Cathedrals in the Metaverse

If you click my video, you’ll espy that I live in a pretty fashionable zone of the Metaverse. Just like my avatar, the city around me is rendered, making it impermanent, transitory and interchangeable.

Which leads to the question, why do all Metaverse cities look like Cyberpunk 2077, and not medieval Cathedrals?

Does the Metaverse need a little more … beauty?

Neither the Internet nor the World Wide Web were built for profit. Sometimes, a profit incentive can be limiting.

The protocols and networks we today recognize as the Internet, were spawned from US DARPA Defense funding, with the US University system on the West coast later playing a bridging role into the private sector, and modern-day Silicon Valley.

Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in Europe and gave it away to the world, for free. Later, organizations like the ITU would quite happily have charged everyone for metered access to the Internet. Imagine paying a small fee for every single website you visited? From a profit perspective, this could be seen as smart business.

Today, US and western capitalism are incapable of building beautiful cities, or making great art. They are not incentivized to do so: taste has not developed, because it does not make a profit. Modern cities are secularized; civic rather than aristocratic. Vulgar.

Perhaps it is legitimate to ask whether a truly beautiful Metaverse can ever be built by a corporation? Or… an AI?

Decentralized and interoperable systems may allow for creators to build online worlds together, from the ground up, with no centralized “owner.” This is the key use-case for procedural generation in video games.

DeFi financial systems will allow for greater creative freedom. Culture and community will become more important in the world of AI, not less.

All I’m saying is that, at some point, the aesthetics and architecture of the Metaverse will become far more varied, ‘livable’ and beautiful.

We’re still a long way from Cathedrals in the Metaverse.

For now, its Cyberpunk 2077 everywhere, and fighting the regulatory state, all the way.

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Hiro.