces are,
11:32 for the most part, salesmen.
11:35 That’s not to say that they don’t believe the Metaverse could or should exist,
11:39 just that most have not considered if it would actually be any good.
11:44 That part they take as a given, because it’s always super cool in stories,
11:48 so why even bother considering that the end result might be boring,
11:53 inconvenient, and disappointing?
11:54 Now, science fiction and actual science have a long and storied history.
11:59 It’s fun to point to all the devices that exist today
12:01 that were first sketched out by a fiction writer decades earlier,
12:05 but there’s also a massive survivorship bias there.
12:08 Sure, some speculations become real,
12:10 either because the author rooted their speculation
12:12 in cutting edge science or because
12:14 fans of the work tried extremely hard to make it a reality,
12:17 but even more get discarded as silly,
12:20 useless, impractical, deadly, or physically impossible.
12:23 This might come as a shock, but when a writer sits down to compose fiction,
12:28 the thing that they write doesn’t need to actually work.
12:32 They’re not real inventions, they’re narrative devices,
12:35 and at a certain point no amount of cool
12:38 factor can make up for the limitations of physical space.
12:41 Star Trek’s holodeck is an insanely cool idea,
12:44 and dear god do I wish it were real.
12:47 But it can’t exist, not as depicted, because it’s not an invention,
12:51 it’s a collection of camera tricks and special effects.
12:54 At the end of the day the holodeck’s limitations,
12:57 and lack thereof, are dictated by narrative necessity.
13:01 So when Neal Stephenson writes about The Metaverse in Snow Crash in 1992 it
13:06 is an invention composed of a mix
13:08 of speculation about the future of existing hardware,
13:11 trends in how people interact via virtual spaces,
13:14 and an overwhelmingly cartoonish dose of Rule of Cool.
13:19 Stephenson’s Metaverse is a massive,
13:22 three-dimensional contiguous space because it’s evocative and interesting,
13:26 it provides a colourful backdrop for the story’s
13:29 gonzo plot about a high stakes pizza delivery swordmaster employed by the mafia
13:34 and a computer virus that can cause brain damage.
13:38 Snow Crash is prescient in degrees about some
13:40 of the ways in which we would engage with technology,
13:44 but overwhelmingly that prescience applies
13:46 to the internet as it currently exists.
13:49 We have virtual live events, virtual sports,
13:53 virtual town squares, virtual club houses,
13:56 and even virtual strip clubs where you can hang out
13:59 in chat with five hundred strangers and watch someone just absolutely [static].
14:05 Really the only things that are missing are either aesthetic,
14:08 like the giant contiguous three dimensional representation of the internet
14:11 where you can walk from one webpage to the next,
14:15 or maybe not even physically possible at all, like the Snow Crash virus itself.
14:21 So this then creates a bit of a trap
14:23 for a lot of the salesmen writing about the inevitability
14:25 of the metaverse where they have to cling to those aesthetic
14:30 details as non-negotiable because otherwise
14:32 they’re just talking about the internet.
14:35 As Matthew Ball writes in his 2022 book The Metaverse and How
14:38 It Will Change Everything “Although virtual worlds come in many dimensions,
14:42 “3D” is a critical specification for the Metaverse.
14:45 Without 3D, we might as well be describing the current internet.
14:48 Message boards, chat services, website builders, image platforms,
14:51 and interconnected networks of content have been around and popular for decades,
14:55 after all.” Which brings us to virtual reality.
14:59 VR is pretty cool tech, I really like it.
15:02 It’s also pretty limited, or more specifically the tech runs up against
15:06 a pretty big barrier which is the human body.
15:10 The inner ear really doesn’t like moving without actually moving,
15:13 which means that every VR application is a series of compromises
15:17 between the immersive potential of VR and what the body will tolerate.
15:21 No!
15:22 Oh god!
15:23 Oh god!
15:24 Oh!
15:25 Because Stephenson’s metaverse is a plot device,
15:28 effectively an alternate dimension,
15:29 the characters are able to navigate the space however Stephenson wants them to.
15:34 And because it’s narratively interesting,
15:35 when the characters want to get from one part of the metaverse
15:39 to another they need to traverse the distance between those two points.
15:43 Ball, for his part, concedes that users of the inevitable metaverse would likely
15:46 find this to be too inconvenient
15:49 and prefer to teleport from location to location.
15:52 The reality is even more restrictive.
15:55 The compromise is that overwhelmingly virtual
15:58 reality experiences are largely static experiences,
16:01 with freeform movement around a small footprint,
16:03 with the user teleporting from spot to spot even within the same virtual room.
16:08 It’s a compromise that VR enthusiasts are willing
16:11 to accept because the alternative is a one-way
16:14 trip to the floor as your cochlea decides
16:17 that being upright is no longer an option.
16:20 The end result, the actuality of virtual reality,
16:23 is that it’s an incredibly potent tool
16:25 for an unfortunately limited number of applications.
16:29 This creates a very sharp contrast between
16:31 the metaverse that’s talked about by pundits
16:34 and the reality of VR that developers
16:36 and enthusiasts have been mapping for over a decade,
16:39 with pundits continuing to insist that a vast,
16:42 contiguous space representing the internet is not only
16:46 a desirable way to interact with those functionalities,
16:49 but indeed a preferential way.
16:52 How this manifests is a metaverse that exists overwhelmingly
16:55 in the form of blog posts about the inevitability of its existence,
17:00 with anything tangentially related to virtual reality
17:03 being encircled as part of the metaverse,
17:06 along with a whole lot of stuff hardly related at all.
17:10 Of particular fascination is the way that this is all talk and no product.
17:14 Lindt USA, manufacturers of terrible chocolate truffles,
17:18 launched their metaverse store in November 2022 and just
17:21 have a look at the language used to describe it.
17:25 Lindt USA Launches Its First-Ever 3D Virtual Store with ByondXR and Makes
17:31 Shopping for Premium Chocolate a Truly
17:35 Innovative Experience In a beautifully decorated,
17:38 fully 3D and highly photorealistic environment,
17:41 the store welcomes visitors with an engaging introduction
17:44 by one of Lindt’s famous master chocolatiers, Ann Czaja.
17:48 Best of all, the immersive store is totally comprehensible:
17:51 “We at Lindt USA are thrilled to offer customers
17:54 this state-of-the-art experience just in time for the holidays.
17:58 While there is no experience like walking
17:59 into one of our beautiful Lindt stores in person,
18:01 our online store is no different.
18:03 We’re excited to show it off.” This is all pretty routine corporate fluff,
18:07 though the surprising,
18:08 and telling thing is that it’s just words, there’s few, if any, images included.
18:15 And there’s a reason why: the whole of it is elevated to transcendental when you
18:21 see the actual thing that they’re describing, a laggy, hideous,
18:26 cheap faux-3D website that would probably be a camp hit if it
18:30 were pitched instead as a throwback to FMV video games from the 90s.
18:34 “Want some Rye?
18:36 Of course ya do!” The vast majority of these so-called metaverse offerings
18:40 are virtual spaces only insofar as they are painted to resemble a store.
18:44 We already tried this 25 years ago,
18:46 and discarded it because it turns out the human
18:48 brain can shop from a list of items or a grid of photos far better than it
18:52 can from an imagemap photo of a display case.
18:55 Examples like this betray not only the ignorance
18:57 of history on the part of the people pushing it,
18:59 but also a profound incompetence on the part of the people building it.
19:03 Rather than being a “cutting-edge virtual shopping
19:05 experience” the Lindt store is so bad,
19:07 so embarrassing, that it would be more respectable
19:10 to learn that ByondXR is an outright scam,
19:13 shaking down gullible corporations afraid of being “out of touch”
19:16 with the future or missing the boat on the next big thing,
19:20 rather than true believers trying their hardest.
19:22 The fact that Patrick Diggelmann,
19:24 vice president of sales and e-commerce for Lindt USA,
19:27 looked at this final product and didn’t immediately scrap it,
19:31 bury it, and demand the company’s money back is just a nice,
19:35 tight encapsulation of how much metaverse participation
19:38 is being driven by irrational, uninformed FOMO.
19:41 And this brings us back to Decentraland.
19:43 All these definitions are pretty bad for Decentraland.
19:46 It clearly wants to be the Metaverse,
19:48 it calls itself that, but because they, like Lindt,
19:51 have made the mistake of actually trying to make something,
19:54 it's possible to evaluate whether or not they’ve succeeded.
19:56 They have activated the trap card of falsifiability.
20:00 VR was dropped from Decentraland’s core feature set somewhere in 2018 or 2019,
20:05 and has all but officially been relegated to a community produced mod,
20:09 which just means that it’s difficult to get working in the first place,
20:13 and when you do nothing is optimized for VR,
20:17 either in terms of technical performance or user experience.
20:20 The results are dizzying even without a headset on.
20:24 Hnnng, okay so the app’s just straight up broken now.
20:33 Cool.
20:37 For many definitions of the metaverse, like Ball,
20:40 this already makes DCL a complete non-starter:
20:43 virtual reality, or at the very least augmented reality,
20:46 is a non-negotiable feature.
20:47 This, however, in my evaluation is just a case of No True Metaverse.
20:53 Decentraland is embarrassing, which makes it inconvenient,
20:56 which means there’s a lot of incentive to discredit
20:59 it as a claim to the idea of the metaverse,
21:03 to insist that its failures are meaningless,
21:05 that there’s nothing to learn from them
21:07 about the viability of the underlying ideas.
21:11 But the knife that says all these definitions are the metaverse cuts both ways.
21:16 If the concept is so broad as to be
21:18 little more than a vague gesture at the future,
21:21 if successful and popular things like Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite
21:26 get to be the nascent metaverse, then this does too.
21:30 And if this is the future, then the future is a dead mall.
21:44 It is difficult to fully encapsulate the sheer
21:47 contradiction between Decentraland as it exists in the minds
21:50 of its supporters and the actual product that you
21:52 can interact with, but in this endeavor we shall strive.
21:56 Maybe we spent our best shot early
21:58 by opening with Redditors praising a theater with non-functional
22:01 doors and a photo of a real concession stand in place of any actual modeling,
22:05 but it’s probably best to let you know what you’re in for.
22:09 That post that we ran earlier,
22:10 by the by, is the most popular post of all time on the Decentraland subreddit.
22:15 The fact that it’s a crossover event with Reddit’s memestock fanatics,
22:17 right down to being disproportionately laden
22:19 with Reddit awards as they tend to do,
22:22 has a poetry to it that I couldn’t script.
22:25 Name a more iconic duo than bad products and serial bagholders: you can’t do it.
22:32 The pizza kiosk they rave about, where you could, in theory,
22:35 order Domino’s via the metaverse and pay in ETH or MANA is long gone,
22:39 all that remains is an empty plot
22:41 devoid of even the world’s procedurally generated shrubbery.
22:44 The details are thin, but from what’s available it’s apparent
22:47 that Domino’s wasn’t officially involved in any capacity,
22:50 which would indicate that the builder had really
22:53 just created a middleman between you and Domino’s,
22:55 where he would take your crypto and then pass the order,
22:59 along with payment in dollars, to Domino’s on your behalf.
23:03 The event calls back to one of the foundational myths of crypto,
23:06 the 10,000 bitcoin pizza, the first purchase ever made with cryptocurrency.
23:12 “22nd of May, 2010 is the date
23:16 when someone first purchased an item with bitcoin,
23:20 in this case a pizza.” The reality
23:23 of that is very similar to the Decentraland pizza kiosk:
23:26 no vendor accepted bitcoin in exchange for pizza.
23:29 Floridian Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 bitcoin on a forum
23:32 to anyone who would bring him two large pizzas.
23:35 Fellow Floridian Jeremy Sturdivant took him up on the offer,
23:38 bought two large pizzas from a pizzeria with his own money
23:42 and then traded them to Laszlo in exchange for the bitcoin.
23:45 Hey, that’s backwards.
23:49 Wait, it’s also backwards from this side!
23:54 Other groups have tried to recreate amusement rides in Decentraland,
23:57 such as those found in District X.
23:59 Originally slated to be Decentraland’s Red Light District
24:02 before the project organizer stole all the donated LAND,
24:05 District X is now home to an excellent showcase
24:07 of the reality of Decentraland’s ability to deliver interactive experiences:
24:12 laggy, glitchy, and profoundly sad.
24:15 Oh yes, I can feel the thrills coursing through my veins.
24:20 In the Decentraland experience there’s a persistent
24:23 tension between the different vectors of incompetence.
24:26 Most of the people building this stuff don’t have good ideas,
24:29 so the stuff is generally bad from first principles,
24:32 but then on top of that the tools
24:34 for building things in Decentraland are also bad,
24:37 so good ideas are kneecapped by being extremely hard to implement,
24:41 but then on top of that Decentraland just runs and performs poorly,
24:45 the controls are particularly heinous and sometimes
24:47 the camera gets possessed by a thousand angry ghosts,
24:50 so no matter what experience you build it’ll
24:54 be tainted by that mandatory membrane of interaction.
24:57 Some of what you’ll stumble across is almost quaint,
25:00 like this modern style suburban single family
25:02 home populated entirely by official Nintendo art.
25:05 It’s almost adorably incompetent, like the Decentraland version of a Geocities
25:10 shrine to Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
25:12 At least until you notice the For Sale sign out front,
25:15 and the several dozen identical Mario houses scattered around the world,
25:18 all owned by the same guy named Dan.
25:20 They’re everywhere, I’ve completely lost track of how
25:24 many unique instances of this house I’ve stumbled across.
25:28 This is in part because navigating Decentraland is a nightmare,
25:31 the extremely short draw distance and attendant lack
25:33 of landmarks makes it very easy to get lost,
25:35 so it’s hard to tell if any given Modern Mario
25:37 House is a fresh one you’ve never been to before,
25:40 or one that you’ve looped back on.
25:42 “AUG 1, 2022 DecentRally:
25:46 Setting the Track for Future Experience Creators Using Infinity
25:49 Engine Code The first of its kind in Decentraland,
25:53 DecentRally shows what the Infinity Engine code can do,
25:55 serving as an open source foundation for future high-speed experiences.”
25:59 Decentraland faces a fascinating problem inherent to its basic construction.
26:03 The language of interaction with the world
26:05 of Decentraland is the language of games.
26:08 You navigate the world via an avatar,
26:10 your avatar runs, jumps, and clicks on things.
26:13 This makes games the most obvious implementation as an Experience,
26:17 since the ludology is already there.
26:20 The problem is that Decentraland is just bad for games.
26:26 DecentRally is an abysmal little experience,
26:27 barely qualifying as the kart racer that it nominally resembles.
26:31 Of course we can’t judge it too harshly as it’s just a proof of concept,
26:35 though given that everything in Decentraland seems to fall
26:37 under that umbrella it’s enough to make one suspicious,
26:40 like maybe “it’s still in beta” or “it’s just
26:43 a proof of concept” are just a rhetorical shield against criticism.
26:47 Either which way, the developer’s other project, Infinity Engine, is also awful,
26:51 and it’s been featured on Decentraland’s front page for well over a year.
26:56 The fantasy of the metaverse is one where
26:58 it subsumes much of our present reality, where,
27:01 in the words of Matthew Ball “entire generations will eventually
27:04 move to and live inside it” which, as a statement,
27:08 more or less demands poetic interpretation,
27:10 that Ball is referring to interactions and activity
27:13 taking place via the membrane of the software,
27:16 because otherwise it’s, you know, stupid,
27:19 because your body won’t fit inside the wires.
27:22 But regardless, this idea of place requires the simulacrum of place,
27:27 and the simulacrum of place must encompass both the fantastic and the mundane,
27:32 because if it doesn’t encompass both Skyrim and your office
27:36 and the grocery store then there’s too much discontinuity,
27:40 the metaverse ceases to be a world, a true place,
27:43 and becomes little more than a digital interface,
27:46 and to that end the existence of the metaverse
27:50 demands the existence of Eashoo Law (A Professional Corporation).
27:55 Welcome to the metaverse law office of James Eashoo,
27:57 a personal injury lawyer based in Los Angeles.
28:00 James isn’t in right now, no one is, and he never will be because the idea
28:04 of staffing this place with actual people is patently absurd.
28:07 While it was unfortunate that you tripped and dropped the urn that contained
28:12 you grandmother’s ashes because you tripped over
28:14 a rake that your roommate left out,
28:18 unfortunately when you attacked him with that rake it was a, uhm, a crime,
28:25 and so I’m afraid I’m going to have to refer you to a criminal defense lawyer.
28:31 Uh, this is, this is outside kinda the purview of what I,
28:37 what I do, I’m more of a personal injury lawyer.
28:42 So, um, unfortunately you are going
28:46 to need criminal defense representation and, um,
28:51 I do have some people tha tI can refer you to.
28:55 I’m deeply sorry for the loss
28:59 of your grandmother and the death of your roommate,
29:04 but I can’t assist you any further in this matter.
29:11 This is not meaningfully useful in any way to businesses.
29:14 When confronted with the actual product,
29:16 the actual series of things that would need to be
29:18 engaged with to make the fictional vision of the metaverse real,
29:21 the product, and the comparison to the “next
29:24 generation of the internet” is comical.
29:26 Ball quotes Tim Sweeny talking about a future
29:29 where every company is expected to operate
29:31 a virtual world “just as every company a few decades ago created a webpage,
29:36 and then at some point every company
29:38 created a Facebook page.” But here’s the thing:
29:41 we already know from those examples that most companies don’t need much
29:46 more to a website than some cursory fluff and their contact information.
29:51 A website, to most companies, is just a replacement for a yellow pages entry,
29:55 it’s an ad whose number one job is to carry a phone number,
30:00 address, and business hours.
30:01 A Facebook page became appealing because it
30:03 offloaded the work of designing the page and its functionality as a whole
30:08 in a way that office workers could easily manage:
30:12 Facebook handles running Facebook, you just put in your stuff,
30:15 making it a useful tool for high density,
30:18 up to date communication, like promotions or changes in operating hours.
30:23 The entire process there is a move towards efficiency.
30:27 The construction and maintenance of a virtual world is ludicrous in comparison.
30:32 The effort to build and update is
30:34 orders of magnitude beyond even a basic webpage,
30:36 and the information density goes down!
30:39 Like, this is really important:
30:40 most business communication is going to be in the form of text for… ever,
30:46 because text is really, really, really useful.
30:51 But the metaverse is a uniquely terrible medium for the delivery
30:54 of text because that text cannot be presented in an optimized format,
30:59 it must be bent to the metaphor of a real space.
31:03 That’s why the only actual meaningful things in Eashoo
31:07 Law (A Professional Corporation) are links to conventional,
31:10 flat, text-and-image based websites.
31:12 Because they’re just more efficient ways to present and access information.
31:17 So the virtual workspace, the idea that this plot in Decentraland
31:22 would ever become actually functional as a space,
31:26 with the receptionist navigating up the virtual stairs to tell James,
31:30 via in-world voice chat, that someone is waiting to see him, is comical.
31:35 But without that promise, without that story, what’s even left?
31:40 An NFT gallery and hard-to-use widgets that just open Instagram in another tab
31:44 and remind you that you’re not
31:47 “in the metaverse” you’re just browsing a website?
31:50 I guess at least you can stand on the balcony
31:53 and admire the Modern Mario House across the street.
31:56 Even official productions,
31:57 stuff created by the developers themselves or people they’ve sub-contracted,
32:01 trend heavily towards embarrassing.
32:05 The festival stage for the first annual Metaverse Music Festival
32:08 featuring DJ Paris Hilton lacked collision on the stairs and balcony,
32:11 meaning you could take a terrible elevator
32:13 to a second floor that you would immediately fall through.
32:17 New Years Eve 2022 was staged in a Duke-Nukem-esque recreation
32:20 of Times Square and featured a devastatingly terrible jumping puzzle,
32:24 just indescribably bad in its fundamental construction,
32:28 riddled with all manner of collision problems,
32:30 and very much coming off as a half-hearted
32:33 idea that was implemented improvisationally and never actually tested,
32:37 let alone revised, with the reward being a broken scavenger token,
32:41 z-fighting textures, and a bad view of the party.
32:45 [barely audible fireworks] “Wait, is that it?
32:52 Was that it?” After a long day’s virtual lawyering,
32:57 it’s only natural that you’ll want to take a load off.
33:00 And we would recommend none-other than NFT World’s NFT World City’s Comedy Club.
33:05 It’s always bugged me when I go into a comedy
33:07 club and I’m not immediately met with comedy- it’s false advertising.
33:11 But with the power of the metaverse,
33:14 and a $120,000 grant from the Decentraland DAO,
33:17 the NFT World City’s Comedy Club obtained an infinite source of comedy.
33:21 “Uh, we hope to have content from Decentral Comedy soon.
33:25 And we have also sourced content from an AI tool
33:31 called ChatGPT which provides some jokes for us to show here.
33:36 It’s not all comedy and incompetence and insincerity, though.
33:41 Occasionally you’ll stumble across a single plot that’s
33:43 just a simple shrine to a loved one,
33:45 taken away from this world, too young and, oh,
33:47 hey, it’s another Modern Mario House.
33:50 One of the most consistently popular locations in Decentraland,
33:52 popular enough to warrant a functionally permanent
33:55 spot on the Genesis Plaza hot locations board,
33:57 is the WonderMine meteor mining and crafting game.
34:01 Now, something to stress here is that this is,
34:04 within the context of Decentraland, a success story.
34:07 There are people who interface with Decentraland solely
34:10 as the medium by which they access WonderMine.
34:14 Even just looking at the map it is one of the few
34:17 consistently occupied places where you can
34:18 find other players in any reasonable number.
34:21 And it is an idle clicking game that is so sluggish
34:24 in its pace that it barely qualifies as a skinner box.
34:27 Meteors fall, and you click on them.
34:30 And then you wait.
34:32 The sole value prospect is that at the end of the process you might
34:35 be able to craft an NFT wearable that you can then sell to someone else.
34:39 “So like I was saying, if you want to see what this is worth,
34:42 we can go over to the marketplace and search steampunk
34:45 hat and as you can see its worth 2499 MANA.
34:48 And if we want to view the value of MANA today,
34:54 it’s over a dollar.” So with such big money on the line,
34:58 of course the game is botted to hell and back with idlers and auto-clickers.
35:03 Decentraland doesn’t log users out after a set time spent idle,
35:06 and the meteors fall in predictable locations, so it’s pretty easy to automate,
35:10 but even barring that level of complexity it’s trivial
35:14 to just leave a tab idle and collect the periodic rewards.
35:20 Wondermine is also immediately adjacent to one
35:21 of the oldest games in Decentraland,
35:23 Dragon Rush, which is featured prominently in Genesis Plaza.
35:27 Immediately we can spot a problem with the real estate model of the internet:
35:31 this relatively modest game has an absolutely massive footprint
35:35 and necessitates a towering retaining wall to back its terrain.
35:38 From a standpoint of architecture it is an immensely hostile block,
35:43 a massive impassable barrier to both sightlines and traffic.
35:47 It turns out that having every individual app and website
35:51 take up scarce space in an adversarial relationship is, uh, bad.
35:57 Alright, so, walk onto the dragon’s back, press f to flap wings and fly,
36:03 go through the gates and land on the landing pad to finish the race.
36:23 Now, maybe this is just unfair,
36:30 after all I did say that Dragon Rush is one of the oldest games in Decentraland.
36:46 Let’s do some due diligence and find something more mature,
36:50 more refined, something with a budget behind it.
36:56 Knights of Antrom, the ultimate role-playing
37:00 game that will challenge you to farm, craft, and fight your way to the top.
37:06 Those looking for a little more action to their Decentraland experience,
37:09 need look no further than Dice Masters.
37:12 An incredible, fully-playable role-playing game
37:14 built within the metaverse’s trusty framework.
37:17 Within its sizable location, gamers can undertake quests,
37:20 battle enemies, collect resources and craft in game items,
37:23 all in addition to ridding the realm of the terrible poultry scourge.
37:27 Dice Masters Development and Expansion Should
37:29 the following Tier 6: up to $240,000 USD,
37:32 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Gaming category be approved?
37:37 Yes wins with 93% Okay, that’s quite a pitch.
37:41 And, you know what, let’s treat this seriously,
37:44 like let’s treat this like it were a Kickstarter or Steam Early Access pitch.
37:50 $240,000 is modest but realistic,
37:52 and watching the trailer, it’s all very achievable,
37:55 especially since the buildings are just lifted from World of Warcraft.
37:59 But, like, the features are very straightforward,
38:02 and the trailer even evokes Decentraland’s style.
38:05 This is eminently realizable.
38:07 Low rent?
38:08 Sure.
38:09 Devoid of original ideas?
38:11 Also true.
38:12 Doable?
38:13 Absolutely.
38:14 This is it, right?
38:15 This is the moment Decentraland has been waiting
38:17 for, this is the realization of all their promises!
38:21 This isn’t just a thing in Decentraland, it’s Decentraland as a platform,
38:25 as the infrastructure invisible beneath
38:28 an otherwise independent game experience!
38:31 They even bothered to include the coordinates in the trailer,
38:34 like they actually want you to go there!
38:59 [groaning] It’s just… it’s the same story over and over again,
39:25 everywhere you go in Decentraland.
39:34 It’s all the same stuff.
39:36 No amount of remixing can overcome the underlying flaws of the base layer.
39:41 Decentraland wants to be the invisible tech behind the scenes,
39:45 but it can’t because it also wants to be a real virtual world,
39:50 and the one goal imposes endless
39:53 creative and technical decisions onto the other.
39:56 You can’t really get anything better out of the system!
40:12 The MetaGamiMall is a construction of special note because its existence was
40:16 made possible by a grant of $220,000 US dollars from the Decentraland DAO,
40:22 the organization that operates, in theory,
40:25 as the government of the Decentraland world.
40:29 The pitch was a gamified mall,
40:30 and I will let their own pitch package speak for itself on some key details.
40:34 “Game+ Mall= GamiMall” “The game- super dogerio, the vitality of the mall.
40:43 “The P2E economic model can incentivise users to play and earn.
40:49 “The first comprehensive traffic road system in Decentaland.
40:54 Highly compatible with Customer shopping habits and Super Dogerio Game.
40:57 Interesting piano floor,
40:57 create more fun while walking and running.” “The Meta GamiMall is an avant
41:00 gard project endeavor to blur the boundaries between game and shop activities.
41:06 The game lives in the mall,
41:12 the mall needs the game.” The actual product is a track
41:18 that you walk along to collect coins that can be traded for wearables,
41:21 while a bad techno DJ repeats the instructions on an endless loop.
41:25 Because space is so tight, even for large plots like this, the track
41:30 consists mostly of really obnoxious spirals,
41:32 and the place is infested with bots that idle on the exact
41:35 same spot until the timer resets and they can collect more coins.
41:39 It would seem that while $220,000 can get you a lot of stuff,
41:43 it can’t get you an experience worth doing with your own human hands.
41:47 The actual rules of Super Dogerio are oblique,
41:50 and the DJ’s instructions don’t actually help.
41:54 “Welcome to MetaMine.
41:56 MetaMine is a metaverse game event
41:59 that will begin from 18th Novermber at MetaGamiMall
42:02 in Decentraland.” “MetaMine is a metaverse game
42:06 event” I guess it’s called Metamine now?
42:10 As for the mall component, I don’t even know what to say.
42:13 The space is so cluttered with the extreme cyberspace
42:16 aesthetic that it’s barely even legible as a mall,
42:18 and the whole notion is keelhauled by the fact
42:20 that this is a miserable interface for actually buying things,
42:24 which is the actual purpose of a mall.
42:27 The result, an empty shopping experience plagued with bots,
42:29 isn’t just a dead mall,
42:31 it’s an undead mall, stuttering along in a parody of life.
42:35 Now, they did seek a new grant in late 2022,
42:39 asking for an additional $60,000 USD to expand and revitalize the mall.
42:44 Unfortunately the proposal was rejected 3 million to 9 million,
42:47 with 7.8 million of the “no” votes coming from two people.
42:51 Sorry MetaGamiMall, better luck next time.
42:54 The Decentraland Report is one of the most fascinating elements of Decentraland,
42:58 and it breaks my heart that we can’t give it the time it truly deserves.
43:02 They style themselves as “the first ever decentralized news network,
43:05 reporting on the latest breaking news of the Metaverse”.
43:09 Between grants and private funding it has received over $250,000 USD,
43:13 a quarter million dollars of investment.
43:16 It is an organization operated by Kevin Clark,
43:18 better known by his handle KevinOnEarth999.
43:21 We’ll let him explain what it means:
43:24 “Decentralized news networks give the public
43:26 the power to control event coverage,
43:29 reporters and how the network will evolve over time.
43:33 Tokens are distributed to the public based on participation
43:35 and can be used to purchase event coverage, ad space,
43:38 and vote on key decisions- such as the addition
43:42 or removal of actual news reporters.” Just to stress
43:45 this, to highlight it and make sure that you
43:47 are aware that this is not us catastrophizing or editorializing,
43:50 the ability for the crowd to fire reporters is an explicit feature.
43:56 “Imagine if you could use a token to vote off a reporter
43:59 from the news.” You can buy the ability to fire a reporter.
44:04 And that’s deliberate,
44:05 because it gives the token resale value, which incentivises participation.
44:09 The editorial agenda of the Decentraland Report
44:12 is not just nominally available for purchase,
44:15 it is proudly available for purchase.
44:18 The Decentraland Report is a news outlet that hates journalism.
44:22 It takes the very messy subject of journalistic independence,
44:25 the way that journalism often functions
44:27 as willing collaborators with systemic power,
44:29 and the reasons why we should be legitimately skeptical,
44:32 alert, and literate in how we intake media,
44:35 and uses that to advocate for a radical populism masquerading as neutrality.
44:41 The logic is that institutions are inherently biased,
44:45 therefore less institution means less bias, and no institution means no bias.
44:51 Their trust model is explicitly rooted in their incompetence.
44:56 Kevin’s rhetoric is part and parcel with the conspiratorial
44:59 thinking that leads people to trust misinformation they
45:02 found on Facebook specifically because they found it
45:05 on a page that gets flagged by Facebook as misinformation.
45:10 It shares a table with the belief that reporters exist to deceive the public,
45:14 and so the only journalism you can trust comes from those who hate journalism.
45:20 “With this decentralized approach to news, the public can take control of global
45:25 narratives and focus on fact-based reporting
45:27 verses biased-based reporting which is focused more
45:30 on getting views than telling the truth.
45:33 Kevin’s vision for the news is downright dystopian,
45:36 it’s a killer writing prompt if you’re in need of ideas.
45:40 So what’s the product?
45:42 You want to see some journalism so unprofessional that it
45:44 would make even the writers at the Defiant cringe?
45:47 “Any giveaways?
45:48 Yeah, for sure man!
45:49 If you hang around I’ll definitely do a giveaway man!
45:54 So we’re just hop right on in here to Dice Masters.
45:56 Come on through!
45:57 I just want to show support to Dice Masters.”
46:02 “And then we’ll kinda move into the auction phase,
46:06 hopping from gallery to gallery.” “That is,
46:10 that sounds like a great time.” “As recommended by Seanny,
46:14 upon the passing of the grant,
46:15 we agree to pay back 10% of our monthly revenue to the DAO,
46:19 in perpetuity until the grant amount is paid back to the DAO.
46:22 That’s amazing.
46:23 That, to me, is epic.” It’s just Twitch streams.
46:29 “No fucking way!
46:32 Do you fucking hear that motherfuckers!
46:37 That’s what the fucking metaverse was missing!
46:42 Metal!” “That is very true, holy shit.
46:45 That is very frickin’ true.
46:50 Wow.
46:51 That was Big Dave.
46:54 Says Big Dave is Talking, listen the fuck up.
46:57 Wow.
46:58 That was, wow.
47:02 Wow.
47:03 That was sound check?
47:04 You gotta be kidding me!
47:08 That was frickin’ sound check, you gotta be kidding me!” I know, I know, right?
47:13 It’s pretty disappointing that after all that talk
47:16 about the philosophy of journalism this ship runs
47:18 aground over the fact that nothing remotely worth
47:21 reporting on happens in Decentraland in the first place,
47:25 so the risk of journalistic malpractice is functionally zero.
47:29 Despite the lofty ambitions of the network, these guys are ultimately harmless.
47:33 They’re just small streamers cosplaying as reporters
47:36 while hanging out with their handful
47:38 of regulars talking about the video game they like to play.
47:42 That said, there’s still a story here.
47:44 They still raised a quarter million dollars, right?
47:48 Did that at least pay someone?
47:51 Well, no.
47:53 Reporters aren’t “paid” as such.
47:55 They get paid in the REPORT token,
47:57 and they get a cut of the organizations’ monthly revenue on Xpand,
48:02 a crypto-meets-Twitter-meets-Patreon platform.
48:05 At time of writing that’s around $120 bucks, total.
48:09 Xpand takes a 10% cut, there is another 10% cut for their grant repayment,
48:13 a phrase that shouldn’t exist, and then the remainder is split nine ways.
48:17 There’s the possibility of one-time donations on top
48:19 of that, which get cut the same way,
48:21 but on average the individual reporters are looking at about ten bucks a month.
48:26 This uh, isn’t a great deal, especially since the streamers,
48:32 Sorry, reporters Need to provide their own equipment.
48:36 So it's no surprise that Kevin has failed to draw in any Pulitzer Prize winners.
48:40 Who he’s ended up with is an ensemble of Decentraland users
48:42 who just want to grow their stream by associating with an org.
48:46 They’re all broadcasting from their personal Twitch streams,
48:48 what they get from the org is the DCLR branding,
48:52 which, you know, it doesn’t draw in the crowds.
48:55 Every single stream we caught had extremely low viewership,
48:58 almost always fewer than 10 viewers, often under 5.
49:02 Kevin's personal and DCLR branded YouTube channels don’t fare any
49:06 better- a video is a success if it breaks 100 views.
49:10 So, where on (Kevin)OnEarth did the money go?
49:15 Okay, the reporters only get paid from the Xpand pot,
49:19 DCLR doesn’t buy them lights or webcams,
49:23 the only thing left to even spend it on… is Decentraland itself?
49:33 [Kazoo and fart performance of Also
49:38 Sprach Zarathustra] The Decentraland Report is
49:41 the perfect showcase of web3’s ability to cause money to just evaporate.
49:45 The build is called the Metaflower,
49:46 which is a reference to an NFT of a superyacht
49:49 from other metaverse candidate The Sandbox that sold Know what, doesn’t matter.
49:55 Using allegedly very expensive tech, the flower is intended to develop and bloom
49:58 as the number of subscribers on the Xpand page grows.
50:02 Of course we need to take Kevin’s word on that because
50:05 the count is currently 22 followers toward the goal of 10,000.
50:08 So the building has remained in its initial form.
50:12 What we’re left with is this.
50:14 We’ve got walls laced with Kevin’s prized NFTs,
50:17 two platforms that I’m assured are
50:19 the ‘studios’ where presenters are intended to stand.
50:22 The Decision Room, where DCLR DAO members will meet, once the DAO gets some.
50:27 And then we have the butthole tunnel that takes us to an alien in a rice
50:31 paddy hat who tells us that we need
50:33 to save the Decentraland Report by gathering News Juice.
50:36 And it turns out that News Juice means
50:39 ‘please follow Kevin and pals on Twitter.’ Wait, Kevin’s in here twice!
50:45 Strangely there’s no news in the DCLR HQ.
50:48 What they do give you is a link
50:50 to an entirely different 3D web application called Oncyber.
50:53 So you’re sitting there, computer frying from running Decentraland.
50:57 And if you want to see some news at the metaverse news building,
51:00 Kevin wants you to open up another 3D site that loads up
51:03 two dozen YouTube videos at once and then crashes Firefox entirely- it’s absurd.
51:09 Needless to say, the Decentraland build contributes extremely
51:12 little to the utility of running a news network.
51:15 We don’t know precisely how much this whole
51:18 thing cost beyond about $35,000 for the LAND,
51:21 but given that the $127,000 in grants are reasonably well accounted for it
51:25 would seem that, after the boring stuff
51:28 like building the website and Twitch assets,
51:30 this as a whole represents Kevin’s $126,000.
51:35 So let’s focus in on those grants.
51:38 Kevin received 4 grants from the Decentraland DAO.
51:40 Two were to hire an editor for DCLR- both paid the editor $50 per edit… in MANA.
51:48 Then there was a $5000 grant in September of 2021 to create
51:52 unique in-game jackets for reporters as a milestone reward for 6 months work.
51:57 And then there was the big one, a $120,000 US grant in stable coins
52:02 to build the backend for DCLR’s reward system.
52:05 Since decentralized news is all about rewarding participation,
52:09 including viewership, you need to build that system.
52:12 Pretty much the same tech that handles Twitch drops…
52:16 to service a community of like 30 people max.
52:19 The decentralized philosophy of the project demands this type of massive,
52:24 inefficient system exist as a starting point.
52:27 You can’t expand into these solutions naturally.
52:30 So Kevin spent $35,000 on LAND,
52:33 potentially $91,000 on the studio build, $5,000 on jackets,
52:37 and $120,000 on this reward system,
52:39 and then went back to the grant program looking for another $240,000,
52:44 32 of which was allotted to reporter
52:47 equipment and included salaries for a marketing director,
52:51 content manager, graphic designer and so on.
52:54 In what seems to have been the only lucid moment
52:56 in the fever dream of the grant scheme, Kevin was told… no.
53:00 Two more reduced proposals have also been rejected.
53:04 You know what we haven’t talked about in a while?
53:06 Chocolate.
53:07 I mean, sure, Lindt has their metaverse,
53:10 but surely chocolate giant Hershey wouldn’t be left behind.
53:14 Well, if you’ve got a craving, you’re in luck!
53:17 Just a hop skip and a jump from the Sugar Club you can experience Hersheyverse,
53:21 the official Metaverse holiday home of Hershey
53:24 Chocolates (of India and the Philippines).
53:26 Sure this plot may look microscopic, but boy howdy is there a lot to do.
53:31 For one you can talk to the shopkeepers
53:33 inside and they’ll… send you a link to Amazon.
53:36 But there’s also gamification!
53:37 There’s a quest!
53:38 It’s time for a treasure hunt!
53:40 Just hop up here and bounce over here,
53:42 and click on this, and ride the elevator and click
53:44 on the camera and you can get your very own official Hersheyverse wearable.
53:48 An NFT on the frequently exploited Polygon blockchain,
53:51 it would appear that this hat has been claimed, generously, about 500 times.
53:58 But once you claim your extremely ugly hat you get
54:01 one last quest to extend your time in the Hersheyverse.
54:04 You see the treasure chest needs opening,
54:06 and the keys won’t find themselves, so you just,
54:10 talk to the shopkeepers and pick the keys up off the ground,
54:14 and click the thing, and gain the ability to fly!
54:19 And by fly I mean that if you double jump an invisible
54:23 platform spawns under you and lifts you up to a predetermined height,
54:26 where you can jump to one of the clouds and take
54:29 control of the chocolate cannon which may or may not work.
54:35 Brands love the metaverse.
54:37 Or at least that’s the story.
54:41 Samsung, Nissan, Vodafone, Snapple, CitiBank, Pedigree,
54:43 Hershey, Mountain Dew, Trident, Sour Patch Kids,
54:46 Atari, Miller Lite, JP Morgan, everyone’s getting in on the metaverse!
54:51 Now, what that means is, uh, extremely flexible.
54:56 We’ve already dipped into Hersheyverse, but what else is out there?
55:01 It’s just… it’s weird, man.
55:06 Atari has probably the best looking location of any of these, but it still
55:10 principally consists of a large faux-social space
55:12 full of furniture that you can’t interact with.
55:15 Wait, have I even mentioned that yet?!
55:17 Yeah, you can’t sit on chairs in Decentraland!
55:21 The whole goddamn world is built of nothing but hangout spots and you can’t even
55:26 role play sitting around a table unless you
55:30 buy the user-created Sit emote from the marketplace!
55:34 Otherwise in the atari stronghold you have a slate of links that all
55:37 take you out of Decentraland and a couple
55:40 wearables that are no longer available.
55:42 The only thing to actually do here is play one
55:45 of the four variants of Breakout and feel the gnawing
55:48 cold reality seep into you as you realize that Decentraland
55:52 is such a monumental failure as a platform for socialization,
55:57 for commerce, and for gaming that it
56:00 can’t even handle properly emulating Breakout,
56:03 a game from 1976 that you can play on goddamn Google images!
56:10 Steve Wozniak built Breakout fifty years ago to run on 44 TTL chips
56:15 and a ham sandwich and that’s still
56:19 somehow too demanding a gaming experience for Decentraland.
56:24 The Onyx Lounge by JP Morgan Chase,
56:26 built in March 2022 and described by Fortune as a bet on “a metaverse
56:31 future that could be worth trillions” was
56:34 originally staffed only by a wandering tiger,
56:36 but has since been replaced with a cramped reading lounge.
56:40 The DCL branch of HSBC is a unique kind of awful,
56:44 with this deeply unsettling robot receptionist and stairs with no collision,
56:48 with the only problem being that it’s not clear
56:51 if this is an official HSBC project or not,
56:54 since impersonation is trivial and even
56:56 the official builds are glitchy and weird,
56:59 because it’s Decentraland: everything is glitchy and weird.
57:03 Particularly though,
57:04 as you go through a lot of these you start to notice a few trends.
57:08 First is a subject that we’ll talk about at length later,
57:10 which is that discussion of these ventures rarely feature anything meaningful.
57:14 They don’t tend to tell you how to actually find the location,
57:17 and tend to downplay the product itself,
57:20 typically limiting visuals to a wide screenshot
57:23 of an exterior, if anything at all.
57:26 Fortune didn’t even bother to mention the tiger.
57:29 It’s really more about the headline than the actual space.
57:34 Second is a trend of dispersion.
57:36 It’s not Hershey’s that’s in the metaverse,
57:39 it’s Hershey’s India and Philippines, it’s Nissan Italy, it’s Vodafone Turkey.
57:44 Third is a trend towards the temporary.
57:47 While the Atari metaverse headquarters is still standing and the Onyx
57:51 Lounge by JP Morgan Chase still sort of technically exists,
57:55 most of these aren’t actually brands “moving to the metaverse”,
58:00 they’re just promotional campaigns.
58:02 The Snapple Stronghold, Miller Lite Metalite Bar,
58:05 and Hersheyverse are already gone.
58:07 “And look, we’ve heard there aren’t a lot of people inside the Metaverse yet,
58:13 but marketers say it's gonna be a very big deal…”
58:15 The Meataversity of Steak-umm came and went in about two months.
58:19 The Trident Vibe x Sour Patch Kids Chew The Vibes
58:22 Dance Party has been replaced by an “office” for MoZeus Worldwide,
58:26 the ad agency that built it.
58:29 While a few corporations jumped in early and actually bought LAND,
58:33 that ship has seemingly already sailed,
58:35 and now the impetus for this isn’t originating with the brands
58:39 but with the digital ad agencies that they hire,
58:43 who then toss in a Decentraland “activation” as part of the package,
58:47 a way to recoup some value from the LAND that the ad agency bought.
58:52 Fourth is that they just overwhelmingly suck and need to constantly
58:56 direct users out of Decentraland in order to accomplish anything.
59:00 The Nissan experience will let you book a test drive
59:03 in Italy if you click a link to open their existing website.
59:07 The Atari store opens Atari’s actual store.
59:10 The Pedigree Fosterverse lets LAND holders
59:12 create a metaverse duplicate of a real
59:14 dog in a partnered shelter in need of a forever home.
59:17 The metaverse dog serves as a digital
59:20 billboard leading to the dog’s adoptapet page.
59:22 Of the three dogs the platform lists at time of writing,
59:25 all three have long-since been adopted out,
59:28 but their listings remain because the incentive for landholders
59:31 to participate is to get a Pedigree branded
59:33 dog on their parcel- so the metaverse dogs
59:36 are doomed to beg for adoption for all eternity.
59:39 So what does that all mean?
59:41 Well, the obvious, but speculative,
59:43 narrative is that ad agencies that have a stake
59:46 in the success of “the metaverse” are approaching brands
59:49 in smaller markets and pitching them on a vision
59:52 of “the future” and dazzling them with some cooked numbers.
59:55 They point to articles in real outlets like
59:58 Fortune with titles referencing a trillion dollar future,
1:00:00 and, like, in the face of that can
1:00:04 you even afford the possibility of being wrong?
1:00:08 It’s the lamest version of Pascal’s Wager.
1:00:11 Back on the Genesis Plaza spawn platform we’ve got
1:00:14 these pillars that I’ve shown but not really talked about yet.
1:00:17 These are Decentraland’s solution to discoverability in their metaverse,
1:00:21 or, well, at least one of their attempted solutions.
1:00:25 As already mentioned, the Classics pillar includes Dragon Rush
1:00:28 in the coveted bottom spot where you can
1:00:30 actually interact without needing to crank
1:00:32 the camera or use the awkward skeuomorphic buttons.
1:00:35 On the right hand side, though, is the Crowds pillar,
1:00:38 and for the last year one location has dominated that bottom slot.
1:00:42 ICE Poker- The Stronghold,
1:00:45 which routinely boasts over 100 attendees, often pushing 200.
1:00:49 Now, that number is middling in isolation, but by the standards of Decentraland,
1:00:54 where 12 qualifies as a crowd, it’s pretty meaningful.
1:00:59 Of course a ton of those attendees are idle at the default spawn location,
1:01:02 but let’s not ruin the fun.
1:01:07 As for the legality of this, well,
1:01:09 the opinion of Decentra Games’ Singapore-based lawyers
1:01:11 is that it’s not gambling under relevant statutes,
1:01:14 thus they don’t need a gaming license to operate.
1:01:17 The important thing here is that the only thing in Decentraland
1:01:20 that seems to be actually successful is outright just a casino,
1:01:23 and regardless of the sentiment of Jacque Law LLC,
1:01:26 the community seems to be taking it for what it clearly is.
1:01:30 “So as you can see I’ve earned $2.98 from playing.
1:01:36 And honestly I’ve only been gambli~oops playing
1:01:38 the casino for a couple of days.”
1:01:41 The odd thing is that it’s seemingly only the poker tables, at that.
1:01:45 Like, really it’s just this one specific casino.
1:01:47 There’s a whole bunch of different casinos around the gambling zone,
1:01:51 basically all of them owned by DecentraGames under the ICE brand,
1:01:54 but The Stronghold is the only one anyone’s ever in.
1:01:59 Turns out that’s because they already ran into legal problems!
1:02:04 You used to be able to gamble
1:02:06 on the slots at Tominoya with your cryptocurrency directly,
1:02:08 but between glitchy behavior that would eat transactions,
1:02:11 high service fees, long wait times to resolve bets,
1:02:14 and, most critically, some pointed letters from various regulatory bodies,
1:02:18 The Stronghold is the only location that supports the current brown bag policy,
1:02:22 and it only has poker, all the others have been converted to free-play.
1:02:27 You can still go over to The Aquarium and play blackjack,
1:02:29 but you will do so alone,
1:02:31 these people are not here to play, they are here to gamble.
1:02:35 When discussing Decentraland,
1:02:36 it’s hard to overlook the subject of its abysmal user base.
1:02:41 Indeed, the biggest story to come out
1:02:44 of Decentraland in 2022 was drama over DCL’s metrics.
1:02:47 In October 2022, crypto outlet Coindesk reported on DappRadar’s Data
1:02:52 that claimed Decentraland had as few as 38 daily active users.
1:02:56 Decentraland fired back in a blog post, scrutinizing the data,
1:02:59 calling it misinformation, and pushing their own value of 8,000.
1:03:03 This back and forth continued,
1:03:04 with Coindesk releasing the ‘final word’ on the subject in January
1:03:08 2023- with their research suggesting an active daily user base of 810.
1:03:13 Now, it’s tempting to fall into this whirlpool,
1:03:16 as apparently Coindesk did for 3 months,
1:03:19 and litigate the definition of a “user,” but let’s head this off at the pass.
1:03:25 Whether Decentraland has daily activity of 40 users,
1:03:29 800 users or 8000 users is irrelevant,
1:03:33 in their business these are all the same number.
1:03:37 Emotionally it feels like a significant difference.
1:03:40 But let’s give some context to these numbers.
1:03:42 At 810 users, It's competing with Lord of the Rings Online
1:03:46 and it has a fraction of the users of Fishing Planet- which like,
1:03:52 it’s Fishing Planet.
1:03:54 The most generous numbers for Decentraland put it
1:03:56 in competition with Star Wars: The Old Republic.
1:04:00 All of these values are just Steam users,
1:04:02 it doesn’t include the users who access the games
1:04:04 directly through their dedicated launchers or on other platforms,
1:04:07 so these numbers are inherently conservative.
1:04:12 Despite having these varying player counts,
1:04:14 these games all have fundamentally the same business model.
1:04:18 They are operating a micro-MMO.
1:04:21 If you ever wonder how ‘dead MMOs’ survive, it’s by running tight ships.
1:04:25 These teams, often small,
1:04:27 inherit a product that was hugely expensive to produce five,
1:04:31 ten, fifteen years ago, and they are tasked with maintaining it in order
1:04:34 to support a small but loyal user base.
1:04:37 It is possible for Runes of Magic to be profitable
1:04:40 off the back of a single digit number of ‘whales’,
1:04:43 people who just really like Runes of Magic.
1:04:47 The same is true for Fiesta Online or LotRO.
1:04:50 So it doesn’t matter what Decentraland’s true daily user count looks like,
1:04:55 because any number they’ve ever pushed falls into the same band of ‘long,
1:05:01 long dead MMO.’ The fact that Decentraland has a similar user base
1:05:06 to DC Universe Online is the red flag that most people notice first.
1:05:11 Daybreak Game Company is a game developer
1:05:13 that currently owns and maintains numerous old MMOs.
1:05:17 Including Everquest, DC Universe Online, and Lord of the Rings Online.
1:05:21 This is a tough business, and in December of 2020,
1:05:25 Daybreak was acquired by Enad Global 7,
1:05:27 in an agreement valued at $300 million dollars.
1:05:31 So this company, that owns and maintains all of these MMOs
1:05:35 that are all individually comparable to Decentraland’s user base,
1:05:39 is meant to be worth a fraction of Decentraland?
1:05:43 “And this is the story behind the company worth nearly ten
1:05:46 billion dollars at the market peak.” It’s been said numerous times before,
1:05:50 but it shouldn’t be left unsaid here.
1:05:53 Decentraland’s purported value, based on the market cap of its cryptocurrency,
1:05:58 is completely disconnected from reality.
1:06:01 Decentraland’s product is clearly trash.
1:06:04 As a video game, it struggles to set itself apart from Inferna,
1:06:08 an MMO that advertises itself as an underdog off the back of its
1:06:12 “3 man dev team.” So Decentraland goes all-in on the speculation, on narrative.
1:06:17 Its value has nothing to do with what Decentraland is today.
1:06:21 But what it will be… and what it did do when you weren’t watching.
1:06:31 “Because the metaverse in its more mature form will be a lot more advanced than
1:06:37 this and a lot more sophisticated than this, but this really is how it starts.
1:06:43 This is the beginning of it and you know this is going
1:06:45 to be the shape of things for the next twenty to thirty years,
1:06:48 I really believe that.” The way that crypto users talk
1:06:51 about Decentraland is so dissociated from what you yourself witness,
1:06:55 that it seems like they’re talking about an entirely different thing.
1:06:59 Like is this it?
1:07:01 Is this the billion dollar virtual world?
1:07:04 Surely I must be missing something.
1:07:07 “I’m sorry you don’t like to make money
1:07:09 here in the network” Like so much of web3,
1:07:13 Decentraland has weaponized its speculative element.
1:07:15 Since they are the future, the product as it exists now borders on irrelevant.
1:07:20 The proposed inevitability of the metaverse is their greatest
1:07:24 asset- because they don’t even need to try.
1:07:27 This is the everything-proof shield that Decentraland
1:07:30 users have created to guard from criticism.
1:07:33 Decentraland and all its contents is forever a prototype-
1:07:37 always just an indication of what the future will bring.
1:07:40 Being bad is not a fatal flaw in the crypto space.
1:07:43 Just look at the Red Ape Family,
1:07:45 they’re visibly incompetent and they still made it to three episodes,
1:07:48 even if the creator is too much of a coward to post the third.
1:07:52 Every successful crypto project is bad,
1:07:54 but with enough legitimacy you can mask that fact.
1:07:57 This generates extremely funny scenarios,
1:07:59 like crypto shill Robin from The Defiant
1:08:01 stumbling through Decentraland’s barren wasteland while
1:08:03 trying to invent reasons why what he’s looking at isn’t plainly obviously ass.
1:08:08 “And I often say that the Metaverse is… it’s a world that rotates around you.
1:08:15 And this is what I mean, the world literally does rotate around you,
1:08:19 this is… it’s a universe where you’re always at the center.
1:08:23 That is the whole kind of mindset change that you have to get
1:08:28 when you talk about the metaverse.” Decentraland
1:08:31 users understand this need for legitimacy intuitively,
1:08:34 and so it becomes what they crave above all else.
1:08:38 That is why they value brand activations so highly, no matter the circumstances.
1:08:43 Being able to put “Vodafone” on their world map,
1:08:46 or “Pedigree” in their events tab,
1:08:48 spins the narrative that real companies are here in Decentraland.
1:08:52 Even embarrassing brand activations are defended,
1:08:54 because “they’re just dipping their toes in, this is just the beginning.”
1:08:59 Decentraland users seek to encourage brand
1:09:01 activations and events through pathetic pandering.
1:09:03 They’ll smile through gritted teeth as they insist
1:09:06 that the Hershey’s Experience really is interesting and successful.
1:09:10 By performatively engaging with events and brand activations,
1:09:13 users seek to create the illusion that these events are
1:09:17 successful in the hopes of drawing in the next sucker.
1:09:20 “What’s cooking good looking people.
1:09:21 We’re in Decentraland and we’re in Hersheyverse.
1:09:23 Can you believe that?
1:09:25 Hershey’s bro, Hershey.
1:09:26 However you say that, Hershey.
1:09:29 Pretty sure it’s Hershey, the fuck bro Mandela?
1:09:32 Bro.
1:09:33 Who woulda thought that Hershey was gonna make a little plot on Decentraland.
1:09:37 You know before you know it you’re gonna see other candy companies.
1:09:40 You know there’s already beverage companies, there’s already alcohol companies,
1:09:43 there’s fucking Yahoo, Amazon is already in here,
1:09:46 and Hershey is the next big one to get into this shit.” This principle scales
1:09:51 up from the Pedigree Fosterverse all the way
1:09:52 up to the marquee events of the platform.
1:09:54 The Metaverse Music Festival, which in its most recent outing was
1:09:57 tossed around as having featured performances from Bjork,
1:10:00 Ozzy Ozzbourne, and Mötorhead,
1:10:02 consisted almost entirely of pre-recorded messages from the musicians
1:10:06 followed by just playing a couple music videos.
1:10:10 “It’s awesome to be in the Metaverse with you
1:10:11 and it feels great to be here in Decentraland.
1:10:13 I hope you’re all having an amazing time today.
1:10:14 My name is Dave Mustaine from Megadeath and today
1:10:14 I’ll be playing you a few of my favorite tracks.
1:10:16 Let me know what you think about
1:10:16 this one.” [Opening chords of The Sick, The Dying,
1:10:27 and The Dead] I criticized Fortnite for being overly
1:10:33 poetic with its definition of a “live” Marshmallow concert,
1:10:36 and this is just, this is just so much worse.
1:10:40 The Metaverse Fashion Week, as the name implies,
1:10:42 was a week-long fashion event held in Decentraland in March of 2022,
1:10:45 scheduled to run just after the Milan Fashion Week.
1:10:49 The event was organized by the Decentraland Foundation,
1:10:52 the developers of Decentraland.
1:10:53 It was the involvement of the Foundation that saw
1:10:55 the Metaverse Fashion Week get some real attention and media coverage.
1:10:59 A number of lifestyle, fashion,
1:11:00 and tech journalists were sent in to cover the event,
1:11:03 for whom many were experiencing the metaverse for the first time.
1:11:07 The event was billed as an opportunity to see
1:11:09 the next major innovation in the fashion industry.
1:11:12 A new way for fashion to be designed, bought and sold.
1:11:15 It would be the melding of fashion and art.
1:11:19 Finally, art and fashion- together at last.
1:11:22 The word ‘phygital’ got thrown around a lot,
1:11:25 to refer to the simultaneous purchasing of a digital and physical good.
1:11:29 Like you buy a digital hat in Decentraland, and a real hat turns up in the mail.
1:11:33 Not to get distracted, but World of Warcraft did this exact promotion in 2010.
1:11:37 This plush Wind Rider Cub came with an in-game pet, it’s not a new thing.
1:11:42 But of course, they don’t frame it that way;
1:11:44 instead you’re buying a single hat with two simultaneous planes of existence.
1:11:48 It’s not a bundle of two products, it’s the same hat in two different forms.
1:11:53 There are dozens of tech startups eager to composite clothing over
1:11:57 photo or video and label it as the future of self-expression.
1:12:01 This so-called ‘screen wear’ is at its best, an artful photoshop job,
1:12:05 and at worst, essentially just a Tiktok or Zoom filter.
1:12:08 “There are different avenues.
1:12:10 So the first thing is you could wear it on your real self through an AR filter.
1:12:15 So that’s number one, and that’s the part where technology is still,
1:12:19 you know, a work in progress.
1:12:21 It's going to get better and better, we know it.
1:12:22 So I think as we, regular people,
1:12:25 start transitioning more and more into the virtual world,
1:12:29 spending more time in virtual environments and that barrier
1:12:32 between physical and digital starts blurring more and more,
1:12:36 and we will start consuming digital fashion, digital sneakers, digital makeup,
1:12:41 digital jewelry” This was the rhetoric that defined the Metaverse Fashion Week.
1:12:45 So, our ragtag ensemble of journalists and creators were sent
1:12:48 in to report on the future of reality and fashion.
1:12:51 How did it go?
1:12:53 Do you really need to be told at this point?
1:12:56 [annoying sounds from DCL] “What the fuck did I just watch?” “After
1:13:11 a pre-show trial session spent exploring Decentraland’s
1:13:14 ‘Luxury Fashion District’—maybe it was too early,
1:13:17 but the only fashion space I teleported to was an empty DKNY store.
1:13:20 “While there were plenty of fashion shows,
1:13:22 very few were successful because the overall experience fell flat.
1:13:26 Perhaps expectedly, many weren’t able to capture the magic of a physical show,
1:13:31 where attendees are fully immersed
1:13:32 and emotionally invested in the brand’s collection.
1:13:35 The game-ified aesthetic in Decentraland took away from the fantasy
1:13:38 and craftsmanship of luxury fashion and, simply put,
1:13:42 the avatar models weren’t as inspiring.
1:13:45 “I don’t know how I feel about it.
1:13:54 I literally canceled everything including my workout to watch this show.”
1:14:00 And there was just very little documenting of the event in general.
1:14:04 This is due to a combination of disinterest,
1:14:06 but also a deliberate effort not to showcase the embarrassing product.
1:14:10 Even the brands involved in the show
1:14:12 downplayed the Decentraland part of their Decentraland show.
1:14:16 “The shows didn’t look the way the brands expected they would,
1:14:18 as publications on their social networks made clear.
1:14:21 This is because brands posted the best photos from the show
1:14:24 and not the reality of pixelated avatars and simple looks.” Likewise,
1:14:27 musicians who “performed” at the music festival
1:14:31 didn’t exactly rush to show off the event, either, so footage of any
1:14:36 of these theoretically big events is shockingly sparse.
1:14:40 This isn’t some grand conspiracy,
1:14:42 it’s just dozens of individuals independently reaching the same conclusion:
1:14:45 the product sucks and it’d be a bad idea to show it.
1:14:49 This is true for both DCL users, but also the journalists covering it.
1:14:54 Decentraland looks so unprofessional that coverage
1:14:56 of DCL looks unprofessional by extension.
1:14:59 “And this actually looks, it looks sorta like me.
1:15:03 I like it so much I’m going to dance for you.”
1:15:06 “We do have a whisky distillery” “You’ve been holding out.
1:15:11 Oh, this is cool.” “Here we can walk around and actually
1:15:15 see the distillery from the inside.” “I enjoy your virtual distillery,
1:15:18 not so much your virtual bourbon, so cheers Gigi.” “Cheers to that!” “I mean,
1:15:24 so here’s the thing, uh, is it for us,
1:15:29 I don’t know, but there are hundreds of thousands
1:15:33 of people who already live in the metaverse, who exist in the metaverse,
1:15:38 who are buying things or hanging out.” This creates an environment where
1:15:41 the Metaverse Fashion Week was a thing talked about in the abstract.
1:15:45 It was a thing that did happen, but the reality is slowly eroded away.
1:15:51 Most people who learned about the event didn’t see the product,
1:15:54 they only heard the narrative.
1:15:56 And that narrative went a little
1:15:58 something like this: “The wearables were supposed
1:16:00 to be available immediately after the runway event at a nearby pop-up shop,
1:16:04 and for free— a rarity considering
1:16:06 fashion’s rush to capitalize on crypto clothing.
1:16:09 For some reason, a couple of hours after it ended,
1:16:12 they weren’t displayed yet inside the paisley-patterned store.
1:16:15 A good reason to come back.” This journalist witnessed a broken feature,
1:16:20 they experienced a bug.
1:16:21 Rather than reporting critically on the failure of a key feature of the event,
1:16:25 the article pulls its punch in the last
1:16:27 line through the language of puff journalism.
1:16:29 Out of context, it reads almost like satire.
1:16:32 But if you read enough coverage of Decentraland, this becomes a very real trend.
1:16:37 “Last of all, I can definitely see
1:16:38 this event evolving into something much more engaging.
1:16:40 there are communities of people who
1:16:42 are replicating in various metaverse outposts
1:16:44 behaviors that people (or people dressed
1:16:46 as elves) have long cultivated in reality.
1:16:49 And fashion is one of those behaviors.
1:16:51 So we’re all just going to need a better graphics card.
1:16:54 “However, MVFW did provide a glimpse into possibilities
1:16:57 for how brands can build their narratives
1:17:00 in the metaverse—offering immersive experiences and innovative
1:17:03 ways to expand offerings beyond the physical.
1:17:06 “Once VR glasses are integrated the experience is going to be on a whole
1:17:11 other level.” And in the absence of any voices to the contrary,
1:17:14 that becomes the narrative of the Metaverse Fashion Week.
1:17:17 It had ‘some technical issues’, ‘reviews were mixed’,
1:17:19 but it was a proof of concept that left
1:17:22 journalists feeling certain that the concept has a future.
1:17:25 And through that lens, that allows those involved to say with a straight
1:17:28 face that the event was a success.
1:17:30 “It was a fantastic four days.
1:17:33 As a proof-point of what is to come;
1:17:36 this is the early evolution of decentralized commerce” On the whole,
1:17:40 journalists are seemingly overwhelmed by the tempest
1:17:42 of claims and ideas surrounding the metaverse.
1:17:45 We can appreciate why this is the case;
1:17:47 a lot of this is vague either on purpose or on accident.
1:17:51 It is not the job of the writers
1:17:53 at Women’s Wear Daily to crack crypto wide open.
1:17:56 It’s all too big, too out of scope,
1:17:58 they’re convinced that they “just don’t get it.” So they defer
1:18:02 to the explanations and narratives given
1:18:04 to them by people trying to sell something.
1:18:06 “I mean, so here’s the thing,
1:18:09 I…” Eric Ravenscraft has discussed this phenomenon with a specific
1:18:12 eye towards journalists in outlets like the New York Times uncritically
1:18:16 parroting the vocabulary of real estate for the digital groundbreaking
1:18:20 of metaverse headquarters that in many cases don’t even actually exist.
1:18:26 This goes all the way back to the first major coverage given
1:18:29 to Decentraland- A BBC story in 2018 in response to the initial land auction.
1:18:34 “In Decentraland users can build whatever they
1:18:37 can imagine on plots of virtual land.
1:18:40 But the creators are giving BBC Tending
1:18:44 a sneak peek.” What’s important to remember
1:18:47 here is that the Decentraland we’re seeing wouldn’t exist for another 2 years,
1:18:53 the actual product in 2018 looked like this.
1:18:56 So by its very nature there is nothing really to show.
1:19:02 And it means we get these lovely little artifacts from the past.
1:19:05 “Right, whoah, I seem to be on some sort of dance floor,
1:19:11 I can hear music, it’s very colourful.
1:19:15 So there seems to be a zombie out in the distance.
1:19:19 Oh gosh, he’s coming right at me!” “It’ll be pretty much exactly like
1:19:22 Facebook except you’ll be able to hear and see each other in VR.
1:19:25 So a bit more of a real experience.
1:19:30 As long as we’ve got the internet, stick our headsets on, and I’ll be able
1:19:33 to have friends come round my house in Decentraland,
1:19:34 or I can go to their house for a virtual cup
1:19:36 of tea.” “How high would the price have to get for you
1:19:39 to sell that land?” “I’m not selling it until it’s worth at least
1:19:43 $10 million.” “Ten million?” “Yeah.” He sold for $980 a year later.
1:19:48 “A million dollars!
1:19:49 But it doesn’t exist?” “It does here, and it will do,
1:19:53 in about a year I believe.” The spine
1:19:55 of this story is built not on what Decentraland did,
1:19:58 or was doing, but what it will do.
1:20:01 All of the features that will be implemented and benchmarks it will hit.
1:20:06 Journalists and vloggers who very understandably
1:20:08 don’t know the deep lore of Decentraland’s
1:20:10 development still mention VR as a thing that just hasn’t been implemented yet,
1:20:15 despite the feature being scrapped.
1:20:17 “Once VR glasses are integrated the experience is going
1:20:20 to be on a whole other level.” Decentraland craves legitimacy,
1:20:24 but it can subsist on crumbs.
1:20:26 It is a speculative real estate scheme which
1:20:29 is rapidly approaching the Nigerian Prince level of self-selection.
1:20:33 That means that for its purpose, all it needs is for people to discuss it,
1:20:37 and for the conversation to feature the defenses we’ve been discussing.
1:20:41 It’s just a prototype, it will improve, the metaverse is inevitable.
1:20:47 Because this reporting loads the bases
1:20:49 for investment advice like this to sound believable.
1:20:52 “Land is hitting all time highs for value and people are
1:20:56 asking ‘can people really afford to buy these plots for a lot?
1:21:00 Yes because there’s going to be large commercial
1:21:02 and business entities that are going to be able
1:21:04 to make a lot more than what they’re going to pay for this land- they know it.
1:21:07 It has long term ramifications in the industry,
1:21:10 so it’s a great investment.” If you took Kevin’s advice at the time,
1:21:14 you’d be in the red less than two weeks later,
1:21:17 have lost half your investment 2 months later and be down 80 to 90% today.
1:21:23 That is the danger posed by nonchalant coverage of Decentraland,
1:21:26 boosting the narrative that major brands
1:21:28 and mass adoption are right around the corner.
1:21:31 There’s no such thing as bad publicity for Decentraland.
1:21:36 It continues to subsist through performative hype and deception.
1:21:41 Decentraland needs to be recognized for what it is,
1:21:44 and can’t be given the easy way out.
1:21:47 Decentraland is not, and has never been, a VR experience.
1:21:51 You cannot order a pizza in Decentraland.
1:21:55 Decentraland is not the future.
1:21:57 It has never, and will never be, worth a billion dollars.
1:22:12 So at this point I think it’s plain to see
1:22:15 that the product of Decentraland is, at best, bad.
1:22:18 But Decentraland users are battle-hardened on this point-
1:22:21 they’ve had years of defending against this claim.
1:22:24 Many DCL users will concede that sure, the product itself is janky,
1:22:28 but obviously its just a prototype- and the real appeal of Decentraland,
1:22:31 what sets it apart from its competition, is its system of governance.
1:22:37 Decentraland was built and is maintained by ‘the Foundation’,
1:22:40 the actual developers behind the product.
1:22:42 Meilich and Ordano always intended for the Foundation to go hands-off,
1:22:45 simply becoming the underlying machinery of the world
1:22:48 akin to the invisibility of a web host.
1:22:51 As part of this invisibility, they wanted users to handle as many
1:22:54 elements of development and maintenance as possible.
1:22:57 This is characterized through the language
1:22:59 of ownership- Decentraland is “owned by its users”,
1:23:02 so naturally the users have direct control over the product.
1:23:07 This is further obfuscated through the language of Decentraland
1:23:10 as a reified space- which is to say,
1:23:13 Decentraland users present themselves as akin to the government
1:23:16 of a virtual world- enacting policies in a democratic fashion.
1:23:20 They do this through the Decentraland DAO.
1:23:23 Because the Decentraland DAO dresses itself
1:23:26 in the language of governance and law,
1:23:28 it’s tempting to engage with them on that level and take the DAO seriously.
1:23:32 We tried to give them a fair go, but we found ourselves repeating the mistakes
1:23:36 of the journalists we just criticized.
1:23:38 To contrast them against real governments
1:23:40 implies that the comparison is warranted, and humors the notion that these are
1:23:44 adults attempting to revolutionize the concept of governance.
1:23:47 So let’s adjust expectations and lead with the soul of the DAO.
1:23:52 Upon revisiting the DAO’s governance site for this project,
1:23:54 the first thing that caught our eye was this.
1:23:57 A proposal to fire a Committee member for abuse of power and bias.
1:24:01 And let me tell you,
1:24:02 the contents of this would be right at home on Something Awful circa 2008.
1:24:07 A guy got banned on Discord and got so upset that he wrote a 1000-word
1:24:11 essay on a sock puppet about why
1:24:13 the moderator should be fired for abusing their authority.
1:24:17 Because when asked, the moderator kinda said he was a pluralist
1:24:20 and “pluralists hate the individual.” And on and on it goes.
1:24:24 The proposal was rejected,
1:24:26 but it was rejected as an invalid question because the Team Manager
1:24:30 of the DAO Facilitation Squad does not count as a member of the DAO Committee,
1:24:34 and thus a complaint would need to be made to the Grant Support Squad who
1:24:38 would then need to recommend a proposal
1:24:41 to revoke the grant funding the DAO Facilitation Squad,
1:24:44 thus firing Matimio indirectly.
1:24:47 Then there’s Kevin’s failed grant proposal- where multiple people rejected
1:24:50 the proposal at least in part because Kevin blocked them on Twitter.
1:24:54 When you block someone on Twitter, this is where they end up.
1:24:58 This is a group of people that sees the Sugar Club,
1:25:02 the empty bar next to Hershey’s,
1:25:04 requesting $60,000 US dollars to fund its “operating
1:25:07 costs”- and they’re like yeah that seems reasonable.
1:25:12 When they hold elections, the candidates are asked questions like:
1:25:15 “What are each candidate's stance on bringing
1:25:18 physical world ideologies into our decentralized world?
1:25:21 You know, government structures- democracy,
1:25:24 communism, whatever.” In that example,
1:25:26 the candidates universally accepted the idea that DCL was
1:25:30 apolitical- and they would support politics being patched into Decentraland,
1:25:33 but only if it achieved majority support in an official vote.
1:25:37 “This is like a grand experiment,
1:25:39 however there’s a lot at stake so I think any ideology that we’re
1:25:44 considering bringing in it would be best handled on a side-project.” My dudes,
1:25:51 the ideology is coming from inside the house.
1:25:55 Their philosophy of governance
1:25:57 minimizes individual authority and decision-making.
1:25:59 But they pass phaux-legislation that gives committee
1:26:02 members absolute discretion with no appeals process.
1:26:05 The Decentraland DAO is no less of a failure than the Hershey’s Experience
1:26:09 or DecentRally- we’re just changing gears
1:26:12 from bad video games to bureaucratic incompetence.
1:26:16 You can’t really understand the DAO until you wrap
1:26:19 your head around just how inequitable the voting situation is.
1:26:24 DAOs often makes use of weighted voting schemes.
1:26:27 The main purpose of this is to ‘acknowledge
1:26:29 a user’s stake in the project’- the logic
1:26:32 being that those with the most invested have the most at stake in the DAO.
1:26:36 Though the details can vary between DAO’s,
1:26:39 Decentraland’s scheme is refreshingly straight forward.
1:26:42 Votes are weighted based on the sum
1:26:44 of Decentraland tokens in the attached wallet.
1:26:47 1 MANA is worth 1 point of Vote Power.
1:26:49 It’s just wealth, the more money you have,
1:26:52 the more your vote counts- one to one.
1:26:55 Naturally, this leads to those with wealth
1:26:57 shutting down any proposal that bothers them.
1:26:59 For instance- Let’s look at this proposal.
1:27:01 “Should we address the Voting Power Distribution in the DAO?” In the proposal,
1:27:06 a DAO Committee member pointed out the obvious issues of the system.
1:27:09 And the results turned out like this.
1:27:11 163 votes for, 45 against.
1:27:15 That is 78% support in terms of ‘real’ votes,
1:27:18 though we’ll get to that, but once Voting Power
1:27:21 was accounted for, the margin inverted, to 73% against.
1:27:26 And then even within that, of the 5.18 million VP against the proposal,
1:27:32 4 million came from a single wallet.
1:27:35 4 wallets make up almost all of the votes against
1:27:40 the proposal- 99.7% of the VP in the 73% majority.
1:27:45 The next step would naturally be to play
1:27:47 with these figures versus the real votes,
1:27:49 you know ‘2% of voters accounted for 73% of the VP’- but the issue
1:27:54 there is that even though this weighted system allegedly exists to combat bots,
1:27:59 users still use bots for the optics.
1:28:03 When you actually look at the votes,
1:28:05 128 of the 209 votes were from accounts with 0 VP.
1:28:09 These were accounts with literally no influence on the vote.
1:28:13 80% of those dummy votes were for Yes.
1:28:16 19 of these accounts only had a single VP,
1:28:19 and then a bunch had 2 VP- both equally capable of being socket puppets.
1:28:25 But whether Guest#60fd is a real user or not
1:28:29 is irrelevant- because one wallet lapped the competition.
1:28:33 One wallet told the DAO go to [static] itself,
1:28:39 just really [static], and the DAO politely complied.
1:28:45 These whales are often burner accounts who are not available for negotiation,
1:28:49 their decrees are silent, yet drown out all other voices.
1:28:53 But there is still an urge to pretend like negotiation is a possibility.
1:28:59 “But we still did get it denied.
1:29:01 Although we met the threshold of approval in the final hours we
1:29:05 did get 3 votes which came in to deny and sort of made
1:29:09 us step back and say we need to re-evaluate how we’re bringing
1:29:13 this forward because ultimately even reaching
1:29:16 the VP threshold of approval by the community,
1:29:19 it seems like the whales still felt like something
1:29:22 else needed to be addressed outside of the other feedback
1:29:26 that we had.” Kevin is clearly upset by this, and despite
1:29:30 all his talk about “addressing the concerns of the whales”,
1:29:33 he understands that he’s talking crap.
1:29:35 He wants the DAO to give him money,
1:29:37 the anonymous whales in question do not want him to receive money.
1:29:41 There is no negotiating or compromising, just pharaohs you can pray to.
1:29:46 So that leads us naturally onto the subject of the DAO’s management.
1:29:49 The DAO has been speed-running bureaucratic paralysis.
1:29:53 In 2020 they attempted to automate governance
1:29:55 by running an on-chain system, but it didn’t work,
1:29:58 no one wanted to pay transaction costs to vote
1:30:01 on every name ban and point of interest,
1:30:03 so they moved the system back off-chain six months later.
1:30:07 Problem is that without automation you need humans to push the buttons.
1:30:12 Decentraland is quite proud of the DAO’s grant scheme-
1:30:14 but it’s been a massive headache for them recently.
1:30:17 For the first year they gave away 3.5 million
1:30:19 dollars in grants to develop projects that would aid adoption,
1:30:23 but the grant application had no standard process,
1:30:25 and grants had no oversight and no accountability- because
1:30:29 no one existed with the authority to do it.
1:30:33 The initial proposal alluded to the idea of revoking
1:30:36 grants- but included no framework to implement it.
1:30:39 So the DAO Committee put forward a proposal to set
1:30:41 up a Squad whose job would be to help
1:30:43 grantees deliver their product- and in the extreme case where
1:30:46 a project had collapsed or was too far off course,
1:30:49 the Squad could recommend that the Committee revoke the grant.
1:30:52 But the Committee is administrative, they can’t revoke the grant,
1:30:56 and the Squad are essentially independent contractors,
1:30:58 they can’t revoke the grant either,
1:31:01 so we need a new committee with express permission to revoke grants.
1:31:07 Enter the Grant Revocation Committee.
1:31:09 We could go crazy with dissecting this, but the short
1:31:12 version is that these committees are meant to have minimal discretion.
1:31:17 The authors of the policy seem to think
1:31:19 discretion only exists if you acknowledge it.
1:31:22 So rather than limiting the scope of consideration
1:31:25 like any other discretionary position in government,
1:31:27 they limit the committee to only considering
1:31:30 cases that are actively handed to them,
1:31:32 but put no restraints on the committee members’ actual decision making
1:31:38 effectively giving them absolute power to revoke any grant for any reason.
1:31:45 And as the cherry on top, there’s no appeals process.
1:31:49 Because to appeal the verdict would require a different group
1:31:52 with the authority to overturn the decision of the Revocation Committee.
1:31:56 The committee intended to have minimal
1:31:59 discretion is completely unrestrained with zero accountability.
1:32:03 Oh and these guys are paid commission for every verdict- so the DAO is
1:32:10 about to learn real fast why we don’t do that in the real world.
1:32:14 Then we have the Facilitation Squad, the Governance Squad,
1:32:18 the Protocol Squad, the Security Advisory Board,
1:32:20 the newly proposed Working Groups.
1:32:22 They’re expanding the DAO Committee from 3 to 5 members,
1:32:25 but only after an election to replace one of the original 3.
1:32:29 In trying to minimize human involvement they have instead ballooned it,
1:32:34 and, like, look at the participation numbers.
1:32:37 Generously there’s a few hundred people actively involved
1:32:40 in the DAO in any capacity at all, and at this rate every single one of them is
1:32:45 going to be in at least one squad or work group.
1:32:49 More realistically the couple dozen people
1:32:51 with the inclination to spend their free
1:32:53 time role playing bureaucrats are going to be sitting on the accountability
1:32:57 squad that has oversight over the oversight work group that advises
1:33:01 the spending council on how much the accountability squad should be paid.
1:33:06 Oh, and these bureaucrats are paid in MANA,
1:33:08 which as we’ve seen is a direct source of political power.
1:33:12 Like, do you remember that time Yemel agreed
1:33:15 with Yemel that Yemel should be paid $150/hour in MANA?
1:33:19 Would you be shocked to learn that Yemel,
1:33:21 who agreed with Yemel about paying Yemel $150 an hour,
1:33:24 is friends with Melich and Ordano from back in the days when they
1:33:27 all spent their time at a tech bro flop house they called Casa Voltaire?
1:33:31 And through all this bureaucratic garbage, it’s easy to lose sight of the truth.
1:33:35 The DAO has no actual authority.
1:33:41 Decentraland isn’t “owned by its users”,
1:33:43 it's owned by its owners- the Foundation.
1:33:46 While the Foundation cedes the copyright on material submitted by users,
1:33:50 the Terms of Use make it very clear that the Foundation
1:33:54 holds the copyright on the Decentraland part of Decentraland.
1:33:58 As Catalina Goanta points out,
1:34:00 this conflicts with the rhetoric that Decentraland is owned by its users,
1:34:05 when the most significant legal right
1:34:07 in this area is unambiguously owned by the Foundation.
1:34:11 Even looking past that, can it really be
1:34:13 said that Decentraland is owned by its users when
1:34:16 the DAO is currently being held hostage by a dozen
1:34:20 whales whose proportional voting rights dwarf their peers?
1:34:24 Now, being a digital landlord doesn’t require much engagement at all.
1:34:28 I would hazard that whoever owns fifty identical Decentraland homes plastered
1:34:32 with For Sale advertisements isn’t really
1:34:35 a Decentraland user above the most literal threshold.
1:34:39 I, on the other hand, am demonstrably a user of Decentraland.
1:34:43 Given how dead engagement is I feel pretty
1:34:46 confident in estimating that I spend far more
1:34:49 hours per year actively looking around and doing
1:34:51 stuff in the world than the median LAND owner.
1:34:55 But I am not an owner of Decentraland by virtue of that time spent in the world,
1:34:59 there is no mechanism that correlates the two,
1:35:02 that gives ownership to those who use it
1:35:04 and strips ownership from those who idly hoard.
1:35:08 The mechanism of ownership is not usage, it’s ownership of LAND and MANA.
1:35:14 The arc of Decentraland’s development is dictated by the Foundation.
1:35:18 They may occasionally ask the DAO what features they’d want to see,
1:35:22 or act on simple proposals for technical changes-
1:35:25 but the DAO is not Decentraland’s board of directors.
1:35:30 “First, Decentraland is always working with the community because we are a DAO.
1:35:35 As a decentralized platform we are mostly governed by the DAO.
1:35:40 So we are not a corporation, so our roadmap also operates differently because we
1:35:45 always try to look into what the community
1:35:48 is aiming.” Notice how she doesn’t say “we’re bound by the decisions of the DAO,
1:35:53 because they’re our bosses”.
1:35:55 Instead the Foundation is “working with the community” and “trying to look
1:35:59 into where the community is aiming.” When
1:36:01 discussing Decentraland’s prospective value to actual businesses,
1:36:04 the Foundation can’t say with a straight
1:36:06 face that representatives from Target need to get
1:36:08 in touch with the DAO Facilitation Squad to outline the contents of a proposal.
1:36:14 At a certain point, all the talk
1:36:16 of decentralized ownership and political revolution
1:36:18 needs to get put aside so Dolce& Gabbana will actually respond to the emails.
1:36:24 In Line Goes Up, we all had a good
1:36:26 laugh at DAOs whose central product was undefined.
1:36:28 “Are we a comic book,
1:36:30 or a bi-monthly curated box of snacks?” But to their credit-
1:36:34 that is in keeping with the philosophy of a DAO.
1:36:36 In the case of Decentraland, the Foundation came first and knows what it is,
1:36:41 and what it wants to be.
1:36:43 If the DAO were to vote for the project to become
1:36:46 a 2D Metroidvania set in a hypothetical fourth Punic War,
1:36:49 in the visual style of NHL ‘94- sorry, that isn’t happening.
1:36:54 The Foundation acts autonomously whenever it wants.
1:36:58 When the Foundation implemented “the first ATM in the metaverse”,
1:37:01 they didn’t consult the DAO before starting development.
1:37:04 And can you blame them?
1:37:06 Can you imagine if, as a business, they were bound by the whims of these losers?
1:37:12 Despite the rhetoric, the Foundation isn’t dependent on the DAO,
1:37:16 in truth it's the opposite.
1:37:18 The DAO can’t function without the Foundation.
1:37:21 Not just in the obvious ways, but from top to bottom.
1:37:25 The 2021 proposal to go off-chain
1:37:27 came from the Executive Director of Decentraland.
1:37:30 In the proposal, he nominated three individuals to serve as the administrative
1:37:34 Committee members- all of whom were working at the Foundation at the time.
1:37:39 The Decentraland DAO simply lacks the means to function autonomously.
1:37:44 Through lack of tools, unimaginable inequality,
1:37:47 general incompetence and a lack of authority, the DAO is impotent.
1:37:52 So is it any wonder that their grant
1:37:57 scheme can turn $240,000 into the MetaGamiMall?
1:38:01 What else could this system possibly produce?
1:38:07 One of the most telling moments in the Decentraland timeline is the June
1:38:15 2019 blog post announcing the switch from the Babylon engine to Unity.
1:38:20 Not because of the engine change in and of itself
1:38:23 but because of this note: jumping added.
1:38:26 Jumping puzzles, it’s important to note, are functionally the single ludic
1:38:30 interaction inherent to Decentraland’s mechanics.
1:38:33 The only games that you see in the world with any consistency,
1:38:37 games that actually involve interacting with the space
1:38:39 and not with a two dimensional UI element,
1:38:42 are scavenger hunts and jumping puzzles.
1:38:45 Unless you’re headed to the gambling halls,
1:38:47 jumping on things is functionally the only thing
1:38:50 to consistently do in Decentraland and it was,
1:38:54 this is important, an afterthought.
1:38:57 2019, that’s four years of development
1:39:00 before jumping was added as basic functionality.
1:39:03 Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano are Argentinian developers who
1:39:06 met in a “hacker house” known as Casa Voltaire.
1:39:10 Most of what we know about Casa Voltaire comes from two online articles,
1:39:14 one from 2017 and another from 2020.
1:39:16 Casa Voltaire hit the sweet spot of anonymity,
1:39:19 there’s not really any contemporary information about what was going
1:39:23 on there because it was just a flop house for tech bros,
1:39:26 but it left just enough of a footprint to become mythologised.
1:39:29 “the community at the Voltaire Castle became a worldwide legend
1:39:33 a crazy hacker haven for cryptocurrency projects” As Ryan Vanzo describes it,
1:39:38 the house was a communal workspace where small start ups
1:39:41 would operate in the house and share resources and expertise.
1:39:44 This was combined with a heady blend of smartboy philosophy.
1:39:48 Both of the previously mentioned articles paint a picture of genius,
1:39:51 citing the deep conversations that would take place within the group.
1:39:55 But, ya know, here’s the deep, moral dilemmas Vanzo cites in his story.
1:40:00 How should autonomous cars act in a situation
1:40:02 that would save the driver but kill a pedestrian?
1:40:05 Who is liable if a bot malfunctions and causes harm?
1:40:09 What kind of neuro-security should we
1:40:11 develop to protect users of brain-to-brain interfaces?
1:40:14 So, like, a high school introduction to ethics.
1:40:17 One of those is literally the trolly problem.
1:40:20 In this environment, and within the context of Argentina’s political volatility,
1:40:23 Ordano and Meilich conceived of Decentraland as a bunch of things,
1:40:27 principally a fulfillment of the fantasy of Snow Crash,
1:40:30 The Matrix, and, of course, Ready Player One.
1:40:33 “The idea was basically whether we could do a virtual world that was based
1:40:39 on open standards and the blockchain
1:40:42 and whether we could encode the physics into...
1:40:46 into a blockchain.
1:40:47 Of course influenced by videos and movies like The Matrix, Ready Player One,
1:40:55 and Snow Crash.” But inside that was an inkling of the political,
1:41:00 the notion that this could be a test bed for political movements,
1:41:04 for new economies, and, ideally, liberation movements.
1:41:09 Writing for Rest of the World,
1:41:11 Leo Schwartz and Lucia Cholakian Herrera describe it,
1:41:13 skeptically, as “a petri dish for the ideals
1:41:16 of democracy and decentralization they championed,
1:41:18 built on the premise that a virtual world controlled by its
1:41:21 own “citizens” could more effectively govern itself— and offer more
1:41:25 stable investment opportunities— than a real one governed by elites.”
1:41:30 Of course in reality Decentraland is steered exclusively by its own elites,
1:41:34 people who bought in hard and early and have
1:41:37 the voting power to dismiss any challenge to their power,
1:41:40 or literal project insiders who have the social capital and access
1:41:44 to the code base to simply end-run the will of the whales.
1:41:48 Because Decentraland is not a petri dish,
1:41:51 sterilized and sealed off from our reality.
1:41:54 In 2003, writers rushed to herald Second Life as the vanguard of the future,
1:41:59 not just a video game, but a new place that couldn’t have existed before.
1:42:05 Two years prior, Edward Castronova had argued that Everquest and virtual worlds
1:42:10 like it were important because the objects in them were worth money.
1:42:15 In response to Second Life, Castronova predicted that in the future,
1:42:18 humanity would pick the virtual world over the real.
1:42:21 “The exodus of people from the real world,
1:42:24 from our normal daily life, of living rooms, cubicles and shopping malls,
1:42:28 will create a change in social climate that makes global
1:42:32 warming look like a tempest in a teacup.” Philip Rosedale,
1:42:37 a developer on Second Life, went even further.
1:42:40 “The real world will become like a museum very soon.
1:42:44 So it’ll be fantastically cool to go to New York,
1:42:47 but in the same way that it’s cool to go see the Mayan ruins.
1:42:51 Because the big buildings will still be there, but they’ll be covered in dust.
1:42:55 Because no one will bother too much with them anymore.” There’s just one tiny,
1:43:00 almost inconsequential problem here, just a little thing,
1:43:03 we’ll talk about it in a moment here,
1:43:05 but just maybe keep in mind that there’s a small little issue.
1:43:10 Johan Huizinga is known for his landmark
1:43:13 anthropologic work Homo Ludens, published in 1938.
1:43:16 Huizinga was concerned with the interaction between play and culture.
1:43:22 And a key element of that was trying to define ‘play’.
1:43:25 What is the difference between a fight and play-fight?
1:43:29 How is it that chalk on grass can produce
1:43:32 a boundary that people take seriously during a game of soccer?
1:43:36 Huizinga proposed the concept of the “magic circle”,
1:43:39 which aims to describe how play space is delineated from the ordinary world.
1:43:44 In a game of Dungeons& Dragons, the rules and instructions alone aren’t
1:43:48 enough to represent the entire game world,
1:43:50 it is “the compound relationship of formal,
1:43:54 social, dramatic and aesthetic elements.” Essentially,
1:43:56 when you buy into the game,
1:43:58 everything comes together to create a kind of pocket dimension,
1:44:02 a psychological bubble, where board pieces,
1:44:04 dice rolls and social interactions can
1:44:07 take on unique meanings distinct from reality.
1:44:11 In a game of soccer,
1:44:12 the players all agree to obey the rules of the game and a social contract forms.
1:44:17 Suddenly the ball, chalk,
1:44:18 and their own limbs take on properties prescribed to them in the player’s mind,
1:44:23 boundaries become respectable and in respecting them they become real.
1:44:28 If, however, someone then karate chops the opposing goalie in the throat,
1:44:32 the bubble bursts- the contract has been broken, the circle has been pierced,
1:44:37 and the lines on the ground stop mattering real fast.
1:44:42 In an honest engagement,
1:44:43 where the fiction is unavoidably present but elided for the sake
1:44:46 of immersion we would call the circle suspension of disbelief or kayfabe.
1:44:51 Tom Boellstroff and Edward Castronova both sought to push Second
1:44:55 Life as a ‘real place,’ separate from the real world,
1:44:58 where genuine research could be done.
1:45:00 Boellstroff argued that Second Life was a fixed site of culture,
1:45:04 like a Pacific Island.
1:45:05 Edward Castronova made a career out of arguing
1:45:08 that Second Life is a site of genuine economic activity.
1:45:12 They, not in their words but in criticism,
1:45:15 present Second Life as existing within an impermeable magic circle,
1:45:20 as like The Matrix, somewhere you travel to, a place.
1:45:26 Okay, but there’s just that one, tiny, minuscule problem,
1:45:30 and that’s that people who “live” in Second
1:45:34 Life don’t actually live in Second Life.
1:45:39 You can eat an infinite amount of digital
1:45:41 food in virtual reality and you will still starve.
1:45:45 But the metaverse both presumes and requires
1:45:48 that legitimacy of place and the real.
1:45:52 Either the outright reification of Ryan Bolger,
1:45:54 or digital fashion being pushed as genuine property,
1:45:57 it needs to be real in order to be meaningful.
1:46:02 So the authors of Decentraland, its creators and its users,
1:46:06 paint a magic circle around it with a narrative of inevitability,
1:46:10 a narrative of the metaverse, a narrative of a true,
1:46:14 separate, new world that you will eventually move your life into.
1:46:19 Because if your neighbors aren’t going
1:46:21 to eventually be compelled to be here tomorrow,
1:46:24 why would you ever want this today?
1:46:28 Decentraland is, at every level, a collective fairy tale.
1:46:32 Just people playing pretend.
1:46:34 “The feeling of these shows was that we all performed a fashion week,
1:46:38 rather than participating in it.” Whether it
1:46:41 be the Pedigree Fosterverse scraping data from adoptapet,
1:46:45 users playing lawyer in their corporate offices or purporting to be
1:46:49 the future of news- Decentraland’s value to businesses is plainly absurd.
1:46:55 And as we’ve seen, even its decentralized premise is a fantasy.
1:46:59 The DAO has no authority and is comically hapless- content to play politics.
1:47:04 All the while pretending they have a stake in a billion dollar product.
1:47:08 And it’s not enough to convince themselves, they need to convince you.
1:47:13 So that is what they do by any means necessary.
1:47:16 They will pander, mislead,
1:47:18 outright lie- whatever it takes for you to buy into their narrative.
1:47:22 Because this only makes sense from inside the circle.
1:47:28 “What if you could own the virtual world?
1:47:32 Create, develop, and trade without limits.
1:47:37 Make genuine connections,
1:47:38 and earn real money.” Decentraland is a farce and a tragedy,
1:47:43 it is painted into a corner
1:47:44 by a combination of ineptitude and inherently bad ideas,
1:47:48 and it cannot escape its fundamental being.
1:47:52 Whatever other ideals are spit out,
1:47:54 whatever rhetoric about liberation or political experimentation is employed,
1:47:58 the simple fact that it was materially born
1:48:01 as a pre-sale of lots of "land" based on a fiction
1:48:05 of people "moving in" sets off a chain of decisions
1:48:09 and incentives about design and functionality that bind it,
1:48:12 forever, to being little more than a fantasy real estate scheme,
1:48:17 an endless world of uniquely scarce dead malls.
1:48:29 I can’t use that right now.
1:48:34 I can’t use that right now.
1:48:40 I can’t use that right now.
1:48:47 Thank you.
1:48:49 I can’t use that right now.
1:48:53 I can’t use that right now.
1:48:54 Mighty kind of you.
1:48:57 I can’t use that right now.
1:49:04 I can’t use that right now.
1:49:07 [gunshot] Oh my god, what did you do!?
1:49:14 I can’t use that right now.