Dana Blankenhorn

The Metaverse Party

I once spent a half-year working on a manual for an online shopping service.

Unfortunately, the year was 1984.

The point is that while it’s easy to ridicule the metaverse, the enabling technology already exists. The vision is easy to express.

When Mark Zuckerberg thinks of the metaverse, he first sees the oculus headset and haptic gloves he’s been developing for nearly a decade. The former can deliver an artificial, or partly artificial, set of visual and auditory inputs. The latter can deliver other senses, like touch, taste, and smell, simply by assigning values to them and transmitting the values, while having the necessary client equipment on-hand to translate the values back into experience.

Controlling Data for Good

When we talk about control over data, we start with metadata. These are vast stores of data on what people are searching for online, data about data.

Google and Meta Platforms (Facebook) use metadata to control advertising. Metadata lets advertisers reach specific consumers for the same price as the general network. The aggregation and organization of markets, once done through journalism, no longer pays.

The same techniques, applied to content, led us to Trump. Victims stay within a walled garden of propaganda. Facts can never get in. People don’t just vote based on this. They refuse vaccines, buy guns, and die. He who controls the data makes the rules.

The Creativity Economy

The Creativity Economy is why Trumpism won’t win.

Technology created the Creativity Economy. Creativity is now the gating factor to economic growth. America has more creativity than any other country, thus more growth.

This means more than having talent. Lots of places have talent. But the Creativity Economy has needs that go beyond having talent. Talent must be taught, and it must be free to learn. It must be mentored. Most importantly it must be empowered. Anything, or anyone, who says “no” to a creative person is harming the economy.

Creativity has many dimensions. The Creativity Economy draws from all of them. Whether your talent lies in organizing, in selling, in technology or explaining it, in music or art, the Creativity Economy needs you. Many business leaders don’t have degrees in business. Part of nurturing the Creativity Economy is giving people the freedom to change their path.