The Metaverse has been hailed by Silicon Valley and business executives as the most significant development in the modern digital age. The Metaverse is loosely defined as a virtual reality platform for social networking and international digital marketing. Despite the rather nebulous nature of its goals, the top institutions are clamoring over the potential success of the Metaverse. JP Morgan estimates that the Metaverse will be able to bring in over $1 trillion dollars in annual revenue, which would vastly outcompete the combined annual revenues of current social networks like Instagram and Facebook.
The nine-figure international lobbying organization, The World Economic Forum, is similarly signaling their optimism and support for the project, publishing an article back in April claiming 78 percent of business executives find the metaverse to be a positive force for businesses as well as a host of other social goals. If a new project is good for business, there is a clear incentive for executives to help encourage the hype around the Metaverse.
However, for all this hype, is there any organic substance behind it? Is this expensive push for a totally digital world, devoid of privacy and regulation something people want or need to improve their daily lives? We have heard how business executives and banking elites view the metaverse, but what does the average person think? Does the average person want a radical transformation of their daily life into one of digital property and identity? Based on the latest data from the Metaverse, the answer is a resounding ‘no’.
Recently a shocking finding from DappRader, a blockchain and NFT transaction tracker, has revealed one of the flagships projects of the metaverse, Decentraland, receives only 30 active users:
In the wake of several outlets reporting on this finding, Decentraland went into full damage control. Decentraland developers took umbrage with the definition used by DappRadar to calculate active users. The roughly 30 ‘active users’ in effect means unique wallet addresses, or people using Decentraland in its economic capacity, and countering that when accounting for users that use Decentraland for chatting and social purposes, their platform receives 8000 daily users.
What was intended to be a correction only makes matters worse for Decentraland. To put even their stated daily active users (or DAUs) into perspective, a comparable social media app like Instagram receives over 500 million daily active users. That equates to Decentraland having .0016% of the average traffic of social media. Even when compared to MMOs (massive multiplayer online games), which track approximately 1 million daily users, the figure of 8000 is pitifully low.
That’s with the assumption that even if Decentraland’s 8000 estimate is accurate, it may be even lower. In a blog post trying to justify this poor performance, the developer lets slip that unique visitors aren’t even counted. The post states, “You might at first divide 56,697, the number of September’s MAU by 30 and come back with the number 1,866”
The blog post patently states their DAU (daily active users), whatever the official number may be, has been on the decline, further supporting the idea that these metaverse companies are floundering. “If you look at Decentraland’s DAU numbers over the past year, it’s true that you will see a decline in overall numbers since the early metaverse hype of late 2021 when terms like ‘NFT’, ‘Web3’, and ‘metaverse’ were just starting to have a real presence in the mainstream.”
Even the original figure of approximately 30 users is still relevant, as it shows that the cryptocurrency function of the platform, which is one of the primary goals of Decentraland, is hardly used by its already small user base.
In terms of both social interaction and economic activity, Decentraland, one of the biggest projects within the metaverse, has up to this point been a complete failure, showing no signs of organic growth, engagement, or interest. This begs the question: if next to no one is using the metaverse, why is it described with such glowing praise by the most wealthy and influential CEOs in business and Silicon Valley?
Could it be that these same business and tech executives have a clear vested interest in selling this paradigm to the public? These tech executives have everything to gain by making an application where all communication and nearly all transfers of funds are under their watchful eye. The irony of the name ‘Decentraland’ could not be more pronounced: the metaverse is anything but decentralized. It is advertised as an entirely new world, created in the image of Silicon Valley and other predatory globalist elites, and beholden to a single parent company: Meta.
If their plans for the metaverse were successful, with a $1 trillion dollar annual income, coupled with the value of countless terabytes of user data, they would have a monopoly over the internet and information even larger than the ones we see today.
It is clear that the elites who run these kinds of institutions do not have the same interests and goals of the average American. The proof is in the user engagement: if people are demanding a metaverse, why aren’t people flocking to it en masse? It is because they do not want their data, their money, and their lives to revolve around digital delusions. People both desire and have a right to privacy and freedom of speech, both of which could easily be snuffed out by projects like the Metaverse. The political implications of this all-encompassing virtual world cannot be overstated. If our lives are spent in the metaverse, then an even greater proportion of our time and money is tied in with international and globalist finances. What is stopping them from advertising real-world products and services, even political messages and candidates on every cloud and tree in the metaverse? The goal of these new-age tech companies is to completely dominate our lives and be as real to us as real life.
Another highly relevant question is how much money is being diverted into these projects which are unwanted by the general public? According to the parent company Meta, they have already placed at least $50 million dollars into the project. Over $50 million dollars is going to help bolster projects like Decentraland, a company with a barren community?
What does it say about the state of our nation that our alleged top minds in the world of technology, who are trying to bring about the future, are delivering one nobody wants? They are delivering a shoddy, inferior copy of reality, in a thinly veiled attempt to erode what remains of our rights.
The elites only care about what projects put money in their pockets, and even that is now contested since elites are clearly willing to waste some of their fortunes to impose tyrannical social changes. They don’t believe in patriotism or any moral value, only the further accumulation of power, often from wealth. None of the wealth is used in service of their countrymen, but as a weapon against them. They farm their own nations’ people, human beings, for their data and money, and attention. In return, they get digital houses and clothes, which serve no purpose. Even before this new wave of artificial intelligence and metaverse discussions, social media has had a parasitic relationship with the average American.
When will these tech companies, the manufacturers of these parasites, be held accountable for their failed prescriptions for society? When will there be a tech executive concerned with the health of their nation, using their position of power and technical mastery in service of improving our quality of life?
