“The Metaverse is already here.” That’s the insight that never really occurred to me until I heard Mustafa Suleyman, Google’s Deep Mind Co-founder, on The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett.
“You know, the last three years people have been talking about Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse. And the mischaracterization of the Metaverse was that it’s over there. It was this like virtual world that we would all bop around in and talk to each other as these little characters, but that was totally wrong. That was a complete miss-framing. The Metaverse is already here. It’s the digital space that exists in parallel time to our everyday life. It’s the conversation that you will have on Twitter or, you know, the video that you’ll post on YouTube, or this podcast that will go out and connect with other people. It’s that meta-space of interaction, you know, and I use meta to mean ‘beyond this space’, not just that weird other, ‘over there’, space that people seem to point to.”
We are already in the Metaverse, I’m in the same room as my daughter right now. She’s watching a movie, I’m writing on my phone. We are entered into parallel universes, physically together but disconnected. We are both in spaces, on screens, beyond the physical space we are in.
Before hearing this quote, I thought of the Metaverse as something in the future, like the ‘fitless humans‘ from the movie WALL•E.
We are already there. We have iPads babysit (or at least occupy the attention of) our kids. We rage about stupid things on Twitter and YouTube. We share content with people we have never met, and they share content with us. We are influenced by influencers. We buy things from virtual stores. We play games with people in different time zones.
The Metaverse is already here creating parallel experiences to the ones we physically experience… It’s not something we are heading towards. We are already living a good part of our lives, ‘in spaces beyond the physical space we are in‘. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest through the trees, or in this case the spaces beyond our screens.
