As The Currency’s Disruption and Innovation columnist, I figured I should probably acknowledge Facebook’s shenanigans of late. However, it pains me to do this. Facebook is the most boring and irrelevant tech company out there. In fact, I think this true to the extent that I no longer believe we should be wasting precious government resources in trying to regulate it; its own terminal decline does that sufficiently well.

So instead what I will discuss is the metaverse with a little m and the Metaverse with a big M. Big M Metaverse belongs to Facebook. Little m metaverse belongs to everybody else, and therein lies Facebook’s problem.

I’ll preface this article by saying that I know very little about the metaverse, NFTs, DAOs or frankly any of the other stuff that sounds like it was made up on a drug-fuelled bender. And not because I’m disinterested, because I am actually very interested. But my lack of understanding is there despite the fact that I’ve minted my own NFTs and been a part of big-name projects like Twitter’s secret and new “decentralized blockchain Twitter” building group. Yes! I’ve even been an active participant in building social media on the blockchain for Jack Dorsey. In fact, I’ve been in more conversations with the superstar, big name people making this a reality than I can count, and I still don’t understand it. 

So my bull radar is hitting Chernobyl levels with most of this.

The metaverse (small m), however, is different. Because it’s actually real and happening and here. It’s not a pump and dump scheme. Its definition is not a convoluted, self-referencing chain of words that mean nothing. And despite what Facebook and others may have you believe, it’s not that complicated.

Let’s start by outlining what the Metaverse (Big M) is. Facebook’s Metaverse is now unfortunately what most people think of when they think about the metaverse. I guess, per Facebook’s recent announcement, it is an awful digital world built-in Windows 95 in which you must start to live your life. Facebook’s Metaverse is an 8-bit, clunky, social space on the internet that makes you prefer to live in solitude for the rest of your life than to allow your digital presence to go there. Think of it as the modern game of The Sims where your low-resolution Sims people go into the swimming pool and you remove the ladder, forcing them to die from exhaustion (if you don’t know what I’m referring to here- that’s a pity). Being in that swimming pool is how I imagine living in Facebook’s Metaverse.

Also as a side note- when we think about the Metaverse as a digital destination where we will start living our social and other lives, why do we have to go back in time? I mean literally – why do all of the developers of game-like social digital interactions believe that Nintendo 64 levels of design is what we want? Exhibit A, web conferencing software Gather Town:

Is it because our modern design capabilities for lifelike human interaction online is still so incredibly bad? Exhibit B, Microsoft Teams metaverse product:

Exhibit C, Roblox. The design of the systems of the future are cringeworthy and awful.

Ok so if this is what people think the metaverse is, count me out. Awful graphic design, clunky interfaces and I haven’t even touched on the horrendously badly designed wearables that you need to have strapped to your physical self to enable this hideousness of digital dystopia.

If Facebook wants to hire 10,000 people to develop this – perfect, let it. We already know that as organizations grow they become increasingly worse at building anything new. And especially the Metaverse, which is some time off becoming a reality and will not, as far as literally anybody is concerned, be initially created by one company in this way. 

Capital M

Now let’s talk about the metaverse. Which couldn’t be more different to the Metaverse. The first big difference is that the metaverse is not an online, top-down controlled space where people will socially interact with each other and wear their $4,000 Gucci NFT handbags. Instead, the way I see it, the metaverse is actually a new type of economic activity that is enabled by emerging types of technologies that allow people, talent and skills to move freely via digital means, without those people or goods having to physically move too.

Think about two examples: hospitals and universities. Firstly, the value of hospitals today (especially in the US healthcare system) are reliant on the top medical talent within that hospital. Top cardiac surgeon in the country? Dollar signs. Top cancer researcher? More dollar signs. Hospitals typically build large physical infrastructure to facilitate the actual embodiment of patients coming to see these doctors. Like a hub and spoke model, with the hospital being the hub, the economic activity is centred at the physical hub where surgeries or treatments are performed. 

But imagine that you are a patient in Botswana, where you have a rare condition that can only be treated by a team of eight experts, and each of these experts are scattered around the world. Now, because of new tele-surgery technologies, you can be in any building in Botswana and have each of these 8 doctors “dialling in” from Boston, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Ireland and so forth to facilitate your surgery. And herein, in a very low-value hospital in Botswana, you have created enormous economic value by forgoing the need for physical presence. Instead of a hub-and-spoke economic model, there is now a networked and decentralized model whereby economic value is no longer retained centrally at the hub but instead dispersed. For me, this new type of economic value creation is done within a virtual space known as the metaverse.

The second example is in education. Think about Harvard, where on the one hand you have an accumulation of the top professors in the world, and on the other a limited number of students who pay outrageous money to be taught by such experts (whether or not this is ethical is another article). Like with the hospital, Harvard is the economic hub of this system, from which spokes radiate outwards. But this can now be decentralized too. 

Earlier this year, I worked with the founder of Masterclass to create an “Introduction to Macroeconomics” course for a new type of “virtual” university called Outlier. Now, you can be a student at home with professors from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and more teaching your classes at a fraction of the cost. By forgoing typical “physical” infrastructure, learning online created value both in how much higher the quality of learning content could be, and in terms of the low price being offered to the student. Through Outlier, you are experiencing the metaverse.

So the metaverse is actually more like a digital Special Economic Zone (SEZ) than a dystopian Windows 95 Sims game. If we keep thinking along these lines, in my mind NFTs too are nothing more than an SEZ. More explicitly- they are a digital mechanism through which millions, if not billions, of dollars, can enjoy pass-through with the luxury of little to no regulation; in turn encouraging the development of a new type of industry. Through this lens, I can start to understand the benefit of innovations coming out of this space, especially given that global macroeconomics is driven by increasingly digital supply chains. 

However, I continue to fall short of understanding things like this project by the artist shl0ms whereby NFTs of shards of a performatively-smashed up urinal are selling for over $3m in the name of democratizing art. You know, breaking the status quo and turning traditional power hierarchies upside down, one overpriced jpeg of a piece of a toilet at a time. My bull radar spikes again. 

So for anybody who is freaking out about Facebook creating the Metaverse (Big M) – fear not. Absolutely nobody is going to play that horrendous game whereby we forego rich experiences with people we can see (whether on Zoom or in-person) to have a low-resolution cartoon of ourselves interact badly in 3-D digital spaces. Facebook is a redundant company that is doing nothing more than virtue signalling that it is ahead of a non-existent curve in a pitiful attempt to raise its share price, much like Elon Musk does, by pretending to belong to the future. It may work for Elon, but it won’t work for The Zuck.

However, if you are not yet thinking about the metaverse (small m), maybe you should. Ireland is the original home of the SEZ (hello Shannon Free Zone) but Ireland has also fallen behind on being the innovator of tax and regulatory innovations. And no, getting good at tax avoidance does not count. What exactly is Ireland’s offering in the digital supply chain? We are not digital contributors or suppliers (like Big Tech is), and our small island barely constitutes one per cent of digital consumers or digital demand. We are however seeing an emergent strategy forming in Ireland around digital facilitation – namely physical data warehouses. Perhaps it is time to think carefully about what its digital equivalent, its digital SEZ, is. I am sure it is in the metaverse.