The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse

I got another big idea let's get AMC to put a theater in Decentraland! What if they not only got into online in a big way but still kept the spirit of physically going to the theaters and hanging out with friends. They can sell tickets that you can buy using Mana. Users would be able to walk to a pizza kiosk and order a pizza and then go to theater and hangout with their friends and watch a movie together all without leaving their house and the game! Edit: It's happening someone built a theater yo AMC where you at you don't want to miss this opportunity [high intensity music] Man when I walked in it blew my mind something was playing I watched it for at least 5 minuets sound and video was clear as fuck Checked it out and it blew me away. This is absolutely sick! Who owns it? This will be awesome once VR is integrated and you can do screen sharing with a group of friends so it’ll be like watching the movie together. I could even see decentraland movie gift cards being sold at the super market in the area where all those gift cards are located.  That’d be so cool I wish could take all my bitcoin and live inside this world Dope asf! Clap clap clap clap clap clap thumbs up ok high five one hundred one hundred What you’re looking at is Decentraland. Conceived by Argentine developers Esteban Ordano and Ari Meilich as a virtual reality world for unconstrained markets and presently advertising itself as a “decentralized metaverse owned by its users.” In the pitch version Decentraland is a true virtual space, a whole new parallel world that you access via virtual reality, a world where you can shop, buy things, invest, purchase goods, and go to stores unconstrained by the laws that govern the place where your physical body eats and sleeps, a product so promising that it commands a valuation in the billions of dollars. In practice, it’s just a bad video game made up of smaller, worse video games, wrapped in a real-estate scheme cosplaying as the Matrix. Most of what Decentraland does, and what it fails to do, are things that would be considered forgivable or quaint in a Kickstarter MMO that had clearly bitten off more than the creators could ever chew, but given that this is a project founded on cryptocurrency all of those foibles are laced with the language of finance and landlordism. Strolling down Decentraland’s spacious boulevards at 5 frames per second rewards the user with a seemingly endless parade of virtual billboards brightly proclaiming that the space you see is all available to rent. This is because of a pretty basic chain of incentives that are laid bare by Decentraland’s history. While the nominally-playable game launched in February 2020 the actual launch was in 2017 broken into two parts: first an initial coin offering in August where their MANA token sale raised approximately $24 million dollars denominated in crypto coins, and second with the “terraforming event” where parcels of land, denominated in LAND tokens, were auctioned off for an additional $28 million in crypto, predominantly bought by guys like this. “I’m not selling until it’s worth at least ten million” This being crypto the obsession with scarcity is so pervasive that it’s almost a waste of time to even mention it but the LAND tokens were limited to 90,000, which, of course, centered a lot of the discussion of Decentraland around the hypothetical value of the virtual plots of land in the event that Decentraland won the future and became the Manhattan of the metaverse, the go-to destination for virtual life. The initial buyers' plans for the land overwhelmingly veered towards pitching cryptocurrency or financial services or just sitting on the land with the intent of renting it out later. This is all baked-in, Decentraland’s initial pitch hinges on it. “What if you could own the virtual world? Create, develop, and trade without limits. Make genuine connections, and earn real money. Decentraland. A fully immersive platform powered by the blockchain. Buy land. Design your experience. And transform he way that people see the world. Purchase the first ever virtual real estate. Get started today.” Now, there’s a lot of ground that needs to be covered, and a not insubstantial amount of theory that I would like to get out there, but I suspect the main thing you might be here for is failure, so just to whet your appetite here is a list of things you can expect to see as we talk about Decentraland, what it is, and what it isn’t. [Disco Music]  Decentraland Records presents the only collection of failure you’ll ever need! Bad graphics Poor performance Dead mall vibes Missing geometry Weed leaves Loading boxes And so much more But before we can get into all that we’ve gotta talk about the metaverse. In the past two years you have likely been inundated with attempts to explain and define the metaverse and yet, despite the numerous, numerous attempts you probably feel no closer to having an actual, workable definition in your head, one that maps to something you can visualize actually integrating with your life. There are a lot of definitions out there, most of them are incredibly flimsy, many of them are outright insane, very few agree on anything other than the broad strokes, and almost all of them fall back on gesturing towards Ready Player One and going “you know, that thing, it’ll be like that.” In the mainstream, the metaverse has been somewhat hijacked by the crypto and web3 crowd. An interesting element to that is that while they are extremely aggressively pushing the word “metaverse” out into the public consciousness, they are late-arriving parasites, they will typically nod their heads at any metaverse vision before throwing it back at you with their crypto junk grafted onto it. They don’t care about the form or content of the metaverse, but both crypto and the metaverse require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense, so the two are somewhat simpatico in that regard. In sharp contrast we have the writing of Ryan Bolger. A theologian, Bolger’s vision of the Metaverse is that of a reified space that sits on top of the real world, a 1 to 1 digital clone. You can leave a digital letter for someone on a park bench, and they need to go to that same bench to find it. A clone so accurate that self-driving cars will navigate not via sensors that monitor the world around them, but by referencing the current position of things in the metaverse - the most jacked version of Google Maps you can imagine.  For Bolger, traditional websites and apps are just a stop gap to the ultimate aim, which should be to astrally project via VR into a McDonalds, where a cashier will then see you through AR glasses and take your order as if you were in the space. The goal of this degree of reification was to create a space so ‘real’ and legitimate, that it could be said that the metaverse could be capable of containing divinity - a church in the metaverse can be sacred independent of the context of human interaction because it’s not just software, it’s a place. Digital fashion and other “phygital” industries also want to break down the barrier between physical and digital, but for very different reasons.  They look at the market for cosmetics in live service video games and crave translating that business model to reality. Rather than building a reified virtual world, digital fashion is much more interested in the augmented reality side of things, they want AR glasses that are so universal and so seamless that we all dress in mo-cap suits and composite the new Gucci over it using an advanced spin on Tiktok’s hat filter. In this definition the metaverse isn’t another place, conceptual or otherwise, it’s just a name for the digital skin that gets laid over the world when viewed through compatible devices. We strongly believe that the amount of clothing produced today is way greater than humanity needs. But don’t shop less, shop digital fashion. Don’t shop less. Don’t shop less. Don’t, don’t you, don’t you dare, don’t you [static] dare shop less, don’t you There are numerous problems here, which boil down to the fact that all of these have equal claim to the word “metaverse.” If you comb through dozens and dozens of definitions of the metaverse you can assemble a web of broad attributes where some are generally agreed upon while others border on being mutually exclusive. It’s a vague, largely incoherent cloud of ideas that’s malleable enough that basically anything can be called part of the metaverse, a proto-metaverse, or a semi-metaverse. Decentraland is the metaverse, TheSandbox is the metaverse, Horizon Worlds is the metaverse, Roblox is the metaverse, Fortnite is the metaverse, Minecraft is the metaverse. The Lindt Experience is the metaverse. “I look at my fourteen year old and she has spent the last year and a half of her life living in a metaverse. She doesn’t even know that word, right, but her school is on Zoom, she hangs out with her friends online in one form or another, and actually in a whole bunch of different forms, right. In Instagram, in TikTok, in iMessage, in, in Fortnite, in Animal Crossing, in, uh, you know all of these different, you know, metaverses, right” “Some leaders within the virtual worlds space, such as Tim Sweeney, believe that eventually, every company will need to operate their own virtual worlds, both as standalone planets and as part of leading virtual world platforms such as Fortnite and Minecraft. As Sweeney has put it, “just as every company a few decades ago created a webpage, and then at some point every company created a Facebook page.” Of course this flexibility that allows for anything good and popular to be part of or a natural, inevitable precursor to the True Metaverse simultaneously provides the flexibility to dismiss any failure as a failing of that pure vision rather than a failure of the underlying ideas themselves. The metaverse cannot fail, you can only fail to make the metaverse. There’s no consensus definition because the Metaverse isn’t real, it’s not an actual thing that anyone’s really building, it’s a rhetorical device that allows the writer to gesture at the future and pontificate on what ought to be. Definitions of the metaverse are, thusly, principally rooted in the writer’s present political and social values. When you understand that the metaverse isn’t a distinct invention or construct but merely a rhetorical proxy for The Future of Technology then all of this becomes a lot easier to deal with. The reason it’s all so messy is because of the aforementioned gesturing towards fiction and because a lot of the people writing effluent prose about how the future is here today in the form of blockchain-based social spaces are, for the most part, salesmen. That’s not to say that they don’t believe the Metaverse could or should exist, just that most have not considered if it would actually be any good. That part they take as a given, because it’s always super cool in stories, so why even bother considering that the end result might be boring, inconvenient, and disappointing? Now, science fiction and actual science have a long and storied history.  It’s fun to point to all the devices that exist today that were first sketched out by a fiction writer decades earlier, but there’s also a massive survivorship bias there. Sure, some speculations become real, either because the author rooted their speculation in cutting edge science or because fans of the work tried extremely hard to make it a reality, but even more get discarded as silly, useless, impractical, deadly, or physically impossible. This might come as a shock, but when a writer sits down to compose fiction, the thing that they write doesn’t need to actually work. They’re not real inventions, they’re narrative devices, and at a certain point no amount of cool factor can make up for the limitations of physical space. Star Trek’s holodeck is an insanely cool idea, and dear god do I wish it were real. But it can’t exist, not as depicted, because it’s not an invention, it’s a collection of camera tricks and special effects. At the end of the day the holodeck’s limitations, and lack thereof, are dictated by narrative necessity. So when Neal Stephenson writes about The Metaverse in Snow Crash in 1992 it is an invention composed of a mix of speculation about the future of existing hardware, trends in how people interact via virtual spaces, and an overwhelmingly cartoonish dose of Rule of Cool. Stephenson’s Metaverse is a massive, three-dimensional contiguous space because it’s evocative and interesting, it provides a colourful backdrop for the story’s gonzo plot about a high stakes pizza delivery swordmaster employed by the mafia and a computer virus that can cause brain damage. Snow Crash is prescient in degrees about some of the ways in which we would engage with technology, but overwhelmingly that prescience applies to the internet as it currently exists. We have virtual live events, virtual sports, virtual town squares, virtual club houses, and even virtual strip clubs where you can hang out in chat with five hundred strangers and watch someone just absolutely [static]. Really the only things that are missing are either aesthetic, like the giant contiguous three dimensional representation of the internet where you can walk from one webpage to the next, or maybe not even physically possible at all, like the Snow Crash virus itself. So this then creates a bit of a trap for a lot of the salesmen writing about the inevitability of the metaverse where they have to cling to those aesthetic details as non-negotiable because otherwise they’re just talking about the internet. As Matthew Ball writes in his 2022 book The Metaverse and How It Will Change Everything “Although virtual worlds come in many dimensions, “3D” is a critical specification for the Metaverse. Without 3D, we might as well be describing the current internet. Message boards, chat services, website builders, image platforms, and interconnected networks of content have been around and popular for decades, after all.” Which brings us to virtual reality. VR is pretty cool tech, I really like it. It’s also pretty limited, or more specifically the tech runs up against a pretty big barrier which is the human body. The inner ear really doesn’t like moving without actually moving, which means that every VR application is a series of compromises between the immersive potential of VR and what the body will tolerate. No! Oh god! Oh god! Oh! Because Stephenson’s metaverse is a plot device, effectively an alternate dimension, the characters are able to navigate the space however Stephenson wants them to. And because it’s narratively interesting, when the characters want to get from one part of the metaverse to another they need to traverse the distance between those two points. Ball, for his part, concedes that users of the inevitable metaverse would likely find this to be too inconvenient and prefer to teleport from location to location. The reality is even more restrictive.  The compromise is that overwhelmingly virtual reality experiences are largely static experiences, with freeform movement around a small footprint, with the user teleporting from spot to spot even within the same virtual room. It’s a compromise that VR enthusiasts are willing to accept because the alternative is a one-way trip to the floor as your cochlea decides that being upright is no longer an option. The end result, the actuality of virtual reality, is that it’s an incredibly potent tool for an unfortunately limited number of applications.  This creates a very sharp contrast between the metaverse that’s talked about by pundits and the reality of VR that developers and enthusiasts have been mapping for over a decade, with pundits continuing to insist that a vast, contiguous space representing the internet is not only a desirable way to interact with those functionalities, but indeed a preferential way. How this manifests is a metaverse that exists overwhelmingly in the form of blog posts about the inevitability of its existence, with anything tangentially related to virtual reality being encircled as part of the metaverse, along with a whole lot of stuff hardly related at all. Of particular fascination is the way that this is all talk and no product. Lindt USA, manufacturers of terrible chocolate truffles, launched their metaverse store in November 2022 and just have a look at the language used to describe it. Lindt USA Launches Its First-Ever 3D Virtual Store with ByondXR and Makes Shopping for Premium Chocolate a Truly Innovative Experience In a beautifully decorated, fully 3D and highly photorealistic environment, the store welcomes visitors with an engaging introduction by one of Lindt’s famous master chocolatiers, Ann Czaja. Best of all, the immersive store is totally comprehensible: “We at Lindt USA are thrilled to offer customers this state-of-the-art experience just in time for the holidays. While there is no experience like walking into one of our beautiful Lindt stores in person, our online store is no different. We’re excited to show it off.”  This is all pretty routine corporate fluff, though the surprising, and telling thing is that it’s just words, there’s few, if any, images included. And there’s a reason why: the whole of it is elevated to transcendental when you see the actual thing that they’re describing, a laggy, hideous, cheap faux-3D website that would probably be a camp hit if it were pitched instead as a throwback to FMV video games from the 90s. “Want some Rye? Of course ya do!” The vast majority of these so-called metaverse offerings are virtual spaces only insofar as they are painted to resemble a store. We already tried this 25 years ago, and discarded it because it turns out the human brain can shop from a list of items or a grid of photos far better than it can from an imagemap photo of a display case. Examples like this betray not only the ignorance of history on the part of the people pushing it, but also a profound incompetence on the part of the people building it. Rather than being a “cutting-edge virtual shopping experience” the Lindt store is so bad, so embarrassing, that it would be more respectable to learn that ByondXR is an outright scam, shaking down gullible corporations afraid of being “out of touch” with the future or missing the boat on the next big thing, rather than true believers trying their hardest. The fact that Patrick Diggelmann, vice president of sales and e-commerce for Lindt USA, looked at this final product and didn’t immediately scrap it, bury it, and demand the company’s money back is just a nice, tight encapsulation of how much metaverse participation is being driven by irrational, uninformed FOMO. And this brings us back to Decentraland.  All these definitions are pretty bad for Decentraland. It clearly wants to be the Metaverse, it calls itself that, but because they, like Lindt, have made the mistake of actually trying to make something, it's possible to evaluate whether or not they’ve succeeded.  They have activated the trap card of falsifiability. VR was dropped from Decentraland’s core feature set somewhere in 2018 or 2019, and has all but officially been relegated to a community produced mod, which just means that it’s difficult to get working in the first place, and when you do nothing is optimized for VR, either in terms of technical performance or user experience. The results are dizzying even without a headset on. Hnnng, okay so the app’s just straight up broken now. Cool. For many definitions of the metaverse, like Ball, this already makes DCL a complete non-starter: virtual reality, or at the very least augmented reality, is a non-negotiable feature. This, however, in my evaluation is just a case of No True Metaverse.  Decentraland is embarrassing, which makes it inconvenient, which means there’s a lot of incentive to discredit it as a claim to the idea of the metaverse, to insist that its failures are meaningless, that there’s nothing to learn from them about the viability of the underlying ideas. But the knife that says all these definitions are the metaverse cuts both ways. If the concept is so broad as to be little more than a vague gesture at the future, if successful and popular things like Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite get to be the nascent metaverse, then this does too. And if this is the future, then the future is a dead mall. It is difficult to fully encapsulate the sheer contradiction between Decentraland as it exists in the minds of its supporters and the actual product that you can interact with, but in this endeavor we shall strive. Maybe we spent our best shot early by opening with Redditors praising a theater with non-functional doors and a photo of a real concession stand in place of any actual modeling, but it’s probably best to let you know what you’re in for. That post that we ran earlier, by the by, is the most popular post of all time on the Decentraland subreddit. The fact that it’s a crossover event with Reddit’s memestock fanatics, right down to being disproportionately laden with Reddit awards as they tend to do, has a poetry to it that I couldn’t script.  Name a more iconic duo than bad products and serial bagholders: you can’t do it. The pizza kiosk they rave about, where you could, in theory, order Domino’s via the metaverse and pay in ETH or MANA is long gone, all that remains is an empty plot devoid of even the world’s procedurally generated shrubbery.  The details are thin, but from what’s available it’s apparent that Domino’s wasn’t officially involved in any capacity, which would indicate that the builder had really just created a middleman between you and Domino’s, where he would take your crypto and then pass the order, along with payment in dollars, to Domino’s on your behalf. The event calls back to one of the foundational myths of crypto, the 10,000 bitcoin pizza, the first purchase ever made with cryptocurrency. “22nd of May, 2010 is the date when someone first purchased an item with bitcoin, in this case a pizza.” The reality of that is very similar to the Decentraland pizza kiosk: no vendor accepted bitcoin in exchange for pizza.  Floridian Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 bitcoin on a forum to anyone who would bring him two large pizzas. Fellow Floridian Jeremy Sturdivant took him up on the offer, bought two large pizzas from a pizzeria with his own money and then traded them to Laszlo in exchange for the bitcoin. Hey, that’s backwards.  Wait, it’s also backwards from this side! Other groups have tried to recreate amusement rides in Decentraland, such as those found in District X.  Originally slated to be Decentraland’s Red Light District before the project organizer stole all the donated LAND, District X is now home to an excellent showcase of the reality of Decentraland’s ability to deliver interactive experiences: laggy, glitchy, and profoundly sad. Oh yes, I can feel the thrills coursing through my veins. In the Decentraland experience there’s a persistent tension between the different vectors of incompetence.  Most of the people building this stuff don’t have good ideas, so the stuff is generally bad from first principles, but then on top of that the tools for building things in Decentraland are also bad, so good ideas are kneecapped by being extremely hard to implement,  but then on top of that Decentraland just runs and performs poorly, the controls are particularly heinous and sometimes the camera gets possessed by a thousand angry ghosts, so no matter what experience you build it’ll be tainted by that mandatory membrane of interaction. Some of what you’ll stumble across is almost quaint, like this modern style suburban single family home populated entirely by official Nintendo art.  It’s almost adorably incompetent, like the Decentraland version of a Geocities shrine to Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At least until you notice the For Sale sign out front, and the several dozen identical Mario houses scattered around the world, all owned by the same guy named Dan.  They’re everywhere, I’ve completely lost track of how many unique instances of this house I’ve stumbled across.  This is in part because navigating Decentraland is a nightmare, the extremely short draw distance and attendant lack of landmarks makes it very easy to get lost, so it’s hard to tell if any given Modern Mario House is a fresh one you’ve never been to before, or one that you’ve looped back on. 
“AUG 1, 2022 DecentRally: Setting the Track for Future Experience Creators Using Infinity Engine Code The first of its kind in Decentraland, DecentRally shows what the Infinity Engine code can do, serving as an open source foundation for future high-speed experiences.” Decentraland faces a fascinating problem inherent to its basic construction. The language of interaction with the world of Decentraland is the language of games. You navigate the world via an avatar, your avatar runs, jumps, and clicks on things. This makes games the most obvious implementation as an Experience, since the ludology is already there. The problem is that Decentraland is just bad for games. DecentRally is an abysmal little experience, barely qualifying as the kart racer that it nominally resembles. Of course we can’t judge it too harshly as it’s just a proof of concept, though given that everything in Decentraland seems to fall under that umbrella it’s enough to make one suspicious, like maybe “it’s still in beta” or “it’s just a proof of concept” are just a rhetorical shield against criticism. Either which way, the developer’s other project, Infinity Engine, is also awful, and it’s been featured on Decentraland’s front page for well over a year. The fantasy of the metaverse is one where it subsumes much of our present reality, where, in the words of Matthew Ball “entire generations will eventually move to and live inside it” which, as a statement, more or less demands poetic interpretation, that Ball is referring to interactions and activity taking place via the membrane of the software, because otherwise it’s, you know, stupid, because your body won’t fit inside the wires. But regardless, this idea of place requires the simulacrum of place, and the simulacrum of place must encompass both the fantastic and the mundane, because if it doesn’t encompass both Skyrim and your office and the grocery store then there’s too much discontinuity, the metaverse ceases to be a world, a true place, and becomes little more than a digital interface, and to that end the existence of the metaverse demands the existence of Eashoo Law (A Professional Corporation). Welcome to the metaverse law office of James Eashoo, a personal injury lawyer based in Los Angeles. James isn’t in right now, no one is, and he never will be because the idea of staffing this place with actual people is patently absurd. While it was unfortunate that you tripped and dropped the urn that contained you grandmother’s ashes because you tripped over a rake that your roommate left out, unfortunately when you attacked him with that rake it was a, uhm, a crime, and so I’m afraid I’m going to have to refer you to a criminal defense lawyer. Uh, this is, this is outside kinda the purview of what I, what I do, I’m more of a personal injury lawyer. So, um, unfortunately you are going to need criminal defense representation and, um, I do have some people tha tI can refer you to. I’m deeply sorry for the loss of your grandmother and the death of your roommate, but I can’t assist you any further in this matter. This is not meaningfully useful in any way to businesses. When confronted with the actual product, the actual series of things that would need to be engaged with to make the fictional vision of the metaverse real, the product, and the comparison to the “next generation of the internet” is comical. Ball quotes Tim Sweeny talking about a future where every company is expected to operate a virtual world “just as every company a few decades ago created a webpage, and then at some point every company created a Facebook page.” But here’s the thing: we already know from those examples that most companies don’t need much more to a website than some cursory fluff and their contact information. A website, to most companies, is just a replacement for a yellow pages entry, it’s an ad whose number one job is to carry a phone number, address, and business hours. A Facebook page became appealing because it offloaded the work of designing the page and its functionality as a whole in a way that office workers could easily manage: Facebook handles running Facebook, you just put in your stuff, making it a useful tool for high density, up to date communication, like promotions or changes in operating hours. The entire process there is a move towards efficiency. The construction and maintenance of a virtual world is ludicrous in comparison. The effort to build and update is orders of magnitude beyond even a basic webpage, and the information density goes down! Like, this is really important: most business communication is going to be in the form of text for… ever, because text is really, really, really useful. But the metaverse is a uniquely terrible medium for the delivery of text because that text cannot be presented in an optimized format, it must be bent to the metaphor of a real space. That’s why the only actual meaningful things in Eashoo Law (A Professional Corporation) are links to conventional, flat, text-and-image based websites. Because they’re just more efficient ways to present and access information. So the virtual workspace, the idea that this plot in Decentraland would ever become actually functional as a space, with the receptionist navigating up the virtual stairs to tell James, via in-world voice chat, that someone is waiting to see him, is comical. But without that promise, without that story, what’s even left?  An NFT gallery and hard-to-use widgets that just open Instagram in another tab and remind you that you’re not “in the metaverse” you’re just browsing a website? I guess at least you can stand on the balcony and admire the Modern Mario House across the street. Even official productions, stuff created by the developers themselves or people they’ve sub-contracted, trend heavily towards embarrassing. The festival stage for the first annual Metaverse Music Festival featuring DJ Paris Hilton lacked collision on the stairs and balcony, meaning you could take a terrible elevator to a second floor that you would immediately fall through. New Years Eve 2022 was staged in a Duke-Nukem-esque recreation of Times Square and featured a devastatingly terrible jumping puzzle, just indescribably bad in its fundamental construction, riddled with all manner of collision problems, and very much coming off as a half-hearted idea that was implemented improvisationally and never actually tested, let alone revised, with the reward being a broken scavenger token, z-fighting textures, and a bad view of the party. [barely audible fireworks] “Wait, is that it? Was that it?” After a long day’s virtual lawyering, it’s only natural that you’ll want to take a load off. And we would recommend none-other than NFT World’s NFT World City’s Comedy Club.  It’s always bugged me when I go into a comedy club and I’m not immediately met with comedy - it’s false advertising. But with the power of the metaverse, and a $120,000 grant from the Decentraland DAO, the NFT World City’s Comedy Club obtained an infinite source of comedy. “Uh, we hope to have content from Decentral Comedy soon. And we have also sourced content from an AI tool called ChatGPT which provides some jokes for us to show here. It’s not all comedy and incompetence and insincerity, though. Occasionally you’ll stumble across a single plot that’s just a simple shrine to a loved one, taken away from this world, too young and, oh, hey, it’s another Modern Mario House. One of the most consistently popular locations in Decentraland, popular enough to warrant a functionally permanent spot on the Genesis Plaza hot locations board, is the WonderMine meteor mining and crafting game. Now, something to stress here is that this is, within the context of Decentraland, a success story. There are people who interface with Decentraland solely as the medium by which they access WonderMine.  Even just looking at the map it is one of the few consistently occupied places where you can find other players in any reasonable number. And it is an idle clicking game that is so sluggish in its pace that it barely qualifies as a skinner box. Meteors fall, and you click on them. And then you wait. The sole value prospect is that at the end of the process you might be able to craft an NFT wearable that you can then sell to someone else.  “So like I was saying, if you want to see what this is worth, we can go over to the marketplace and search steampunk hat and as you can see its worth 2499 MANA. And if we want to view the value of MANA today, it’s over a dollar.” So with such big money on the line, of course the game is botted to hell and back with idlers and auto-clickers. Decentraland doesn’t log users out after a set time spent idle, and the meteors fall in predictable locations, so it’s pretty easy to automate, but even barring that level of complexity it’s trivial to just leave a tab idle and collect the periodic rewards. Wondermine is also immediately adjacent to one of the oldest games in Decentraland, Dragon Rush, which is featured prominently in Genesis Plaza.  Immediately we can spot a problem with the real estate model of the internet: this relatively modest game has an absolutely massive footprint and necessitates a towering retaining wall to back its terrain.  From a standpoint of architecture it is an immensely hostile block, a massive impassable barrier to both sightlines and traffic. It turns out that having every individual app and website take up scarce space in an adversarial relationship is, uh, bad. Alright, so, walk onto the dragon’s back, press f to flap wings and fly, go through the gates and land on the landing pad to finish the race. Now, maybe this is just unfair, after all I did say that Dragon Rush is one of the oldest games in Decentraland. Let’s do some due diligence and find something more mature, more refined, something with a budget behind it. Knights of Antrom, the ultimate role-playing game that will challenge you to farm, craft, and fight your way to the top. Those looking for a little more action to their Decentraland experience, need look no further than Dice Masters. An incredible, fully-playable role-playing game built within the metaverse’s trusty framework. Within its sizable location, gamers can undertake quests, battle enemies, collect resources and craft in game items, all in addition to ridding the realm of the terrible poultry scourge. Dice Masters Development and Expansion Should the following Tier 6: up to $240,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Gaming category be approved? Yes wins with 93% Okay, that’s quite a pitch. And, you know what, let’s treat this seriously, like let’s treat this like it were a Kickstarter or Steam Early Access pitch.  $240,000 is modest but realistic, and watching the trailer, it’s all very achievable, especially since the buildings are just lifted from World of Warcraft. But, like, the features are very straightforward, and the trailer even evokes Decentraland’s style.  This is eminently realizable. Low rent? Sure. Devoid of original ideas? Also true. Doable? Absolutely. This is it, right? This is the moment Decentraland has been waiting for, this is the realization of all their promises! This isn’t just a thing in Decentraland, it’s Decentraland as a platform, as the infrastructure invisible beneath an otherwise independent game experience! They even bothered to include the coordinates in the trailer, like they actually want you to go there! [groaning] It’s just… it’s the same story over and over again, everywhere you go in Decentraland. It’s all the same stuff. No amount of remixing can overcome the underlying flaws of the base layer. Decentraland wants to be the invisible tech behind the scenes, but it can’t because it also wants to be a real virtual world, and the one goal imposes endless creative and technical decisions onto the other. You can’t really get anything better out of the system! The MetaGamiMall is a construction of special note because its existence was made possible by a grant of $220,000 US dollars from the Decentraland DAO, the organization that operates, in theory, as the government of the Decentraland world. The pitch was a gamified mall, and I will let their own pitch package speak for itself on some key details. “Game + Mall = GamiMall” “The game - super dogerio, the vitality of the mall.  “The P2E economic model can incentivise users to play and earn.  “The first comprehensive traffic road system in Decentaland. Highly compatible with Customer shopping habits and Super Dogerio Game. Interesting piano floor, create more fun while walking and running.” “The Meta GamiMall is an avant gard project endeavor to blur the boundaries between game and shop activities. The game lives in the mall, the mall needs the game.” The actual product is a track that you walk along to collect coins that can be traded for wearables, while a bad techno DJ repeats the instructions on an endless loop.    Because space is so tight, even for large plots like this, the track consists mostly of really obnoxious spirals, and the place is infested with bots that idle on the exact same spot until the timer resets and they can collect more coins.  It would seem that while $220,000 can get you a lot of stuff, it can’t get you an experience worth doing with your own human hands.  The actual rules of Super Dogerio are oblique, and the DJ’s instructions don’t actually help. “Welcome to MetaMine. MetaMine is a metaverse game event that will begin from 18th Novermber at MetaGamiMall in Decentraland.” “MetaMine is a metaverse game event” I guess it’s called Metamine now? As for the mall component, I don’t even know what to say.  The space is so cluttered with the extreme cyberspace aesthetic that it’s barely even legible as a mall, and the whole notion is keelhauled by the fact that this is a miserable interface for actually buying things, which is the actual purpose of a mall.  The result, an empty shopping experience plagued with bots, isn’t just a dead mall, it’s an undead mall, stuttering along in a parody of life. Now, they did seek a new grant in late 2022, asking for an additional $60,000 USD to expand and revitalize the mall. Unfortunately the proposal was rejected 3 million to 9 million, with 7.8 million of the “no” votes coming from two people. Sorry MetaGamiMall, better luck next time. The Decentraland Report is one of the most fascinating elements of Decentraland, and it breaks my heart that we can’t give it the time it truly deserves. They style themselves as “the first ever decentralized news network, reporting on the latest breaking news of the Metaverse”. Between grants and private funding it has received over $250,000 USD, a quarter million dollars of investment. It is an organization operated by Kevin Clark, better known by his handle KevinOnEarth999. We’ll let him explain what it means: “Decentralized news networks give the public the power to control event coverage, reporters and how the network will evolve over time. Tokens are distributed to the public based on participation and can be used to purchase event coverage, ad space, and vote on key decisions - such as the addition or removal of actual news reporters.” Just to stress this, to highlight it and make sure that you are aware that this is not us catastrophizing or editorializing, the ability for the crowd to fire reporters is an explicit feature. “Imagine if you could use a token to vote off a reporter from the news.” You can buy the ability to fire a reporter. And that’s deliberate, because it gives the token resale value, which incentivises participation. The editorial agenda of the Decentraland Report is not just nominally available for purchase, it is proudly available for purchase. The Decentraland Report is a news outlet that hates journalism. It takes the very messy subject of journalistic independence, the way that journalism often functions as willing collaborators with systemic power, and the reasons why we should be legitimately skeptical, alert, and literate in how we intake media, and uses that to advocate for a radical populism masquerading as neutrality. The logic is that institutions are inherently biased, therefore less institution means less bias, and no institution means no bias. Their trust model is explicitly rooted in their incompetence. Kevin’s rhetoric is part and parcel with the conspiratorial thinking that leads people to trust misinformation they found on Facebook specifically because they found it on a page that gets flagged by Facebook as misinformation. It shares a table with the belief that reporters exist to deceive the public, and so the only journalism you can trust comes from those who hate journalism. “With this decentralized approach to news, the public can take control of global narratives and focus on fact-based reporting verses biased-based reporting which is focused more on getting views than telling the truth. Kevin’s vision for the news is downright dystopian, it’s a killer writing prompt if you’re in need of ideas. So what’s the product? You want to see some journalism so unprofessional that it would make even the writers at the Defiant cringe? “Any giveaways? Yeah, for sure man! If you hang around I’ll definitely do a giveaway man! So we’re just hop right on in here to Dice Masters. Come on through! I just want to show support to Dice Masters.” “And then we’ll kinda move into the auction phase, hopping from gallery to gallery.” “That is, that sounds like a great time.” “As recommended by Seanny, upon the passing of the grant, we agree to pay back 10% of our monthly revenue to the DAO, in perpetuity until the grant amount is paid back to the DAO. That’s amazing. That, to me, is epic.” It’s just Twitch streams. “No fucking way! Do you fucking hear that motherfuckers! That’s what the fucking metaverse was missing! Metal!” “That is very true, holy shit. That is very frickin’ true. Wow.  That was Big Dave.  Says Big Dave is Talking, listen the fuck up.  Wow.  That was, wow. Wow.  That was sound check? You gotta be kidding me! That was frickin’ sound check, you gotta be kidding me!” I know, I know, right? It’s pretty disappointing that after all that talk about the philosophy of journalism this ship runs aground over the fact that nothing remotely worth reporting on happens in Decentraland in the first place, so the risk of journalistic malpractice is functionally zero. Despite the lofty ambitions of the network, these guys are ultimately harmless. They’re just small streamers cosplaying as reporters while hanging out with their handful of regulars talking about the video game they like to play. That said, there’s still a story here. They still raised a quarter million dollars, right? Did that at least pay someone? Well, no. Reporters aren’t “paid” as such. They get paid in the REPORT token, and they get a cut of the organizations’ monthly revenue on Xpand, a crypto-meets-Twitter-meets-Patreon platform.  At time of writing that’s around $120 bucks, total. Xpand takes a 10% cut, there is another 10% cut for their grant repayment, a phrase that shouldn’t exist, and then the remainder is split nine ways. There’s the possibility of one-time donations on top of that, which get cut the same way, but on average the individual reporters are looking at about ten bucks a month. This uh, isn’t a great deal, especially since the streamers,  Sorry, reporters Need to provide their own equipment.  So it's no surprise that Kevin has failed to draw in any Pulitzer Prize winners. Who he’s ended up with is an ensemble of Decentraland users who just want to grow their stream by associating with an org. They’re all broadcasting from their personal Twitch streams, what they get from the org is the DCLR branding, which, you know, it doesn’t draw in the crowds. Every single stream we caught had extremely low viewership, almost always fewer than 10 viewers, often under 5. Kevin's personal and DCLR branded YouTube channels don’t fare any better - a video is a success if it breaks 100 views. So, where on (Kevin)OnEarth did the money go? Okay, the reporters only get paid from the Xpand pot, DCLR doesn’t buy them lights or webcams, the only thing left to even spend it on… is Decentraland itself? [Kazoo and fart performance of Also Sprach Zarathustra] The Decentraland Report is the perfect showcase of web3’s ability to cause money to just evaporate. The build is called the Metaflower, which is a reference to an NFT of a superyacht from other metaverse candidate The Sandbox that sold  Know what, doesn’t matter.  Using allegedly very expensive tech, the flower is intended to develop and bloom as the number of subscribers on the Xpand page grows. Of course we need to take Kevin’s word on that because the count is currently 22 followers toward the goal of 10,000. So the building has remained in its initial form. What we’re left with is this. We’ve got walls laced with Kevin’s prized NFTs, two platforms that I’m assured are the ‘studios’ where presenters are intended to stand. The Decision Room, where DCLR DAO members will meet, once the DAO gets some. And then we have the butthole tunnel that takes us to an alien in a rice paddy hat who tells us that we need to save the Decentraland Report by gathering News Juice. And it turns out that News Juice means ‘please follow Kevin and pals on Twitter.’ Wait, Kevin’s in here twice! Strangely there’s no news in the DCLR HQ.  What they do give you is a link to an entirely different 3D web application called Oncyber. So you’re sitting there, computer frying from running Decentraland. And if you want to see some news at the metaverse news building, Kevin wants you to open up another 3D site that loads up two dozen YouTube videos at once and then crashes Firefox entirely - it’s absurd. Needless to say, the Decentraland build contributes extremely little to the utility of running a news network. We don’t know precisely how much this whole thing cost beyond about $35,000 for the LAND, but given that the $127,000 in grants are reasonably well accounted for it would seem that, after the boring stuff like building the website and Twitch assets, this as a whole represents Kevin’s $126,000. So let’s focus in on those grants. Kevin received 4 grants from the Decentraland DAO. Two were to hire an editor for DCLR - both paid the editor $50 per edit… in MANA. Then there was a $5000 grant in September of 2021 to create unique in-game jackets for reporters as a milestone reward for 6 months work. And then there was the big one, a $120,000 US grant in stable coins to build the backend for DCLR’s reward system. Since decentralized news is all about rewarding participation, including viewership, you need to build that system. Pretty much the same tech that handles Twitch drops… to service a community of like 30 people max.  The decentralized philosophy of the project demands this type of massive, inefficient system exist as a starting point. You can’t expand into these solutions naturally. So Kevin spent $35,000 on LAND, potentially $91,000 on the studio build, $5,000 on jackets, and $120,000 on this reward system, and then went back to the grant program looking for another $240,000, 32 of which was allotted to reporter equipment and included salaries for a marketing director, content manager, graphic designer and so on. In what seems to have been the only lucid moment in the fever dream of the grant scheme, Kevin was told… no. Two more reduced proposals have also been rejected. You know what we haven’t talked about in a while? Chocolate. I mean, sure, Lindt has their metaverse, but surely chocolate giant Hershey wouldn’t be left behind. Well, if you’ve got a craving, you’re in luck! Just a hop skip and a jump from the Sugar Club you can experience Hersheyverse, the official Metaverse holiday home of Hershey Chocolates (of India and the Philippines). Sure this plot may look microscopic, but boy howdy is there a lot to do. For one you can talk to the shopkeepers inside and they’ll… send you a link to Amazon. But there’s also gamification! There’s a quest! It’s time for a treasure hunt! Just hop up here and bounce over here, and click on this, and ride the elevator and click on the camera and you can get your very own official Hersheyverse wearable. An NFT on the frequently exploited Polygon blockchain, it would appear that this hat has been claimed, generously, about 500 times. But once you claim your extremely ugly hat you get one last quest to extend your time in the Hersheyverse. You see the treasure chest needs opening, and the keys won’t find themselves, so you just, talk to the shopkeepers and pick the keys up off the ground, and click the thing, and gain the ability to fly! And by fly I mean that if you double jump an invisible platform spawns under you and lifts you up to a predetermined height, where you can jump to one of the clouds and take control of the chocolate cannon which may or may not work. Brands love the metaverse. Or at least that’s the story. Samsung, Nissan, Vodafone, Snapple, CitiBank, Pedigree, Hershey, Mountain Dew, Trident, Sour Patch Kids, Atari, Miller Lite, JP Morgan, everyone’s getting in on the metaverse! Now, what that means is, uh, extremely flexible. We’ve already dipped into Hersheyverse, but what else is out there? It’s just… it’s weird, man. Atari has probably the best looking location of any of these, but it still principally consists of a large faux-social space full of furniture that you can’t interact with. Wait, have I even mentioned that yet?! Yeah, you can’t sit on chairs in Decentraland!  The whole goddamn world is built of nothing but hangout spots and you can’t even role play sitting around a table unless you buy the user-created Sit emote from the marketplace! Otherwise in the atari stronghold you have a slate of links that all take you out of Decentraland and a couple wearables that are no longer available. The only thing to actually do here is play one of the four variants of Breakout and feel the gnawing cold reality seep into you as you realize that Decentraland is such a monumental failure as a platform for socialization, for commerce, and for gaming that it can’t even handle properly emulating Breakout, a game from 1976 that you can play on goddamn Google images! Steve Wozniak built Breakout fifty years ago to run on 44 TTL chips and a ham sandwich and that’s still somehow too demanding a gaming experience for Decentraland. The Onyx Lounge by JP Morgan Chase, built in March 2022 and described by Fortune as a bet on “a metaverse future that could be worth trillions” was originally staffed only by a wandering tiger, but has since been replaced with a cramped reading lounge. The DCL branch of HSBC is a unique kind of awful, with this deeply unsettling robot receptionist and stairs with no collision, with the only problem being that it’s not clear if this is an official HSBC project or not, since impersonation is trivial and even the official builds are glitchy and weird, because it’s Decentraland: everything is glitchy and weird. Particularly though, as you go through a lot of these you start to notice a few trends. First is a subject that we’ll talk about at length later, which is that discussion of these ventures rarely feature anything meaningful. They don’t tend to tell you how to actually find the location, and tend to downplay the product itself, typically limiting visuals to a wide screenshot of an exterior, if anything at all. Fortune didn’t even bother to mention the tiger. It’s really more about the headline than the actual space. Second is a trend of dispersion. It’s not Hershey’s that’s in the metaverse, it’s Hershey’s India and Philippines, it’s Nissan Italy, it’s Vodafone Turkey. Third is a trend towards the temporary. While the Atari metaverse headquarters is still standing and the Onyx Lounge by JP Morgan Chase still sort of technically exists, most of these aren’t actually brands “moving to the metaverse”, they’re just promotional campaigns. The Snapple Stronghold, Miller Lite Metalite Bar, and Hersheyverse are already gone. “And look, we’ve heard there aren’t a lot of people inside the Metaverse yet, but marketers say it's gonna be a very big deal…” The Meataversity of Steak-umm came and went in about two months. The Trident Vibe x Sour Patch Kids Chew The Vibes Dance Party has been replaced by an “office” for MoZeus Worldwide, the ad agency that built it. While a few corporations jumped in early and actually bought LAND, that ship has seemingly already sailed, and now the impetus for this isn’t originating with the brands but with the digital ad agencies that they hire, who then toss in a Decentraland “activation” as part of the package, a way to recoup some value from the LAND that the ad agency bought. Fourth is that they just overwhelmingly suck and need to constantly direct users out of Decentraland in order to accomplish anything. The Nissan experience will let you book a test drive in Italy if you click a link to open their existing website. The Atari store opens Atari’s actual store. The Pedigree Fosterverse lets LAND holders create a metaverse duplicate of a real dog in a partnered shelter in need of a forever home. The metaverse dog serves as a digital billboard leading to the dog’s adoptapet page. Of the three dogs the platform lists at time of writing, all three have long-since been adopted out, but their listings remain because the incentive for landholders to participate is to get a Pedigree branded dog on their parcel - so the metaverse dogs are doomed to beg for adoption for all eternity. So what does that all mean? Well, the obvious, but speculative, narrative is that ad agencies that have a stake in the success of “the metaverse” are approaching brands in smaller markets and pitching them on a vision of “the future” and dazzling them with some cooked numbers. They point to articles in real outlets like Fortune with titles referencing a trillion dollar future, and, like, in the face of that can you even afford the possibility of being wrong? It’s the lamest version of Pascal’s Wager. Back on the Genesis Plaza spawn platform we’ve got these pillars that I’ve shown but not really talked about yet. These are Decentraland’s solution to discoverability in their metaverse, or, well, at least one of their attempted solutions. As already mentioned, the Classics pillar includes Dragon Rush in the coveted bottom spot where you can actually interact without needing to crank the camera or use the awkward skeuomorphic buttons. On the right hand side, though, is the Crowds pillar, and for the last year one location has dominated that bottom slot. ICE Poker - The Stronghold, which routinely boasts over 100 attendees, often pushing 200. Now, that number is middling in isolation, but by the standards of Decentraland, where 12 qualifies as a crowd, it’s pretty meaningful. Of course a ton of those attendees are idle at the default spawn location, but let’s not ruin the fun. As for the legality of this, well, the opinion of Decentra Games’ Singapore-based lawyers is that it’s not gambling under relevant statutes, thus they don’t need a gaming license to operate.  The important thing here is that the only thing in Decentraland that seems to be actually successful is outright just a casino, and regardless of the sentiment of Jacque Law LLC, the community seems to be taking it for what it clearly is. “So as you can see I’ve earned $2.98 from playing. And honestly I’ve only been gambli~oops playing the casino for a couple of days.” The odd thing is that it’s seemingly only the poker tables, at that. Like, really it’s just this one specific casino. There’s a whole bunch of different casinos around the gambling zone, basically all of them owned by DecentraGames under the ICE brand, but The Stronghold is the only one anyone’s ever in. Turns out that’s because they already ran into legal problems! You used to be able to gamble on the slots at Tominoya with your cryptocurrency directly, but between glitchy behavior that would eat transactions, high service fees, long wait times to resolve bets, and, most critically, some pointed letters from various regulatory bodies, The Stronghold is the only location that supports the current brown bag policy, and it only has poker, all the others have been converted to free-play. You can still go over to The Aquarium and play blackjack, but you will do so alone, these people are not here to play, they are here to gamble. When discussing Decentraland, it’s hard to overlook the subject of its abysmal user base. Indeed, the biggest story to come out of Decentraland in 2022 was drama over DCL’s metrics.  In October 2022, crypto outlet Coindesk reported on DappRadar’s Data that claimed Decentraland had as few as 38 daily active users. Decentraland fired back in a blog post, scrutinizing the data, calling it misinformation, and pushing their own value of 8,000.  This back and forth continued, with Coindesk releasing the ‘final word’ on the subject in January 2023 - with their research suggesting an active daily user base of 810. Now, it’s tempting to fall into this whirlpool, as apparently Coindesk did for 3 months, and litigate the definition of a “user,” but let’s head this off at the pass.  Whether Decentraland has daily activity of 40 users, 800 users or 8000 users is irrelevant, in their business these are all the same number. Emotionally it feels like a significant difference. But let’s give some context to these numbers. At 810 users, It's competing with Lord of the Rings Online and it has a fraction of the users of Fishing Planet - which like, it’s Fishing Planet.  The most generous numbers for Decentraland put it in competition with Star Wars: The Old Republic. All of these values are just Steam users, it doesn’t include the users who access the games directly through their dedicated launchers or on other platforms, so these numbers are inherently conservative. Despite having these varying player counts, these games all have fundamentally the same business model. They are operating a micro-MMO. If you ever wonder how ‘dead MMOs’ survive, it’s by running tight ships. These teams, often small, inherit a product that was hugely expensive to produce five, ten, fifteen years ago, and they are tasked with maintaining it in order to support a small but loyal user base. It is possible for Runes of Magic to be profitable off the back of a single digit number of ‘whales’, people who just really like Runes of Magic. The same is true for Fiesta Online or LotRO. So it doesn’t matter what Decentraland’s true daily user count looks like, because any number they’ve ever pushed falls into the same band of ‘long, long dead MMO.’ The fact that Decentraland has a similar user base to DC Universe Online is the red flag that most people notice first. Daybreak Game Company is a game developer that currently owns and maintains numerous old MMOs. Including Everquest, DC Universe Online, and Lord of the Rings Online. This is a tough business, and in December of 2020, Daybreak was acquired by Enad Global 7, in an agreement valued at $300 million dollars. So this company, that owns and maintains all of these MMOs that are all individually comparable to Decentraland’s user base, is meant to be worth a fraction of Decentraland? “And this is the story behind the company worth nearly ten billion dollars at the market peak.” It’s been said numerous times before, but it shouldn’t be left unsaid here. Decentraland’s purported value, based on the market cap of its cryptocurrency, is completely disconnected from reality. Decentraland’s product is clearly trash. As a video game, it struggles to set itself apart from Inferna, an MMO that advertises itself as an underdog off the back of its “3 man dev team.” So Decentraland goes all-in on the speculation, on narrative. Its value has nothing to do with what Decentraland is today. But what it will be… and what it did do when you weren’t watching. “Because the metaverse in its more mature form will be a lot more advanced than this and a lot more sophisticated than this, but this really is how it starts. This is the beginning of it and you know this is going to be the shape of things for the next twenty to thirty years, I really believe that.” The way that crypto users talk about Decentraland is so dissociated from what you yourself witness, that it seems like they’re talking about an entirely different thing. Like is this it? Is this the billion dollar virtual world? Surely I must be missing something. “I’m sorry you don’t like to make money here in the network” Like so much of web3, Decentraland has weaponized its speculative element. Since they are the future, the product as it exists now borders on irrelevant. The proposed inevitability of the metaverse is their greatest asset - because they don’t even need to try. This is the everything-proof shield that Decentraland users have created to guard from criticism. Decentraland and all its contents is forever a prototype - always just an indication of what the future will bring. Being bad is not a fatal flaw in the crypto space. Just look at the Red Ape Family, they’re visibly incompetent and they still made it to three episodes, even if the creator is too much of a coward to post the third. Every successful crypto project is bad, but with enough legitimacy you can mask that fact. This generates extremely funny scenarios, like crypto shill Robin from The Defiant stumbling through Decentraland’s barren wasteland while trying to invent reasons why what he’s looking at isn’t plainly obviously ass. “And I often say that the Metaverse is… it’s a world that rotates around you. And this is what I mean, the world literally does rotate around you, this is… it’s a universe where you’re always at the center.  That is the whole kind of mindset change that you have to get when you talk about the metaverse.” Decentraland users understand this need for legitimacy intuitively, and so it becomes what they crave above all else. That is why they value brand activations so highly, no matter the circumstances. Being able to put “Vodafone” on their world map, or “Pedigree” in their events tab, spins the narrative that real companies are here in Decentraland. Even embarrassing brand activations are defended, because “they’re just dipping their toes in, this is just the beginning.” Decentraland users seek to encourage brand activations and events through pathetic pandering. They’ll smile through gritted teeth as they insist that the Hershey’s Experience really is interesting and successful. By performatively engaging with events and brand activations, users seek to create the illusion that these events are successful in the hopes of drawing in the next sucker. “What’s cooking good looking people. We’re in Decentraland and we’re in Hersheyverse. Can you believe that? Hershey’s bro, Hershey. However you say that, Hershey. Pretty sure it’s Hershey, the fuck bro Mandela? Bro. Who woulda thought that Hershey was gonna make a little plot on Decentraland. You know before you know it you’re gonna see other candy companies. You know there’s already beverage companies, there’s already alcohol companies, there’s fucking Yahoo, Amazon is already in here, and Hershey is the next big one to get into this shit.” This principle scales up from the Pedigree Fosterverse all the way up to the marquee events of the platform. The Metaverse Music Festival, which in its most recent outing was tossed around as having featured performances from Bjork, Ozzy Ozzbourne, and Mötorhead, consisted almost entirely of pre-recorded messages from the musicians followed by just playing a couple music videos. “It’s awesome to be in the Metaverse with you and it feels great to be here in Decentraland. I hope you’re all having an amazing time today. My name is Dave Mustaine from Megadeath and today I’ll be playing you a few of my favorite tracks. Let me know what you think about this one.” [Opening chords of The Sick, The Dying, and The Dead] I criticized Fortnite for being overly poetic with its definition of a “live” Marshmallow concert, and this is just, this is just so much worse. The Metaverse Fashion Week, as the name implies, was a week-long fashion event held in Decentraland in March of 2022, scheduled to run just after the Milan Fashion Week. The event was organized by the Decentraland Foundation, the developers of Decentraland. It was the involvement of the Foundation that saw the Metaverse Fashion Week get some real attention and media coverage. A number of lifestyle, fashion, and tech journalists were sent in to cover the event, for whom many were experiencing the metaverse for the first time.  The event was billed as an opportunity to see the next major innovation in the fashion industry. A new way for fashion to be designed, bought and sold. It would be the melding of fashion and art. Finally, art and fashion - together at last. The word ‘phygital’ got thrown around a lot, to refer to the simultaneous purchasing of a digital and physical good. Like you buy a digital hat in Decentraland, and a real hat turns up in the mail. Not to get distracted, but World of Warcraft did this exact promotion in 2010. This plush Wind Rider Cub came with an in-game pet, it’s not a new thing. But of course, they don’t frame it that way; instead you’re buying a single hat with two simultaneous planes of existence. It’s not a bundle of two products, it’s the same hat in two different forms. There are dozens of tech startups eager to composite clothing over photo or video and label it as the future of self-expression. This so-called ‘screen wear’ is at its best, an artful photoshop job, and at worst, essentially just a Tiktok or Zoom filter.  “There are different avenues. So the first thing is you could wear it on your real self through an AR filter. So that’s number one, and that’s the part where technology is still, you know, a work in progress. It's going to get better and better, we know it.  So I think as we, regular people, start transitioning more and more into the virtual world, spending more time in virtual environments and that barrier between physical and digital starts blurring more and more, and we will start consuming digital fashion, digital sneakers, digital makeup, digital jewelry”
 This was the rhetoric that defined the Metaverse Fashion Week.  So, our ragtag ensemble of journalists and creators were sent in to report on the future of reality and fashion. How did it go? Do you really need to be told at this point? [annoying sounds from DCL]  “What the fuck did I just watch?” “After a pre-show trial session spent exploring Decentraland’s ‘Luxury Fashion District’—maybe it was too early, but the only fashion space I teleported to was an empty DKNY store. “While there were plenty of fashion shows, very few were successful because the overall experience fell flat. Perhaps expectedly, many weren’t able to capture the magic of a physical show, where attendees are fully immersed and emotionally invested in the brand’s collection. The game-ified aesthetic in Decentraland took away from the fantasy and craftsmanship of luxury fashion and, simply put, the avatar models weren’t as inspiring. “I don’t know how I feel about it. I literally canceled everything including my workout to watch this show.” And there was just very little documenting of the event in general. This is due to a combination of disinterest, but also a deliberate effort not to showcase the embarrassing product. Even the brands involved in the show downplayed the Decentraland part of their Decentraland show. “The shows didn’t look the way the brands expected they would, as publications on their social networks made clear. This is because brands posted the best photos from the show and not the reality of pixelated avatars and simple looks.” Likewise, musicians who “performed” at the music festival didn’t exactly rush to show off the event, either, so footage of any of these theoretically big events is shockingly sparse. This isn’t some grand conspiracy, it’s just dozens of individuals independently reaching the same conclusion: the product sucks and it’d be a bad idea to show it. This is true for both DCL users, but also the journalists covering it. Decentraland looks so unprofessional that coverage of DCL looks unprofessional by extension. “And this actually looks, it looks sorta like me. I like it so much I’m going to dance for you.” “We do have a whisky distillery” “You’ve been holding out. Oh, this is cool.” “Here we can walk around and actually see the distillery from the inside.” “I enjoy your virtual distillery, not so much your virtual bourbon, so cheers Gigi.” “Cheers to that!” “I mean, so here’s the thing, uh, is it for us, I don’t know, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who already live in the metaverse, who exist in the metaverse, who are buying things or hanging out.” This creates an environment where the Metaverse Fashion Week was a thing talked about in the abstract. It was a thing that did happen, but the reality is slowly eroded away. Most people who learned about the event didn’t see the product, they only heard the narrative. And that narrative went a little something like this: “The wearables were supposed to be available immediately after the runway event at a nearby pop-up shop, and for free — a rarity considering fashion’s rush to capitalize on crypto clothing. For some reason, a couple of hours after it ended, they weren’t displayed yet inside the paisley-patterned store. A good reason to come back.” This journalist witnessed a broken feature, they experienced a bug. Rather than reporting critically on the failure of a key feature of the event, the article pulls its punch in the last line through the language of puff journalism. Out of context, it reads almost like satire. But if you read enough coverage of Decentraland, this becomes a very real trend. “Last of all, I can definitely see this event evolving into something much more engaging. there are communities of people who are replicating in various metaverse outposts behaviors that people (or people dressed as elves) have long cultivated in reality. And fashion is one of those behaviors. So we’re all just going to need a better graphics card. “However, MVFW did provide a glimpse into possibilities for how brands can build their narratives in the metaverse—offering immersive experiences and innovative ways to expand offerings beyond the physical.  “Once VR glasses are integrated the experience is going to be on a whole other level.” And in the absence of any voices to the contrary, that becomes the narrative of the Metaverse Fashion Week. It had ‘some technical issues’, ‘reviews were mixed’, but it was a proof of concept that left journalists feeling certain that the concept has a future. And through that lens, that allows those involved to say with a straight face that the event was a success. “It was a fantastic four days. As a proof-point of what is to come; this is the early evolution of decentralized commerce” On the whole, journalists are seemingly overwhelmed by the tempest of claims and ideas surrounding the metaverse. We can appreciate why this is the case; a lot of this is vague either on purpose or on accident. It is not the job of the writers at Women’s Wear Daily to crack crypto wide open.  It’s all too big, too out of scope, they’re convinced that they “just don’t get it.” So they defer to the explanations and narratives given to them by people trying to sell something. “I mean, so here’s the thing, I…” Eric Ravenscraft has discussed this phenomenon with a specific eye towards journalists in outlets like the New York Times uncritically parroting the vocabulary of real estate for the digital groundbreaking of metaverse headquarters that in many cases don’t even actually exist.   This goes all the way back to the first major coverage given to Decentraland - A BBC story in 2018 in response to the initial land auction. “In Decentraland users can build whatever they can imagine on plots of virtual land. But the creators are giving BBC Tending a sneak peek.” What’s important to remember here is that the Decentraland we’re seeing wouldn’t exist for another 2 years, the actual product in 2018 looked like this. So by its very nature there is nothing really to show. And it means we get these lovely little artifacts from the past. “Right, whoah, I seem to be on some sort of dance floor, I can hear music, it’s very colourful. So there seems to be a zombie out in the distance. Oh gosh, he’s coming right at me!” “It’ll be pretty much exactly like Facebook except you’ll be able to hear and see each other in VR. So a bit more of a real experience. As long as we’ve got the internet, stick our headsets on, and I’ll be able to have friends come round my house in Decentraland, or I can go to their house for a virtual cup of tea.” “How high would the price have to get for you to sell that land?” “I’m not selling it until it’s worth at least $10 million.” “Ten million?” “Yeah.” He sold for $980 a year later. “A million dollars! But it doesn’t exist?” “It does here, and it will do, in about a year I believe.” The spine of this story is built not on what Decentraland did, or was doing, but what it will do. All of the features that will be implemented and benchmarks it will hit. Journalists and vloggers who very understandably don’t know the deep lore of Decentraland’s development still mention VR as a thing that just hasn’t been implemented yet, despite the feature being scrapped. “Once VR glasses are integrated the experience is going to be on a whole other level.” Decentraland craves legitimacy, but it can subsist on crumbs. It is a speculative real estate scheme which is rapidly approaching the Nigerian Prince level of self-selection. That means that for its purpose, all it needs is for people to discuss it, and for the conversation to feature the defenses we’ve been discussing. It’s just a prototype, it will improve, the metaverse is inevitable. Because this reporting loads the bases for investment advice like this to sound believable. “Land is hitting all time highs for value and people are asking ‘can people really afford to buy these plots for a lot? Yes because there’s going to be large commercial and business entities that are going to be able to make a lot more than what they’re going to pay for this land - they know it. It has long term ramifications in the industry, so it’s a great investment.” If you took Kevin’s advice at the time, you’d be in the red less than two weeks later, have lost half your investment 2 months later and be down 80 to 90% today. That is the danger posed by nonchalant coverage of Decentraland, boosting the narrative that major brands and mass adoption are right around the corner.  There’s no such thing as bad publicity for Decentraland. It continues to subsist through performative hype and deception.  Decentraland needs to be recognized for what it is, and can’t be given the easy way out. Decentraland is not, and has never been, a VR experience. You cannot order a pizza in Decentraland. Decentraland is not the future. It has never, and will never be, worth a billion dollars. So at this point I think it’s plain to see that the product of Decentraland is, at best, bad. But Decentraland users are battle-hardened on this point - they’ve had years of defending against this claim. Many DCL users will concede that sure, the product itself is janky, but obviously its just a prototype - and the real appeal of Decentraland, what sets it apart from its competition, is its system of governance. Decentraland was built and is maintained by ‘the Foundation’, the actual developers behind the product. Meilich and Ordano always intended for the Foundation to go hands-off, simply becoming the underlying machinery of the world akin to the invisibility of a web host. As part of this invisibility, they wanted users to handle as many elements of development and maintenance as possible. This is characterized through the language of ownership - Decentraland is “owned by its users”, so naturally the users have direct control over the product. This is further obfuscated through the language of Decentraland as a reified space - which is to say, Decentraland users present themselves as akin to the government of a virtual world - enacting policies in a democratic fashion. They do this through the Decentraland DAO. Because the Decentraland DAO dresses itself in the language of governance and law, it’s tempting to engage with them on that level and take the DAO seriously. We tried to give them a fair go, but we found ourselves repeating the mistakes of the journalists we just criticized. To contrast them against real governments implies that the comparison is warranted, and humors the notion that these are adults attempting to revolutionize the concept of governance. So let’s adjust expectations and lead with the soul of the DAO. Upon revisiting the DAO’s governance site for this project, the first thing that caught our eye was this.  A proposal to fire a Committee member for abuse of power and bias. And let me tell you, the contents of this would be right at home on Something Awful circa 2008. A guy got banned on Discord and got so upset that he wrote a 1000-word essay on a sock puppet about why the moderator should be fired for abusing their authority. Because when asked, the moderator kinda said he was a pluralist and “pluralists hate the individual.” And on and on it goes. The proposal was rejected, but it was rejected as an invalid question because the Team Manager of the DAO Facilitation Squad does not count as a member of the DAO Committee, and thus a complaint would need to be made to the Grant Support Squad who would then need to recommend a proposal to revoke the grant funding the DAO Facilitation Squad, thus firing Matimio indirectly. Then there’s Kevin’s failed grant proposal - where multiple people rejected the proposal at least in part because Kevin blocked them on Twitter. When you block someone on Twitter, this is where they end up. This is a group of people that sees the Sugar Club, the empty bar next to Hershey’s, requesting $60,000 US dollars to fund its “operating costs” - and they’re like yeah that seems reasonable. When they hold elections, the candidates are asked questions like: “What are each candidate's stance on bringing physical world ideologies into our decentralized world? You know, government structures - democracy, communism, whatever.”  In that example, the candidates universally accepted the idea that DCL was apolitical - and they would support politics being patched into Decentraland, but only if it achieved majority support in an official vote. “This is like a grand experiment, however there’s a lot at stake so I think any ideology that we’re considering bringing in it would be best handled on a side-project.” My dudes, the ideology is coming from inside the house. Their philosophy of governance minimizes individual authority and decision-making. But they pass phaux-legislation that gives committee members absolute discretion with no appeals process. The Decentraland DAO is no less of a failure than the Hershey’s Experience or DecentRally - we’re just changing gears from bad video games to bureaucratic incompetence. You can’t really understand the DAO until you wrap your head around just how inequitable the voting situation is. DAOs often makes use of weighted voting schemes. The main purpose of this is to ‘acknowledge a user’s stake in the project’ - the logic being that those with the most invested have the most at stake in the DAO. Though the details can vary between DAO’s, Decentraland’s scheme is refreshingly straight forward. Votes are weighted based on the sum of Decentraland tokens in the attached wallet. 1 MANA is worth 1 point of Vote Power. It’s just wealth, the more money you have, the more your vote counts - one to one. Naturally, this leads to those with wealth shutting down any proposal that bothers them. For instance - Let’s look at this proposal. “Should we address the Voting Power Distribution in the DAO?” In the proposal, a DAO Committee member pointed out the obvious issues of the system. And the results turned out like this. 163 votes for, 45 against. That is 78% support in terms of ‘real’ votes, though we’ll get to that, but once Voting Power was accounted for, the margin inverted, to 73% against. And then even within that, of the 5.18 million VP against the proposal, 4 million came from a single wallet. 4 wallets make up almost all of the votes against the proposal - 99.7% of the VP in the 73% majority. The next step would naturally be to play with these figures versus the real votes, you know ‘2% of voters accounted for 73% of the VP’ - but the issue there is that even though this weighted system allegedly exists to combat bots, users still use bots for the optics. When you actually look at the votes, 128 of the 209 votes were from accounts with 0 VP. These were accounts with literally no influence on the vote. 80% of those dummy votes were for Yes. 19 of these accounts only had a single VP, and then a bunch had 2 VP - both equally capable of being socket puppets. But whether Guest#60fd is a real user or not is irrelevant - because one wallet lapped the competition. One wallet told the DAO go to [static] itself, just really [static], and the DAO politely complied. These whales are often burner accounts who are not available for negotiation,  their decrees are silent, yet drown out all other voices. But there is still an urge to pretend like negotiation is a possibility. “But we still did get it denied. Although we met the threshold of approval in the final hours we did get 3 votes which came in to deny and sort of made us step back and say we need to re-evaluate how we’re bringing this forward because ultimately even reaching the VP threshold of approval by the community, it seems like the whales still felt like something else needed to be addressed outside of the other feedback that we had.” Kevin is clearly upset by this, and despite all his talk about “addressing the concerns of the whales”, he understands that he’s talking crap. He wants the DAO to give him money, the anonymous whales in question do not want him to receive money. There is no negotiating or compromising, just pharaohs you can pray to. So that leads us naturally onto the subject of the DAO’s management. The DAO has been speed-running bureaucratic paralysis. In 2020 they attempted to automate governance by running an on-chain system, but it didn’t work, no one wanted to pay transaction costs to vote on every name ban and point of interest, so they moved the system back off-chain six months later. Problem is that without automation you need humans to push the buttons. Decentraland is quite proud of the DAO’s grant scheme - but it’s been a massive headache for them recently. For the first year they gave away 3.5 million dollars in grants to develop projects that would aid adoption, but the grant application had no standard process, and grants had no oversight and no accountability - because no one existed with the authority to do it. The initial proposal alluded to the idea of revoking grants - but included no framework to implement it. So the DAO Committee put forward a proposal to set up a Squad whose job would be to help grantees deliver their product - and in the extreme case where a project had collapsed or was too far off course, the Squad could recommend that the Committee revoke the grant. But the Committee is administrative, they can’t revoke the grant, and the Squad are essentially independent contractors, they can’t revoke the grant either, so we need a new committee with express permission to revoke grants. Enter the Grant Revocation Committee. We could go crazy with dissecting this, but the short version is that these committees are meant to have minimal discretion. The authors of the policy seem to think discretion only exists if you acknowledge it. So rather than limiting the scope of consideration like any other discretionary position in government, they limit the committee to only considering cases that are actively handed to them, but put no restraints on the committee members’ actual decision making effectively giving them absolute power to revoke any grant for any reason.  And as the cherry on top, there’s no appeals process. Because to appeal the verdict would require a different group with the authority to overturn the decision of the Revocation Committee.  The committee intended to have minimal discretion is completely unrestrained with zero accountability. Oh and these guys are paid commission for every verdict - so the DAO is about to learn real fast why we don’t do that in the real world. Then we have the Facilitation Squad, the Governance Squad, the Protocol Squad, the Security Advisory Board, the newly proposed Working Groups. They’re expanding the DAO Committee from 3 to 5 members, but only after an election to replace one of the original 3. In trying to minimize human involvement they have instead ballooned it, and, like, look at the participation numbers. Generously there’s a few hundred people actively involved in the DAO in any capacity at all, and at this rate every single one of them is going to be in at least one squad or work group. More realistically the couple dozen people with the inclination to spend their free time role playing bureaucrats are going to be sitting on the accountability squad that has oversight over the oversight work group that advises the spending council on how much the accountability squad should be paid. Oh, and these bureaucrats are paid in MANA, which as we’ve seen is a direct source of political power. Like, do you remember that time Yemel agreed with Yemel that Yemel should be paid $150/hour in MANA? Would you be shocked to learn that Yemel, who agreed with Yemel about paying Yemel $150 an hour, is friends with Melich and Ordano from back in the days when they all spent their time at a tech bro flop house they called Casa Voltaire? And through all this bureaucratic garbage, it’s easy to lose sight of the truth. The DAO has no actual authority. Decentraland isn’t “owned by its users”, it's owned by its owners - the Foundation. While the Foundation cedes the copyright on material submitted by users, the Terms of Use make it very clear that the Foundation holds the copyright on the Decentraland part of Decentraland. As Catalina Goanta points out, this conflicts with the rhetoric that Decentraland is owned by its users, when the most significant legal right in this area is unambiguously owned by the Foundation. Even looking past that, can it really be said that Decentraland is owned by its users when the DAO is currently being held hostage by a dozen whales whose proportional voting rights dwarf their peers? Now, being a digital landlord doesn’t require much engagement at all. I would hazard that whoever owns fifty identical Decentraland homes plastered with For Sale advertisements isn’t really a Decentraland user above the most literal threshold. I, on the other hand, am demonstrably a user of Decentraland. Given how dead engagement is I feel pretty confident in estimating that I spend far more hours per year actively looking around and doing stuff in the world than the median LAND owner. But I am not an owner of Decentraland by virtue of that time spent in the world, there is no mechanism that correlates the two, that gives ownership to those who use it and strips ownership from those who idly hoard. The mechanism of ownership is not usage, it’s ownership of LAND and MANA.  The arc of Decentraland’s development is dictated by the Foundation. They may occasionally ask the DAO what features they’d want to see, or act on simple proposals for technical changes - but the DAO is not Decentraland’s board of directors. “First, Decentraland is always working with the community because we are a DAO. As a decentralized platform we are mostly governed by the DAO. So we are not a corporation, so our roadmap also operates differently because we always try to look into what the community is aiming.” Notice how she doesn’t say “we’re bound by the decisions of the DAO, because they’re our bosses”. Instead the Foundation is “working with the community” and “trying to look into where the community is aiming.” When discussing Decentraland’s prospective value to actual businesses, the Foundation can’t say with a straight face that representatives from Target need to get in touch with the DAO Facilitation Squad to outline the contents of a proposal. At a certain point, all the talk of decentralized ownership and political revolution needs to get put aside so Dolce & Gabbana will actually respond to the emails. In Line Goes Up, we all had a good laugh at DAOs whose central product was undefined. “Are we a comic book, or a bi-monthly curated box of snacks?” But to their credit - that is in keeping with the philosophy of a DAO. In the case of Decentraland, the Foundation came first and knows what it is, and what it wants to be. If the DAO were to vote for the project to become a 2D Metroidvania set in a hypothetical fourth Punic War, in the visual style of NHL ‘94 - sorry, that isn’t happening. The Foundation acts autonomously whenever it wants. When the Foundation implemented “the first ATM in the metaverse”, they didn’t consult the DAO before starting development. And can you blame them? Can you imagine if, as a business, they were bound by the whims of these losers? Despite the rhetoric, the Foundation isn’t dependent on the DAO, in truth it's the opposite. The DAO can’t function without the Foundation. Not just in the obvious ways, but from top to bottom. The 2021 proposal to go off-chain came from the Executive Director of Decentraland. In the proposal, he nominated three individuals to serve as the administrative Committee members - all of whom were working at the Foundation at the time. The Decentraland DAO simply lacks the means to function autonomously. Through lack of tools, unimaginable inequality, general incompetence and a lack of authority, the DAO is impotent. So is it any wonder that their grant scheme can turn $240,000 into the MetaGamiMall? What else could this system possibly produce? One of the most telling moments in the Decentraland timeline is the June 2019 blog post announcing the switch from the Babylon engine to Unity. Not because of the engine change in and of itself  but because of this note: jumping added. Jumping puzzles, it’s important to note, are functionally the single ludic interaction inherent to Decentraland’s mechanics. The only games that you see in the world with any consistency, games that actually involve interacting with the space and not with a two dimensional UI element, are scavenger hunts and jumping puzzles. Unless you’re headed to the gambling halls, jumping on things is functionally the only thing to consistently do in Decentraland and it was, this is important, an afterthought. 2019, that’s four years of development before jumping was added as basic functionality. Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano are Argentinian developers who met in a “hacker house” known as Casa Voltaire. Most of what we know about Casa Voltaire comes from two online articles, one from 2017 and another from 2020. Casa Voltaire hit the sweet spot of anonymity, there’s not really any contemporary information about what was going on there because it was just a flop house for tech bros, but it left just enough of a footprint to become mythologised. “the community at the Voltaire Castle became a worldwide legend a crazy hacker haven for cryptocurrency projects” As Ryan Vanzo describes it, the house was a communal workspace where small start ups would operate in the house and share resources and expertise. This was combined with a heady blend of smartboy philosophy. Both of the previously mentioned articles paint a picture of genius, citing the deep conversations that would take place within the group. But, ya know, here’s the deep, moral dilemmas Vanzo cites in his story. How should autonomous cars act in a situation that would save the driver but kill a pedestrian? Who is liable if a bot malfunctions and causes harm? What kind of neuro-security should we develop to protect users of brain-to-brain interfaces? So, like, a high school introduction to ethics. One of those is literally the trolly problem. In this environment, and within the context of Argentina’s political volatility, Ordano and Meilich conceived of Decentraland as a bunch of things, principally a fulfillment of the fantasy of Snow Crash, The Matrix, and, of course, Ready Player One. “The idea was basically whether we could do a virtual world that was based on open standards and the blockchain and whether we could encode the physics into... into a blockchain. Of course influenced by videos and movies like The Matrix, Ready Player One, and Snow Crash.” But inside that was an inkling of the political, the notion that this could be a test bed for political movements, for new economies, and, ideally, liberation movements. Writing for Rest of the World, Leo Schwartz and Lucia Cholakian Herrera describe it, skeptically, as “a petri dish for the ideals of democracy and decentralization they championed, built on the premise that a virtual world controlled by its own “citizens” could more effectively govern itself — and offer more stable investment opportunities — than a real one governed by elites.” Of course in reality Decentraland is steered exclusively by its own elites, people who bought in hard and early and have the voting power to dismiss any challenge to their power, or literal project insiders who have the social capital and access to the code base to simply end-run the will of the whales. Because Decentraland is not a petri dish, sterilized and sealed off from our reality. In 2003, writers rushed to herald Second Life as the vanguard of the future, not just a video game, but a new place that couldn’t have existed before. Two years prior, Edward Castronova had argued that Everquest and virtual worlds like it were important because the objects in them were worth money. In response to Second Life, Castronova predicted that in the future, humanity would pick the virtual world over the real. “The exodus of people from the real world, from our normal daily life, of living rooms, cubicles and shopping malls, will create a change in social climate that makes global warming look like a tempest in a teacup.” Philip Rosedale, a developer on Second Life, went even further. “The real world will become like a museum very soon. So it’ll be fantastically cool to go to New York, but in the same way that it’s cool to go see the Mayan ruins. Because the big buildings will still be there, but they’ll be covered in dust. Because no one will bother too much with them anymore.” There’s just one tiny, almost inconsequential problem here, just a little thing, we’ll talk about it in a moment here, but just maybe keep in mind that there’s a small little issue. Johan Huizinga is known for his landmark anthropologic work Homo Ludens, published in 1938.  Huizinga was concerned with the interaction between play and culture. And a key element of that was trying to define ‘play’. What is the difference between a fight and play-fight? How is it that chalk on grass can produce a boundary that people take seriously during a game of soccer? Huizinga proposed the concept of the “magic circle”, which aims to describe how play space is delineated from the ordinary world.  In a game of Dungeons & Dragons, the rules and instructions alone aren’t enough to represent the entire game world, it is “the compound relationship of formal, social, dramatic and aesthetic elements.” Essentially, when you buy into the game, everything comes together to create a kind of pocket dimension, a psychological bubble, where board pieces, dice rolls and social interactions can take on unique meanings distinct from reality. In a game of soccer, the players all agree to obey the rules of the game and a social contract forms. Suddenly the ball, chalk, and their own limbs take on properties prescribed to them in the player’s mind, boundaries become respectable and in respecting them they become real. If, however, someone then karate chops the opposing goalie in the throat, the bubble bursts - the contract has been broken, the circle has been pierced, and the lines on the ground stop mattering real fast. In an honest engagement, where the fiction is unavoidably present but elided for the sake of immersion we would call the circle suspension of disbelief or kayfabe. Tom Boellstroff and Edward Castronova both sought to push Second Life as a ‘real place,’ separate from the real world, where genuine research could be done. Boellstroff argued that Second Life was a fixed site of culture, like a Pacific Island. Edward Castronova made a career out of arguing that Second Life is a site of genuine economic activity. They, not in their words but in criticism, present Second Life as existing within an impermeable magic circle, as like The Matrix, somewhere you travel to, a place. Okay, but there’s just that one, tiny, minuscule problem, and that’s that people who “live” in Second Life don’t actually live in Second Life. You can eat an infinite amount of digital food in virtual reality and you will still starve. But the metaverse both presumes and requires that legitimacy of place and the real. Either the outright reification of Ryan Bolger, or digital fashion being pushed as genuine property, it needs to be real in order to be meaningful. So the authors of Decentraland, its creators and its users, paint a magic circle around it with a narrative of inevitability, a narrative of the metaverse, a narrative of a true, separate, new world that you will eventually move your life into. Because if your neighbors aren’t going to eventually be compelled to be here tomorrow, why would you ever want this today? Decentraland is, at every level, a collective fairy tale. Just people playing pretend. “The feeling of these shows was that we all performed a fashion week, rather than participating in it.” Whether it be the Pedigree Fosterverse scraping data from adoptapet, users playing lawyer in their corporate offices or purporting to be the future of news - Decentraland’s value to businesses is plainly absurd. And as we’ve seen, even its decentralized premise is a fantasy. The DAO has no authority and is comically hapless - content to play politics. All the while pretending they have a stake in a billion dollar product. And it’s not enough to convince themselves, they need to convince you. So that is what they do by any means necessary. They will pander, mislead, outright lie - whatever it takes for you to buy into their narrative. Because this only makes sense from inside the circle. “What if you could own the virtual world? Create, develop, and trade without limits. Make genuine connections, and earn real money.” Decentraland is a farce and a tragedy, it is painted into a corner by a combination of ineptitude and inherently bad ideas, and it cannot escape its fundamental being.  Whatever other ideals are spit out, whatever rhetoric about liberation or political experimentation is employed, the simple fact that it was materially born as a pre-sale of lots of "land" based on a fiction of people "moving in" sets off a chain of decisions and incentives about design and functionality that bind it, forever, to being little more than a fantasy real estate scheme, an endless world of uniquely scarce dead malls. I can’t use that right now. I can’t use that right now. I can’t use that right now. Thank you. I can’t use that right now. I can’t use that right now. Mighty kind of you. I can’t use that right now. I can’t use that right now. [gunshot] Oh my god, what did you do!? I can’t use that right now.

Channel: Folding Ideas

Views: 2,406,281

Keywords: Criticism

Id: EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Length: 109min 21sec (6561 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 26 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/nicethingyoucanthave]

So it's like second life, but worse?

[u/Chancoop]

The grant repayment bit for the reporters subscription gave me a good laugh, but the part that really had me howling was when he opens a link to an entirely different metaverse-esque 3D space webpage that tries to run 24 youtube videos at the same time and crashes the browser. This thing is so amazingly incompetent.

[u/antichrist____]

The part about governance was pretty great. There's nothing quite like people with zero knowledge about a complicated subject making every single predictable mistake imaginable due to their delusions of being "different" to the uncountable number of people who have tried before them. Although, paying administrators in tokens that directly bestow more voting power is so bad I think it might be original.

[u/Maleficent_Plankton]

Like Folding Ideas, I also spent my own 2 months exploring Decentraland. I wrote this after my first week and kept it updated over a month.

https://mplankton.substack.com/p/mplankton-explores-decentraland

I totally agree with him. It's a buggy, empty mall. None of the mini-games in DCL are remotely fun. Some places are pretty and artistic, but it's like visiting an abadoned city built for a past Olympics. I couldn't go 5-10 minutes without hitting a bug or loading glitch.

It's fun if you enjoy exploring empty buildings. But it's not a good multiplayer, metaverse-like experience.

I'm also trying The Sandbox, which is so much more polished. But currently, the Sandbox is very much a single-player gaming experience. It barely qualifies as a Metaverse.

[u/2718281828]

Holy crap. It's long-running character Hat Dan, the Dan with a hat.

[u/hellshot8]

Crypto bros rediscovering why regulations exist will always be funny to me

This week: Zoning laws

[u/_Fun_Employed_]

I’m thrilled to finally be one of those people that was into a thing before it was cool. I watched Folding Ideas when Dan used a puppet and it was mostly about film editing!

[u/Galt2112]

Completely setting aside how shitty it is now and the performance issues I just don’t understand how anyone can look at this and not immediately realize that it’s still strictly worse than either the internet as it currently functions or the real world.

That theater idea is so ridiculous. Why would a virtual 3D theater with rooms and a lobby that you have to walk your avatar into and navigate be better than just clicking the thing you want on a browser? It’s a ton of added inconvenience for what, a little bit of role playing something you can do in real life? How can anyone look at this and not recognize instantly that stuff like that and the “shopping” experiences this kind of stuff seems to be built around is worse than useless?

Even if it looked completely real and worked perfectly it would be stupid.

[u/SpikeRosered]

My favorite part of tech bros rheteroic is that real life interactions can be fully replaced by virtual ones. That the natural world has no inherent value.

You can have the most realistic shoe store in the world and with every feature and trimming imaginable. Sensors that perfectly make you experience what trying on and wearing the shoe is like. You still can't walk away with the actual shoes when you're done.

At the end of the day I've never felt any FOMO for any of this because I just don't see the practicality outside of a unique gaming experience. Second Life is a thing and people get into it who want that specific experience. I just don't see the whole world adopting such a niche hobby.