"Give Me a #Metaverse, Or Else"

The Dish | July 25th, 2022 | A New York Culture Club Publication

By Brian R. Yurachek

“Give Me a Metaverse!” This is a line that I’ve heard repeated over the past three months from some of the largest brands and retailers across the globe. To professionals who understand the complexities inherent to responsibility embarking on this endeavor, this statement is nearly akin to walking into a doctor’s office and immediately demanding brain surgery with no prior evaluation: It’s dangerous.

The above comment is unfortunately indicative of an all too familiar behavior, far more nefarious than a simple misunderstanding motivated by strategic urgency and/or corporate tact. For-profit, centralized business operations fly directly in the face of the values embodied in decentralized technologies as well as their corresponding communities and proximity participants. Moreover, reaching consensus in a unified manner requires specific elements of shared control, accountability and inclusiveness. In the case of a for-profit institution, a mutually acceptable outcome for the shareholder is the only consideration. Strategic posturing, a barrage of marketing propaganda and a narrow focus on meeting short-term key performance indicators (KPIs), all take precedent over striking an equitable transfer of value between the company and its driving force of intellectual capital, the internal stakeholder.

I believe the global coronavirus pandemic to have set in motion a meaningful shift in human consciousness, for which the global corporate slave-state is largely unprepared. Furthermore, some of the largest companies in the world are making an even bigger mistake arrogantly assuming that they have ‘a handle on things’ and that this irrational exuberance (to steal from Greenspan) is something that they can fleetingly exploit for near-term profit and customer acquisition. This attitude is largely apparent to today’s younger consumers who now have an ability to verify the claims that their favorite brands are making and have been making since their inception. They are better defining whether their value sets align with that institution and the verifiable data that is now secured as an immutable record of history. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s friction. We are on the brink of an incredible realization of accountability in data in a world that is bound by legal constructs, institutions and symbols placing emphasis on values inconsistent with our ability meet our resource needs: Forget about prosperity or “The American Dream.”

My “Global Dream” is a world that is governed by measurable data, truth, and a genuine desire to understand others and their needs. We then require ‘guardrails’ of transparency, enabled by decentralized ledgers where we can all reach consensus through a technology that’s proven itself reliable in moving trillions of dollars around the planet for over a decade. It’s not up for discussion. It doesn’t care about your emotions or opinions. It’s fact. If you don’t like it, have your voice heard by participating in consensus. But when the answer reveals itself, you must be prepared to be in the mathematical minority and thus submit your ego to the truth.

Major brands and retailers who suspect that they may be able to use these new tools to create value should spend the bulk of their creative exploration in realizing their, “Why?” This requires seeking out information from the true creative professionals on the front lines of these technologies, far from the bureaucratic groupthink of teams of highly compensated executive consultants. We have too many linear individuals standing outside the ‘doors’ of Web3 with really nice plungers but with no awareness of how bad the ‘bathroom’ smells…and it stinks!

There will continue to be enormous anthropological ‘friction’ as we build better tools as a means of chronologically reaching consensus on some of the most important decisions humanity faces. This ‘friction’ will most notably be fueled by the divide in our definitions of science and politics. Science is grounded in measurable data. Politics is emotional and measured in fear and the influence it wields. We can observe the plights and failures of the current global framework with measurable data, yet we can’t seem to wrangle ourselves from the political ‘death-roll’ that keeps nearly one billion people on this planet earning a daily wage of less than a small bottle of Poland Spring Water. The sad part is that most of them would take the water over the money because they’re dying of thirst and starvation. We’re so busy patting ourselves on the back for sending satellites into the nether of Space that we forgot to bring almost one third of the global population to work. This is pathetic and I won’t stand for it anymore.

In conclusion, centralized institutions would benefit from coming to the realization that Web3 is all about opting out of their not so passive oppression and their procurement of intellectual and social capital, without an equitable transfer of value. This leaves us in a constant state of resource dilemma where social media ‘pings’ wake us up in morning and LED ‘fogs’ fall over us like a warm blanket at night: All with a hope that we will wake up in the morning with the courage to turn it all around. It's time to take back control of the dynamic human spirit while embracing technologies that can provide order and transparency. We must reject the institutions and sociologically damaging frameworks that are absent of any measurement and sewn deep with political power agendas fueled by fear.

You are the artist. You are the asset. Let’s start viewing the world as our collective canvas for which we now have new brushes and paint to create a better landscape: A landscape that we must paint with creative compassion.

“The Radish,” affectionately known as “The Dish” is a blockchain-powered publication focused on decentralized, dissemination of knowledge and information. We are solely reader supported through the listing of each publication on the Ethereum Protocol. Are you curious?

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