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The Metaverse Isn’t Real Yet But It’s Already Really Lucrative

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In a society that seems addicted to the “new, new thing,” it is easy to pass off talk about the “metaverse” as classic techie hype. It’s not that or, at least, it’s about to be and is already becoming much more than just that.

There’s a reason that tech oligarchs are betting their futures on this technology to extend the internet into a permanent virtual reality, one with the potential to consume everything in its path and remake societies. Mark Zuckerberg may be a menace but he is willing to ignore critics and seize the future. In renaming Facebook as Meta, he absorbed a $200 billion loss in market value for the company and a $30 billion drop in his own net worth.

He’s hardly alone in being willing to take the risk. Rony Abovitz, a confidant of Zuckerberg , received more than $2.5 billion in funding from a diverse list of venture and private equity investors, including Alibaba and Google, for his previous virtual reality venture, Magic Leap. Former Disney CEO Robert Iger is also taking the plunge, taking a seat on the board of Los Angeles-based Genies, which has raised $100 million in venture funding to create avatars for celebrities on the Metaverse as well for the sale of virtual “goods.” Disney itself has a senior VP dedicated to its metaverse strategy, a former CTO at the entertainment giant with “a history of enabling transformation… Especially when it comes to bridging the physical and digital worlds.”

Abovitz compares the current discovery of what he calls “inner space”—a blending of “neuroscience, imagination, consciousness, physics, and adventure”—to the space pioneers of the Mercury program. Matthew Ball, the CEO of Venture Capital firm Epyllion, told Bloomberg that he anticipates the metaverse economy producing $10 to $30 trillion in 15 years.

The idea of a “metaverse” began in 2003 with Second Life, a game and marketplace that former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale envisioned as a limitless, immersive “green field” where avatars interacted with other avatars, creating buildings and communities together and building a virtual economy. In practice, it seemed (and still seems) cartoonish and artificial, a “place” where people buy and sell virtual goods and virtual real estate with little consumer protection. That said, as of this writing, over 900,000 people still “play” Second Life, which was acquired by an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager.

As to the cartoonish and artificial feel, including in Zuckerberg’s introduction of Meta’s metaverse, of these worlds, that’s something that can change quickly with technological progress, whose breakneck pace was further accelerated by the online impact of the pandemic, allowing for major advancements in vividity, or the “real-seemingness” of these virtual environments. Two technologies in particular, sensory field computing and artificial intelligence, can help make users feel like what they are experiencing is real. Sensory Field Computing refers to the way in which computers translate the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) into digital reality. The intended effect, explains virtual reality pioneer Charlie Fink, who teaches at Chapman’s Dodge Film School, is to create an “internet that you are inside of looking out at” rather than observing from a screen.

The invention of virtual reality goggles like Oculus, later acquired by Facebook (now Meta), was one big step forward for the sight and sound elements, albeit an insufficient one. But, according to Abovitz, founder of Mako Surgical, Magic Leap, and now Sun and Thunder, we are moving toward what he calls Neurologically True Reality, where all five senses can be represented so vividly that one’s neurons cannot tell the difference between physical reality and digital reality. He believes that this technology offers the potential to help severely traumatized people, such as those suffering from PTSD, recover by “rewiring” their brains to adapt to a different, non-traumatic reality. The sufferer can replace their old, disruptive world with a completely new view and context to lead a more normal life.

Read the rest of this piece at Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Marco Verch via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Coming Bloodbath of the Democrats

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The depression-era comedian Will Rogers once famously said he did not belong to an organised political party because he was a Democrat. Yet today the traditional factiousness of the Democratic coalition has been engulfed by an almost Stalinist attitude that brooks no dissent on its most treasured policies – even though these do not resonate well with the bulk of the electorate.

To recover, Democrats need to find a way back to their historic base of working-class and minority voters, who now seem to be heading to the GOP. Franklin D Roosevelt’s alliance between big cities, small towns, labour unions and farmers was often awkward, but it still achieved remarkable success in restoring US confidence and winning the war. In contrast, President Biden’s boneheaded embrace of a progressive agenda that is widely detested across most of the population may prove to be one of the greatest political blunders of recent American history.

Given the probability of a significant loss in this November’s Midterms, we should expect – and hope for – a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory. There needs to be something equivalent to the New Democrats who, under Bill Clinton, revived the party after the devastating defeats of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis in the 1970s and 80s by moving the party to the centre and connecting it to the country’s diverse regions. ‘Too many Americans’, wrote New Democrats Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, ‘have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security’.

This time around, the rhetorical knives are already coming out to counter the Democrats’ seemingly inexorable shift to the left. Much of the emerging argument centres around the most unappreciated and largest voting bloc – working- and middle-class Americans.

Many of these voters may be receptive to the traditional, economic-centred social-democratic message of the Democrats. But they are less enthused about the priorities of the now dominant progressives – especially the loudest and most pervasive among them, namely, the climate-change activists. Backed by the media and numerous celebrities, and funded generously by tech and Wall Street oligarchs, they have asserted their dominance since the very beginning of the Biden administration, and appear to have further solidified their control over energy policy, even in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its numerous after-effects.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz via Flickr under U.S. Government Work.

The Limits of Libertarianism

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Over the past half-century, libertarians have played a critical role in the ever-growing war against governmental nonsense. If you want to read the best critiques of wasteful transit policy, sports stadia, government pensions or cancel culture, you can find it among liberty-minded outlets like Reason magazine, the Cato Institute and numerous free-market think tanks. They have provided a strong and necessary voice for free-market capitalism at a time when it faces serious challenges, notably from China and other state-directed systems.

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You Can’t Fix Housing with New Houses. We Need New Cities

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Housing is rapidly becoming the key economic issue facing America’s beleaguered middle class. Even as interest rates rise, rents are on a wild binge, up near 20 percent in the past year or more in some cities. Meanwhile, home prices have hit a high and appear to be climbing further still. Higher prices are emerging even in what have long been relative bargain communities in the southeast, as refugees from the high-priced Northeast pour in with their greater resources.

The property gold rush has been made more problematic by the growing role of professional, well-funded investors and speculators, to whom the housing market is more attractive than a sometimes unsteady stock market. Read more

Webinar: The Case for Suburbia

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When: March 8, 2022 at 12PM (CT)
Where: Join on Zoom

The seeming success of compact cities and the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate have led to pushback against sprawling, car-dominated cities. Join us as we discuss the environmental case for suburbia.

Webinar: The Case for Suburbia

Fresno Business Council Meeting

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Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky join a Fresno Business Council Board Meeting to discuss unaffordable housing and solutions to housing costs.

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Report: Restoring the California Dream

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This newly released report examines how the California dream can be restored for California’s middle- and working-class families. An excerpt follows:

What is happening to the California dream? For some it still comes true, but for many, and perhaps most Californians, the state increasingly fails to provide ample opportunities to start a business, buy a home or move up to the middle class. The state’s performance on these issues is the ultimate test of the ‘California model’ and its validity for the rest of the nation. Read more

California is a Bastion of Innovation Marred by Deep Inequality. Is That America’s Future?

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Everyone seems to be California dreaming these days. Much of America, particularly its red parts, see California as a hopeless dystopia best understood as everything the nation should avoid. Meanwhile, for the progressive Left and many around Joe Biden, California is the Mecca, a great role model being attacked by jealous reactionaries.

As in so many cases, both sides have a piece of the truth.

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The New Dark Ages

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If ignorance is bliss, the Western world should be ecstatic. Even as colleges churn out degrees and collect fees, and technology makes information instantly accessible, the basic level of literacy, as measured by such things as reading books and acquainting oneself with the past, is in a precipitous decline. Rather than building a vital world with our technological culture, we are repeating the memes of feudal times, driven by illiteracy, bias and a rejection of the West’s past.

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We Need More Families

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Families, and the lack of them, are emerging as one of the great political dividing lines in America, and much of the high-income world. The familial ideal was once embraced by all political factions, except on the extremes, but that is no longer the case.

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