The ones who bought their own homes in the metaverse

To try and fight anxiety from artificial intelligence and from imminent end of the world, I went to see what happened to those who a year and a half ago said that we would all end up in the metaverse. I’m not just thinking of Mark Zuckerberg, who even changed his company’s name at the time to show us the right path; nor to the thousands of people who on LinkedIn overnight went from smart city experts or innovation managers to metaverse analysts (they are probably the same ones who have become masters of generative artificial intelligence today). No, the ones I’d like to meet today are the ones who are in the metaverse buy a house.

Now maybe we don’t remember it, but just a year ago there were many dozens of so-called metaverses in the world, i.e. parallel worlds that you can enter with a special viewer or in many cases even without, from your home computer. Enter where? In parallel worlds precisely, such as those of video games, or in digital copies of our world that are still virgin, however, to be colonized. “It’s like landing in New York in the early 1800s,” someone said enthusiastically. Thus began a bizarre real estate market to grab land or houses in the metaverse hoping that one day they would be worth more. Now I know that I risk appearing a retrograde old man, but what’s more idiotic than buying a virtual house in a parallel world in which you can’t actually live? Not everyone thinks so, however, because thousands of people, led by some bored VIPs, have invested non-trivial sums to buy a house in the metaverse. In the meantime, however, that hangover has passed: Disney and Microsoft they have just canceled their respective project teams and even Zuckerberg, in his last meeting with investors, spoke almost exclusively of artificial intelligence, relegating the opportunities of the metaverse to the distant future. And prices have plummeted. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: if you’re looking for a place to stay isolated and not meet anyone, that’s the metaverse today.