025: What if innovation shows up in the wrong order?

[Before - Session 08] Time to shake off Spring Break and get back to work.

We, and by “we” I mean Mark Zuckerberg, took a pretty big swing towards the Metaverse about a year ago. $13.7B later, I’m looking at my dusty Oculus Quest 2 headset. I should charge it up.

We’re coming back from Spring Break tomorrow to focus on the Metaverse. And I wonder: What would have happened differently if two of our major themes—AI and the Metaverse—had swapped arrival dates?

What if 2022 was all about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, and Midjourney and fingers and the end of search and the reinvention of both Google and Microsoft? (Both announced significant updates integrating AI into their core product platforms while we were on break. Neither mentioned the Metaverse.)

And then what if 2023 was the year in which Facebook rebranded to Meta…and right now Zuck’s Meta adventure was seen to be launching upon the revelations of A.I.-generative tech? Would the Wall Street Journal be reporting Horizon Worlds usage as, “currently reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, S.D.?” Or that, “more than half of Quest headsets—the entry model costs about $400—aren’t in use six months after they are purchased, according to people familiar with the data”? 🙄

Zuck can dream. The Metaverse remains a quandary.

And yet we’ve been imagining “it” for almost a century—as Matthew Ball describes in his excellent The Metaverse (And How It Will Revolutionize Everything). Of course, there are many others. Louis Rosenberg writes persuasively about the near future of augmented realities. And I’m a big fan of his (as yet) fictional Metaverse 2030 as a means of comprehending how our experiences, media and relationships might evolve.

So tomorrow’s course will dance with the contrasts, the constraints, the culture and dreams of an entirely new way of functioning with media. I’m thrilled we will welcome Amir Berenjian, CEO of REM5 Studios to help illuminate augmented and virtual realities and and the state of whatever it is we imagine the Metaverse could become.

By the way, did you know in 1968 less than 10% of U.S. households had a color TV? I wonder if we're moving fast enough yet.