Earlier this year we did a series on the Metaverse for another podcast series I host with my colleague Doug Sparkes called  a “Deeper Dive.”  That series is still well worth listening to in its entirety, but over past weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about one particular episode we called a “map of the metaverse(s)”

We took the idea from the book Snowcrash, where the term metaverse was first used. In that book, there were multiple countries or city states each with their own rules. They had there own citizenship and rules. Many of them were run by corporations or eccentric rich people who were the “dictators” who ruled those worlds. Sound familiar?

You could travel between them but you did so at some risk. They were tribal and often treated immigrants and travellers with suspicion and sometimes with hostility.

The concept in the book was so close to what we saw emerging in the metaverse as it was unfolding IRL (in real life).  We saw a competitive set of contenders all trying to build a stake in the new metaverse(s).  So I thought, what if I described the emerging metaverse as if it was a world and we could map out the the various wannabe city states.

The result was this episode.  I hope you’ll find it interesting.  It may help make conceptual  sense of some of the things that are emerging here and now.

One last note.  There are a number of articles emerging now that talk about how the metaverse is failing, how Zuckerberg is losing hundreds of billions or how the metaverse has become what sports icon Yogi Berra said about restaurants in New York. “Nobody goes there because it’s too crowded.”

We wanted to skirt both the posture of the true believer and the cynic. In our opinion, the metaverse is inevitable. What form it takes or in our parlance, what country or alliance of countries win is not.

Enjoy!

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