The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
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Dan Olson
@FoldableHuman
Albertan documentarian behind In Search of a Flat Earth, Line Goes Up, and The Future is a Dead Mall
Not actually a duck
contact@foldingideasshow.com
Dan Olson’s Tweets
TFW says “I don’t trust you and your recommendations, I think you only recommend books because they’re trash and you like when people suffer”
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I’m torn on this box of protein bars I was given. Kinda mixed vibes, an odd flavour combination that’s like a light, nutty lemon flavour with an undertone of your grandparents’ ashes.
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This podcast was a ton of fun to record, it was a blast chatting with & , so much fun I would have maybe even considered filling out the exit survey.
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The fact that I know these are used against the workers is fraught, I know there's no room for nuance, that it's all performance, that anything less than a 5 will be used against them in some way by someone, and I just, I refuse to play. Don't put that evil on me.
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When Best Buy asks me to fill out a survey it makes sense, because Best Buy are awful, but I went to high school with my dentist, I know his parents, I'm not filling out a survey.
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I'm so exhausted of every single business on the planet asking me to fill out a survey.
I had an eye exam and was asked to fill out a survey. I ordered glasses and was asked to fill out a survey. I went to the dentist and was asked to fill out a survey.
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Hands up if you want Robin to give me a tour of his holo-deck
(spoilers: it's a mo-cap production studio and not a holo-deck) twitter.com/IamSuperMassiv
This Tweet is unavailable.
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My sister gave me her in-laws’ old Olympus OM-2 kit a few months ago and it’s quickly become a favourite, I’m surprised it isn’t more popular with analog film/manual lens enthusiasts. Lovely compact camera, beautifully designed lenses, just feels really good to use.
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So the Calgary Flames were originally the Atlanta Flames and I just learned are apparently named after Sherman burning the city down.
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The great thing about having a backlog of games is that you can play them! They don't get too old! You can just be like "hey, I know it's 8 years old and the sequel is out, but I finally got into Salt & Sanctuary and it was a lot of fun!"
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I agree with bigolas dickolas: you should absolutely read This is How You Lose the Time War
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read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious.
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Weird that the CEO of Epic would be super excited about the entire internet running on Unreal. Can't fathom why. I'm sure it doesn't colour his opinions, though.
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Man who stands to make tons of money if fantasy thing becomes real still insisting you'll do your taxes in VR because Minecraft is popular.
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The metaverse is dead! Let's organize an online wake so that we 600,000,000 monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, Sandbox, and VRChat can mourn its passing together in real-time 3D.
businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead
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This week we released our first-ever Podcast video episode.
I was very happy to speak with Alberta's own about his YouTube career, internet grifts, and why he spends so much time thinking about them.
Feedback very much welcome.
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Love when someone sends me a TikTok and I’m at my desk. Click the link, put the puzzle piece captcha into its slot, re-do the puzzle piece captcha because I was off by three pixels, dismiss the sign up prompt, un-mute, and re-start the video that’s been playing the whole time.
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It’s awesome that it’s legal to say “I hope our damp, clammy King has a short reign” especially since our damp, clammy King wishes it weren’t.
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But this became my go-to tell for if someone pitching a metaverse vision had any idea what they were talking about, regardless of how fluent they were with the theoretical technology.
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These were ultimately solved by imposing hard limits via central dictate, or just stripping the features entirely. It was a staple of Epic's earlier Unreal games, and is very much not a staple of Epic's Fortnite.
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TF2 and CounterStrike had a similar problem with "lag bomb" tags. You make your spray an absurdly high res image, put it on a wall around a corner, and then hide. Anyone who comes into the hallway lags out as their computer tries to download the texture and you pick them off.
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A lot of these models were created by well-meaning-but-oblivious designers who were self-expressing a little too hard and didn't know the first thing about optimization. But a lot were malicious.
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Thing is that most servers had it turned off because a lot of the models were way too complex, the textures way too high-res, and they'd lag out everyone else when you were on screen, assuming they didn't outright crash the server when it tried to push them out
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Multiplayer FPSs used to have user-generated skin systems, you could build and share custom character models and depending on server settings your skin could be automatically pushed to other server participants. Exactly the kind of self-expression the metaverse promises.
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Also conspicuously absent in all the metaverse reading: no one talks about malicious design.
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Bolger and Ball both pitch Metaverse visions where you can hide a pair of digital sneakers in a spot and they'll still be there years later, but neither addresses the implication that this inevitably creates digital littering.
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What this means for my research is that if you're convinced that an apocalyptic rebirth hinges on the actions of a corporation, there's going to be some sliver of daylight you can point to and say "it's not over yet" for basically the rest of your life.
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And there's always the possibility that some aesthetic continuity exists after the name, trademarks, and copyrights are solid off to some new entity that wears them like pelts.
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The formal process takes months and months, years aren't unusual, decades aren't unheard of. And even when there's no more court dates on the docket there's still a holding company somewhere with 1 employee of record.
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If Folding Ideas went out of business I could erase the entire thing in an afternoon. If your aunt's turquoise gallery goes out of business there's a day that it's open and then a day that it's not. But when K-Mart goes out of business? It kinda never truly does.
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One of the details that's really made an impression on me in all this research into corporate bankruptcy is just how *slow* the process is, and the fact that it's often never definitively over.
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Amazing work from the Roko's Basilisk dude. Straight up arguing that his golden age post-singularity future should have its wealth distribution calcified in the exact state of the world as of six weeks ago.
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I'm thinking of drafting a "𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲" contract for people to sign.
It would specify the following deal amongst all humans in the multiverse:
- We will all work together to create a human-positive singularity in which… Show more
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And it's absolutely no coincidence that literally all of them are groups with some internal belief that they're harbingers of some new revolutionary system and a deep, festering grievance that other people laugh at them because they're wrong and their ideas are bad.
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There are individuals that, IDK, got Twitter Blue for whatever observably not worth it justifications, but these are the groups that decided en mass "yes, finally, now it's my turn!"
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It's not even a here and there kinda thing. You click through to any of Ryan Cohen's tweets and the replies are just *hundreds* of dot eth, wen MOASS! blue check simps.
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Just observably looking at the people who jumped on that verification badge with the most enthusiasm, like, there is not a feature under the sun that would make me want it. It could do my taxes for me and, just, nah, I'm good.
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People who bought Twitter Blue:
People who still think Musk will send them to Mars
People who still think crypto is cool
People who need you to think NFTs are cool
People who believe GameStop is going to be worth $9000 per share
Hustle culture grifters
Alt-right wound collectors
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