There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit. Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all.
The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worldsproduced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars. You’re not reading those numbers wrong. To say that the Metaverse is dead is an understatement. It was never alive.
Indeed, one of the characteristics of this movement is its apolitical, or even anti-political, character. In riots, it’s the symbols of political institutions, or institutions at all, that are attacked. The rioters have no real demands to make. They are in no way looking for a political relay to express them. And that’s the difficulty for any government seeking to channel the movement: to whom should it talk, and what should it propose? Of the three terms that make up the title of Hirschman’s book, the first two of which I mentioned earlier (exit and loyalty), the third, voice, is missing: the questioning of institutions with the aim of obtaining a response to demands. The way out of the crisis is therefore singularly difficult to find.
nice to know that movies still contain layers and layers of meaning.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi had a baby yoda patch in last press photo. Internet is having a blast with it :)
