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Burger.

all these buzzwords and not one cool shirt

Written December 16, 2021

The Internet isn't real. I'm not real. I'm a carefully curated facade. My name isn't even needleful dot net; it's actually Pudge Grunion.

But the reality of playing in this fantasy world for too long is that I'm surrounded by idiots who think any of this matters, such as myself. But I'm not alone: The mighty Czar Zuckerberg, Baron Bezos, and other mighty nodes in this net have begun work on dastardly machinations called the "Metaverse", and "Web3". Nobody knows what they are, what value they have, or if they even exist, but they do know it's the best thing since sliced bread (sliced bread is overrated, quite frankly. I can just slice the bread myself (in fact, being able to slice sandwich bread (or you know that raisin cinammon swirl bread at grocery store bakeries?) to my desired thickness would be fantastic (if you slice the cinammon bread thick enough it's practically a cinammon roll))).

Can one live in this "Metaverse"? Can they catch insects in their "Web3"? This blog will concisely explain such things, so long as you ignore all the parts where I'm not concise.

The Metaverse

Okay so you know video games? Well, imagine one, but you have to pay the mortgage on a fake house with real money. I think? Nobody actually knows what the metaverse is, but Facebook was so into it that they rebranded to "Meta". And news sites have story after story about the Metaverse, talking as if it's a real thing.

Even in its uncertain state, there are a few things I know about the Metaverse

• Tech companies want more control over and access to your life by making you do more in their software.
• Other companies want more money by making you buy digital goods that they can reproduce at (virtually (haha)) no cost.
• Modern businesses often come up with the monetization plan first, and try to justify it with a product later (see: software as a service, microtransactions, NFTs (but we'll get to them)).

So actually, I'm pretty sure "The Metaverse" is a scam. It's a way for companies to exert more control over you, and extract more money for less value, and it's being talked about as the future of technology because modern journalism is controled by like four corporations. This is the most sensible theory on the Metaverse. Why else would so many people talk about it so enthusiastically, without any clear value for normal people? It's because the value is for businesses, and they're desperately trying to make you want it.

You can't have your house instantly seized and resold. Except in the Metaverse. You can't have your clothes deprecated and deleted off your body. Except in the Metaverse. You can just steal routers from Wal-Mart and they can't stop me. Except in the Metaverse.

Companies like Facebook Meta want to know every intimate detail of your life, and they'll gladly make VR games if that's what gets you to talk in their microphones, dance for their cameras, and window shop at their storefronts.

The Metaverse is dogshit. Anybody who talks about it is dogshit, especially me. I'm glad we got all this squared away.

Web3

Web3 is just crypto currency. It's marketed by the same insufferable people, and as far as I can tell, there are literally zero "Web3" products or services that aren't just some scheme to pump the value of Brapcoin or whatever stupid thing people have Ponzi'd themselves into this time.

• An NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a unique marker that represents ownership of something on a blockchain (or other distributed ledger (but blockchain gets the investment dollars because of name recognition)). Finally, artists can sell their digital art for money! This is used to sell JPEGs of randomly generated monkeys for $700,000 each, in the hopes an even bigger idiot will buy it for more. And despite the "non-fungibleness" of these tokens, art theft (and just regular theft) is rampant with NFTs, because the token is just a random god-damn number and a link to a picture. I could literally download the picture, mint a new NFT, and sell it as my own.
• A Decentralized Identity is another blockchain-powered techno whiz. It's supposed to allow one-click logins for any website, with complete privacy, control, and security! Unless your crypto wallet containing the identity gets stolen or lost (a common occurence). And also the blockchain is called a "public distributed ledger" for a reason. Every single login would be on the blockchain for anyone to see. For some reason "just make a new identity for each website" has been deemed the best possible solution to the problem.

I get it, crypto bros. I have like $500 in Etherium, and I would love for it to become $50,000. But sometimes the best way to make money is to create literally anything of value.