Okay the metaverse is still way off from being something that we will all be using on a daily basis, but if you consider that no one had an iphone before 2007, it may be closer than we think.
I recently read an article that claimed large percentages of the global population will be only too happy to plug-in for most of their days and lives, only unplugging to consume nourishment and vacate it. Presumably nourishment might even be a tablet that could be popped like party drug, so you could plug back in as soon as possible and perhaps consume a metaverse roast chicken and all the trimmings with Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse illusion of taste. Who can say? The reason this article was so sure that people would want to be in the metaverse, as opposed to IRL, is that in the metaverse, you could live in a huge Hollywood Hills mansion, while in fact living in a shared room, on a bunk bed, in some actual universe version of a crack den. This idea was brought to page and screen rivetingly in Ready Player One, and one can quite see the compelling argument when living in poverty. I wouldn't mind a massive house upgrade myself, though the thought of being plugged in to the metaverse seems more like the horrors of The Matrix, than the cerebral utopia, which is how the metaverse is being sold to us. But who am I to say, as there are much smarter (and commercially motivated) minds than mine to predict this future and to make it a reality. What I wonder is how it will affect the actual property market. This article suggested that even the most impoverished among us would have access to palaces in our chosen setting. Would it be a modernist masterpiece, on a cliff over looking the ocean? A farmhouse in rolling country hills? A celebrity filled, pimped, American style mansion, a villa on Lake Como? Anything could be yours. But, I cant see this happening. Already there is a massive market for purchasing things that do not exist in real life. Not just block chain currency, but clothes and art for example. You actually pay real money to dress your avatar self with designer clothes and accessories and you can buy digital artwork for huge sums that will appreciate in value. Money itself doesn't really exist either, so what's to stop King Mark from creating a metaproperty market? Not for you that Colorado ranch house. Not unless you have mega dosh saved up in metaland banks. I wonder if the self styled celebrity brokers on the various cringy TV shows could avatar themselves in expensive, too tight suits and meta sports cars to show the metamansions?
One thing is certain in my mind, London housing stock is in short supply and we poor Londoners are cramped into ever smaller spaces, or paying eye watering sums for a bit more space and a garden, so I can quite see the attraction for those who really cant afford much more than a room in a shared house, but I don't think for one minute it will be free for very long. Not when there is money to be made. In real life or in the metaverse, it will still be controlled by humans, and we like a stack of cash. In fact the gold rush has already begun with a brave entrepreneur purchasing a tract of virtual land in Decentraland, one of the cyber cities of the future. Its like buying the land under Regent Street or the Las Vegas strip. Priceless real estate one day or $2.5m cyber dollars today, which in this case was paid in mana. A cyber currency. Not the stuff from heaven. One thing is for sure, this is going to be a gold mine, but this gold is as light as, well, nothing at all. Are you willing to take the virtual leap of faith? How we scoffed at early bitcoin investors, and who's laughing now?
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