Matthew Ball: commitment

Transcript context

…Last question, and really, I’m asking for a sincere answer here. How do you think about why it is that you wrote this book? Again, it’s The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. There are so many things you could have done. You have an extensive audience online where you can write. It’s ungated — not always, but typically, everyone can read it. And now you’ve written a book. Why did you write the book? And why should we read the book? It is easy to think that the metaverse is a buzzword. We’ve been here before: 3D TVs, autonomous driving, messaging bots, drone internet. We’re familiar with terms that are hyped long before they’re possible or turn out to have been little more than a name change. Yet, I would argue that what we’re seeing here is unprecedented. No one renamed themselves “3D TV platforms,” not least of all, the seventh-largest company on Earth. This year, McKinsey estimates that the big five tech companies will spend $30 billion on metaverse investments; that venture capital, private equity, and big tech will spend $130 billion. I believe deeply that this transition is real. I also believe that we’re coming out of 15 years in the mobile and cloud era dissatisfied with many things. Dis- and misinformation, radicalization, harassment, toxicity, happiness, the role of algorithms in our lives, regulation, platform power, data rights, data security, data literacy. And I believe that most of those challenges will become harder in the metaverse. But I also believe that when these platform shifts occur, we have an unprecedented, or rather, very rare opportunity as users, as voters, consumers, developers, to affect that outcome. We have agency, we pick who leads when, why, and how, with which philosophies. I wrote this book because I’ve spent five years thinking about the theme — what matters, what doesn’t, what we need, what we want, what will happen automatically and what won’t. And releasing a book nationally that is in bookstores, that reaches those I don’t interact with daily, that hits those who believe it’s a thing but don’t know exactly how, was the best way to have that outcome. Matthew Ball, thank you very much.…

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