The Meh-taverse

The job of a tech CEO is equal parts therapist and fortune teller. 

They must simultaneously motivate a bunch of tech employees in the near term (a near impossible task unless you have a masseuse and green juice handy) while also making sure those employees are working on the things that will be beneficial in a far-off horizon. The CEO balances the present needs of employees with preparing the organization for a future that only the leader can see. Not easy. 

The best executives are able to either accurately time trends or motivate their employees better than their peers can when trends become obvious. 

To help in this effort, executives often resort to vague, verbal gesticulations I call meta-narratives. These are stories that become popular, regardless of their relation to the truth, and can be used to convince lemming-esque employees and investors that the company is doing the right thing. Meta-narratives are huge, sweeping statements. You can always tell one is happening when, rather than solid math, company presentations are filled with grandiose soliloquies about the way the world will be in the future. A recent example is big data versus machine learning. Look at the Google trends data below (big data=blue, machine learning=red)

The golden years for the “big data” companies were 2012-2016. I remember so many earnings calls and strategy decks at the time, all purporting the value for big data. It was the meta-narrative that execs would cite to justify their strategy. Around 2018, with the rise of Waymo and autonomous vehicles, the meta-narrative shifted to machine learning. Yet again, the same song and dance were trotted out. “This will change everything!” “We are an AI company now.” etc., etc. 

I am pleased to announce that the era of machine learning is now over. The meta-narrative is now…the Metaverse (in yellow).

Prior to October 2020, the term Metaverse had only appeared 5 times in SEC filings. In 2021, the term was mentioned 260 times. Around the same time, Facebook changed its name to Meta, Microsoft pitched the “enterprise Metaverse,” and the term suddenly seemed to show up everywhere. Crypto projects galore started touting how the blockchain was central to the future of the internet, and thus the Metaverse. (You can find my analysis of that pitch here). 

You could argue that all of this recent interest was spurred by one man’s essays: Matthew Ball. His writing on the topic has been used by essentially every major entertainment and tech CEO. When executives are weaving their meta-narratives about the Metaverse, they typically cite him. 

Being the guy who pumped a meta-narrative is a great job. He has paid speaking engagements, a venture portfolio, an ETF he manages, and now, a best-selling book. The Metaverse and How It Will Shape Everything is his attempt to summarize his perspective on what the hell this word even means. 

His primary argument is that the digital world will consume the physical one. That our virtual selves and virtual economies will be orders of magnitude larger than physical ones and most importantly, this will happen sometime soon. This is a bold claim and one worth examining. Thankfully, I did it for you. This is a review of the book itself and an exploration of whether his ideas are right.

A Book Review

Let’s get straight to the good stuff. Ball defines the Metaverse as

“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

That is a lot. If it’s easier, you can basically think of the movie Ready Player One and you’ve got the gist of it.