A new climate reality is coming into view ⊗ Ways to think about a metaverse ⊗ Thinking together

This week →{.caps} A new climate reality is coming into view ⊗ Ways to think about a metaverse ⊗ Thinking together ⊗ Peering into the invisible present

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.196 was The transapocalyptic now by Alex Steffen.

A new climate reality is coming into view

It’s a little eery (although probably COP related) that the most clicked link in the year-ago issue was The transapocalyptic now, which has more than a little overlap with this one by David Wallace-Wells which is and excellent and, I believe, very useful read for my/your thinking around the climate crisis, or the polycrisis as he mentions in the piece. Useful because it lines up with things I’ve read elsewhere about where we’re headed and how that might look. We have to hold those two things (direction and ‘quality’) in our mind and understand that both exist at the same time.

First, largely through the incredibly rapid installation and cost reduction of renewables (as well as the minimum measures ‘we’ have enacted so far), the extreme scenarios like IPCC’s RCP8.5, seem to have been averted. We’ve lowered the ceiling of how high we might go with CO2 in the atmosphere. However, our inaction has also raised the floor (and the seas) and there’s no scenario, likely for hundreds of years, where humanity lives at the temperature it evolved in. That’s the gist of the piece; the path is narrower than before (sorry for the mixed metaphors) and we have a clearer view of where we are headed.

Second, while we start to understand this relatively positive path, we must also realise that it’s still a dire, dire situation. The climate extremes will be more extreme and more frequent, everyone will suffer through more crises, and they will do so very unequally. Floods, disappearing islands, droughts, failed crops, famines, climate migrations, extinctions, zoonotic diseases, and more.

Even though it’s a 30 minute read, there could easily be a follow-up of the same length.  Wallace-Wells just hints at agriculture and crop failure and just spends one phrase on “supply-chain issues” but the geopolitics of resources, whether those we grow or those we dig out of mines, is another huge part of the polycrisis. Will all the planned/needed renewables be manufacturable considering what’s left? How dire will crop failures be? Who will block what, who will control prices on what, and who might invade or disrupt whom for those resources? Wallace-Wells mentions potential unaligned countries and a “Lithium OPEC,” elsewhere there’s also talk of an “OPEC of rainforests” with Brazil, Indonesia and the DRC. In other words, he covers a lot of ground and yet there’s still way more to cover.

Finally, it’s worth a visit for the series of pictures interspersed along the article, each has a relatively long description and each is a solution, option, accomplishment related to the polycrisis.

==Acknowledging that truly apocalyptic warming now looks considerably less likely than it did just a few years ago pulls the future out of the realm of myth and returns it to the plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group.== […]

What will the world look like at two degrees? There will be extreme weather even more intense and much more frequent. Disruption and upheaval, at some scale, at nearly every level, from the microbial to the geopolitical. Suffering and injustice for hundreds of millions of people, because the benefits of industrial activity have accumulated in parts of the world that will also be spared the worst of its consequences. […]

==The author and activist Bill McKibben worries that although the transition is accelerating to once-unimaginable speeds, it still won’t come fast enough. “The danger is that you have a world that runs on sun and wind but is still an essentially broken planet.”== […]

“For years and years — decades and decades — people have been begging,” Taiwo says. “The deciding thing will be, what is it that global south countries are prepared to do if these demands aren’t met.” […]

Today, as a result, “a lot of my hope is just radical uncertainty,” she says. ==“You see that the world can’t go on as it is — that is true. But it doesn’t mean the world can’t go on. It means that the world will go on, not as it is but in some unimaginably transformed way.”==

Ways to think about a metaverse

Nothing against Benedict Evans, I like his work, but I didn’t expect he’d come up with one of the best metaverse pieces I’ve read. Perhaps weirdly, perhaps completely appropriately, it’s not excellent for any technical details he comes up with, it’s because of how he spreads out the blurry concept in front of him and adds the context of the last few decades of tech. No predictions of what it is, dreams of specific tech, or who will win, just a clear-eyed reminder of the pretty massive gap between predictions of ‘the information super-highway’ and what the internet ended up being, as well as the chasm between expectations for the mobile internet in 2002 (remember WAP?) and today, with billions of pocket super-computers around the globe. The metaverse is at the Al Gore or WAP stage of its history.

Gaming has created the most advanced ‘proto-metaverses’ so far, so many (including me) often look there for hints of the future. Yet Evans reminds us that “we’ve been applying Moore’s Law to games consoles for 40 years or so, and they’ve got a lot better but ==most people don’t care==. A PS5 is objectively amazing, but the global installed base of games consoles is flat at only about 175m units.” Better tech doesn’t always translate to broad adoption.

Is the metaverse the next mobile internet, the next gaming era, or just Zuck’s fever dream?

The real question, of course, is whether AR and VR actually do break out, and reach that scale. People in the space often talk as though this is inevitable and unquestionable, but I don’t think we should be sure. ==The basic mistake, I think, would be to presume that because the technology can get better, it necessarily follows that billions (or even hundreds of million) of people will use it.== […]

Is a smartphone really more ‘immersive’ than a PC or a giant TV? I think you could argue that the move from command line to GUI to smartphone is a move towards less immersion and a much more casual, fluid, accessible, pick-up-and-put-down kind of experience. […]

==[E]very time I see a VR or AR concept showing huge virtual screens floating in space, I think that the future of software is not about seeing more rows in my spreadsheet at once - the future is not seeing it at all, and having an ML engine that builds it for me. This is like printing out our emails.== […]

And so when people start making highly specific predictions about how an entirely new thing will appear, a decade into the future, and explain how it will all work, that feels very inorganic. This isn’t how tech works anymore. ==The problem with this view of ‘the metaverse’ is not so much that there are huge practical problems in making assets portable between totally different types of game, but that you really can’t predict any of that in advance.==

Thinking together

This issue is pretty long so I won’t summarise this one much. Gordon Brander sees “three trends that seem like part of the winding path forward. Thinking with a second brain. Thinking together at Dunbar{.internal}-scale. Thinking with the network.” I’ll leave you to it if those topics interest you, but I’ll mention that his first trend links to ITEs{.internal} and digital gardens{.internal}, and the second to a few things, including small groups{.internal} and the multiplayer web.

Philosopher Paul Tillich posits that when social sensemaking fails to keep up with reality, we experience it as a kind of mass neurosis. Everybody has a crisis of meaning at the same time. Life stops making sense. […]

The user-generated content era, where most information is produced/consumed by users, in a tight feedback loop between attention allocation and content production/consumption. […]

==Egregores are collective intelligence that emerges from our individual interactions, sort of like how price signals emerge from the individual actions of many market participants. They need continued interaction to survive, and can often be found manifesting around the frontlines of interminable memetic conflicts.==

Peering into the invisible present

Interesting for “the invisible present,” “a space where we fail to see slow changes and are unable to interpret effects that lag years behind their causes,” and for the peek into how knowledge is accumulated through decades of work passed on from researcher to researcher.

Perceptions are distorted by selective memories, cognitive biases, political agendas and shifting baseline syndrome—the propensity of each generation to gradually forget past environmental conditions and accept present ones as normal.

Asides

• 📧 👀 TheFutureParty is a free daily email on business, tech, and culture. Every morning, they break down today’s hottest trends and analyze what it could all mean for the future. It’s relevant, digestible, and fun to read. Check it out and connect with a community that is both diverse and inclusive.
• 🤯 😍 🇪🇬 Like those realtors’ 3D tours of homes, but hundreds of times more fascinating. Go Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. “This is the interior three chambers of Khufu Pyramid, also known as the Great Pyramid, on the Giza Plateau. The pyramid interior includes the King’s, Queen’s, and subterranean chambers as well as the initial excavation tunnel.”
• 😍 🌳 📸 🇬🇧 Moss Drapes from Trees in Ethereal Photographs of England’s Forests. “Burnell’s images offer a glimpse of moss-coated limbs and fern-covered forest floors that seem to freeze time. He also visits dense stands of conifers, with canopies that create dreamlike effects as they block the sunlight from reaching the ground below.”
• 🤔 🤓 Magic Leap 2 is the best AR headset yet, but will an enterprise focus save the company?. “The $3,299 Magic Leap 2 (ML2), which launched in September, is easier to wear, far more powerful and it offers a dramatically larger (and taller) AR field of view than any headset we've seen before.”
• 👏🏼 🏺 🇺🇸 🇮🇹 🇬🇷 🇨🇾 🇵🇰 Man repatriates 19 antiquities after reading Guardian article. “[T]he ancient pieces worth up to £80,000 – including two seventh- and eighth-century BC Cypriot vases – that he had inherited from his grandmother could have come from illicit excavations because they have no collecting history.”
• 🤯 🌻 How the ‘Diamond of the Plant World’ Helped Land Plants Evolve. “For more than a century, scientists have tried to understand the chemical basis for sporopollenin’s unparalleled strength. Sporopollenin shields the DNA in pollen and spores from light, heat, cold and desiccation.”
• 🤔 This cheap material could capture CO2 from power plants before it pollutes the atmosphere. “A material made from cheap and common chemicals could help capture the carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks before it pollutes the atmosphere.”
• 🏠 Mighty Buildings completes “world’s first” 3D-printed zero-net energy home. “The exterior composite stone wall panels were 3D printed in a factory in Oakland. The proprietary material – known as Light Stone – is a concrete alternative with four times more tensile and flexural strength, 30 per cent less weight and less carbon dioxide, according to Mighty Buildings.”

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