What can Tulum teach us about the Metaverse-selfie?

Finally able to get to a point in my web3 project where I can work remotely. I returned to Tulum, a place I fell in love with ten years ago, to do metadata and margaritas on the beach, or so I imagined. Well, crypto twitter and discord lost appeal as soon as I found myself present in front of the turquoise sea and full moon. Its ok, I’m giving myself a few days to decompress and reacclimatize to my life pre-covid/pre-NFTs. Tulum has changed a lot in the years, and each subsequent trip here it becomes less recognizable. The wild jungle, which was once a feature, is now being removed for beach road hooka bars and pharmacies. The once quiet road where hippies walked barefoot is now a busy party zone. Quiet nights under the stars are now filled with neighbors’ competing commercial music. C’est la’vie. Tulum is an instagramer’s paradise.

I luckily reconnected with some old friends who were involved with an Equinox festival. It was a 3 day event full of indigenous leaders teaching and doing rituals around a sacred fire, yoga, consciousness workshops, amazing music, food, dance, and new friends. This experience gave me some perspective on web3 and the metaverse, which I will present here in a very unstructured manner. The first truth to acknowledge is that the metaverse has been around for a long time in the form of video games being played by people simultaneously around the world in communication and competition with each other. There is a purpose in being there. Other metaverses like Decentral and Sandbox seem to be more experimental, like the early days of web1. But metaverse, NFTs, and crypto became a “thing” durning covid, when we were all locked down, separated, longing for community. Zuckerberg is no dummy, and in his eyes the metaverse is another place to leverage isolation and loneliness for profit. In fact, most of the new metaverses coming out with whatever graphic bells and whistles are also going to profit off of separation and the desire for meaningful connection. Land speculators buy metaverse mansions and parcels, hoping they will increase in value, but will they actually build or occupy this virtual real estate? If not, I predict there will be many 2022 era virtual ghost towns in the future.

People will seek meaning in the metaverse that they can’t find irl. NFT communities will likely be the best use case for temporary metaverses. Yuga Labs just announced last week their new metaverse which appears to be a home for all blue chip NFT community holders. I suspect this will be a popular place to explore for people in those communities, but what about the 1000s of people who are not holders of those projects? When I was at the festival, I was drawn to one fabric from the Indigenous peoples from the Peruvian Andes. I was given some background on the cloth, and I was told it was their technology for traveling through the universe of consciousness. There were bundles of fabric folded with in the bundles, and each one had a different use for your traveling altar. I liked how she called it “technology.” Long before computers people studying esoteric subjects were using their mind to connect to spiritual avatars, and visit worlds gate kept by initiation and plant medicine. The metaverse is a place that does not exist in space/time like the “real” world. So like these esoteric realms it has the potential to transform the heart/mind if utilized in meaningful ways. It’s a space where the next generation of digital natives (10 year olds building their metaverses on Roblox) will be able to encounter Peruvian shamans and their knowledge perhaps. Media can be medicine as we weave a new narrative. The old world is clearly crumbling, and since my 2015 “Organic Cyber Cafe” text I have been investigating the Metaverse as full of opportunities and obstacles. So while people profit on other’s loneliness for now, we should also be looking at use cases beyond digital bells and whistles.

I see a few ideas to make the metaverse more interesting. One would be the Burningman model, where teams spend a year building an incredible virtual space, which is only accessible to enter and explore for a week out of the year. Ticked NFT entrance, POAP for attendees, etc. It’s a model less about owning land, and more about sharing inspiration and creativity. Another model I see is a digital version of Indigenous and esoteric wisdom that with in us all is the Universe. So the web3 version of this is that we are each our own metaverse. Instead of everyone trying to build in a single metaworld, we each have our own personal layered metaverse, access granted by QR code or NFT the same way we share a business card. Layer one could be professional (like with linkedin contacts and a virtual space for business meetings). The next layer could be for closer friends (virtual hang out room, NFT collection, Instagram type stories, etc). Next layers in could be more and more personal, gate kept via password/NFT for whomever you wanted to share with. This is ultimately how we already exist, each as our own Universe. This is just a web3 version of it. Questions of decentralization arise. We see big tech censoring and deplatforming people, so we would hope to find a solution to that, given that web3 arises out of privacy and ownership concerns. Another Metaverse model is what I am trying to do with my LFG Galactic Travel Agency project (visit the website and watch the youtube link https://www.lfggta.xyz).

To wrap up this free-form thinking out loud, I’ll circle back to Tulum. I am not sure if there is a digital equivalent of seeing jungles destroyed for the sake of new condos. I wonder if early adopters of Sandbox walk around and reminisce about how their world used to be so quiet pre-Snoop. That being said, What makes Tulum popular is the vacation selfie flex, so anyone who wants to succeed in their metaverse would be smart to build something super creative and unique on their land that people will want to take a metaverse-selfie in front of. This is probably the best short term goal for virtual real-estate flippers. What will succeed is a purpose driven destination. Unfortunately for now this is a very shallow pixel count, but in the future I hope to see more meaningful uses cases where people are finding access and connection to information and communities that they might not have otherwise. The metaverse can be a big distraction from the problems of the world, or the greatest solution to solving them collaboratively.

Cheers from Tulum,

Oliver