Transmission #28: Metaverse, sovietwave, Johnny Decimal and having ketchup with pasta.
Design, ideas and other flotsam
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
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Design
How Facebook Is Morphing Into Meta
Mike Isaac,Sheera Frenkel & Ryan Mac, The New York Times
The scale of Mark Zuckerberg’s lurch into the so-called metaverse is, to put it mildly, bold. He has rebranded the company, is pouring billions of dollars and tens of thousands of workers into an idea that still doesn’t really exist yet.
Myself and a colleague recently acquired a pair of Oculus Quest 2 headsets, and have been trying them out, looking to see if there is a better way to do distributed work than through functional but impersonal figma/miro/zoom triumvirate.
Though there’s a fair amount of setup, and the learning curve is steep initially, there is something undeniably compelling about inhabiting a virtual 3D space with other people. The tech, while genuinely amazing, and leaps and bounds ahead of where it was only a few years ago, still feels a 1-2 generations away from being ‘solved’ to the tolerance of an average punter. But I can’t help but agree with Zuck that there is a there there. That, sometime in the not-to-distant future, it is a plausible concept that people will be spending a reasonable amount of their day in the metaverse.
What that is going to ultimately look like is anyone’s guess. In the spirit of some of the early internet idealists from the 90s, Tony Farisi, an exec at Unity (itself a certain major beneficiary of a move toward more virtual worlds), attempts to lay down some ground rules for what the metaverse should be:
Rule #1. There is only one Metaverse.
Rule #2: The Metaverse is for everyone.
Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse.
Rule #4: The Metaverse is open.
Rule #5: The Metaverse is hardware-independent.
Rule #6: The Metaverse is a Network.
Rule #7: The Metaverse is the Internet
It’s worth checking out the entire article here. There’s plenty to suggest that innovation in this space is only beginning: this will not be the last post about the metaverse on Transmissions, you can be sure.
Ideas
Deep-internet bubbles: How microgenres are taking over SoundCloud
Kieran Press-Reynolds, NoBells Blog
Spotify is in the news. And aside from the current furore, there is a lot that Spotify does badly. But there’s also a lot that it does well. Or at least does in interesting new ways. One of those things is the way it classifies and sorts through its vast trove of songs, and particularly how it is able to understand and organise notions of musical genre on a truly enormous scale.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after visiting the valiant and quite extraordinary map of musical genre, constructed by Spotify’s ‘data alchemist’ Glenn McDonald, at everynoise.com. Everynoise is an huge word-map that shows hundreds of different genres and their relative proximity/similarity to each other. Helpfully, each tag is accompanied by a short audio clip. (Favorite new genre discoveries include schranz, hololive, sovietwave and new isolationism - honestly I love genre names so much.)
The blog piece that kicked off this whole dive was a fascinating look into Soundcloud, not Spotify, and the proliferation of micro-genres with just a handful of artists (or in some cases, just one), recognising the necessity of giving a name to a sound in order to help it find a footing within the cultural maelstrom.
Quotes
Even more astonishing is the subsequent finding that a milligram of the pheromone from the grass-cutting Atta vollenweideri (ant) suffices to lead a worker 60 times around the world.
– E.O. Wilson, Superorganism
Chart of the Week
Other
🗂 A quick intro to the Johnny Decimal system, for scrupulous file naming and organisation. Link
📚 A library of articles and books that have been censored by autocratic regimes has been created for global access – in Minecraft. Metaverse for good, or good PR exercise for the creators? (The two are not mutually exclusive). Link
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Till next time!