No. 114: 🤖 Decentraland
+ 🎨 DALL-E 2: Avocado teapots and woolly monster soup
Hiya,
We’ve got an another action-packed edition of hi, tech. today:
Decentraland: It’s one of the many platforms vying for metaverse supremacy. I created an avatar, hooked up my crypto wallet, and got involved. Long story short: I wasn’t impressed. 👎
DALL-E 2: It’s AI that can create fantastical images from a short piece of text. I was impressed. 👍
📺 The new Samsung art TV
🐦 A nightingale that’s not what it seems
But first:
📢 Self-promotion klaxon 📢
I’m in a very good Vice article this week, talking about BeReal. Take a look!
I’ve got a webinar coming up on April 20th with the Digital Marketing Institute. It’s all about data visualization 📊 Sign up here!
A whole new video is up on hi, tech. TV: I explain how Spotify recommends new music 🎵
My new mini-course on business model innovation is up on Emeritus Insights! In just 17 action-packed videos, filmed in my living room, you’ll learn it all. You can take a look here (I think you have to subscribe to get the content, though)
Ah there’s more, but that’ll do for one week. Also I’m in NYC April 30 - May 6; let me know if you’re around!
A Trip to Decentraland
I’ve been pootling about in Decentraland for a little while now, trying to figure out why anyone would think this is the future. Conversely, I’m finally starting to understand the appeal of nostalgia.
See, the Web as we know it is a platform people can build on. This “metaverse” is supposed to be the next phase of technological evolution, but there is no universal metaverse platform. We can’t just log onto it; we have to select one of many individual platforms, few of which communicate with each other.
Of course, this is why Zuckerberg wants to seize the initiative and create a metaverse standard for us. He wants to do for the metaverse what Microsoft did for Web browsing with Internet Explorer in ‘95.
So far, brands (it’s always the brands, isn’t it?) are pumping money into one platform in particular: Decentraland.
As its name suggests, it proposes giving control to users, rather than the very centralised vision Mr Zuckerberg has for the metaverse.
Decentraland had a fashion week in late March, where Esteé Lauder gave out 10,000 free NFTs. And in Decentraland’s Luxury Fashion District, a single 16-square-metre parcel of land can sell for $15,000.
Real estate speculators (and by gum, they’re speculating hard on this one) have spent up to $500 million on metaverse “land” already.
Why?
They have transferred the surface elements of real-world economics (the $$$) to a virtual world where these elements have no underlying substance.
Land (real land) has financial value because of physical and geographical properties, as well as the conceptual value we ascribe to it.
In a virtual world, we don’t need another shopping district. We can instantly go anywhere, any time, so “location” takes on a new meaning. Your Gucci boutique can be next door to Dior or a million miles away in the metaverse. The difference is the same.
So you see, I go looking for some sort of substance in these things and it’s feeling increasingly fruitless. One ends up thinking of Percy Shelley, right?
Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life
Because check this out from Wikipedia’s Decentraland profile:
Users have minted NFTs of avatars with slurs in their names and at one point the name "Jew" was for sale for $362,000. Despite the community voting in favor of adding "Hitler" to the banned names list, there were not enough votes for the decentralized autonomous organization's (DAO) smart contract to execute.
“Decentralisation” is really not the road to decency, is it?
The platform has its own custom currency, MANA, which has a market value of $4.7 billion somehow. Its value spiked after Facebook rebranded to Meta, but it seems like the real world is finally catching up with MANA. Its price has fallen from a high of over $5 to about $2.70 today.
And monthly land sales in Decentraland have been falling for the last few months after that spike in late 2021:
This is because, to put it simply, very few people are actually using Decentraland.
[Decentraland is] mostly empty and with a number of concurrent users of around 1,600 in 2021, a figure that might include inactive users who remain logged on.
- WIRED
Decentraland disputes WIRED’s estimate of 1,600 users, but even its own internal figures put the figure at only 15,000 daily users.
That’s enough background - let’s get into the action.
Introducing: The Suavatar
First up, we need an avatar and I’m not paying for any extras. Fortunately, that inquisitively arched eyebrow is part of the free package.
And if you need more proof of just how avaricious the metaverse is:
I never really thought of my skin as something I wear, but everything has its price in Decentraland. I mean, you have to connect a crypto wallet just to get in.
The experience is slow. Slow and clunky. Decentraland only works on a desktop browser which, no, isn’t very futuristic.
I haven’t played video games in years but back when I did, they were better than this.
Super Mario 64 was at least 128 times better than this.
I guess those video games just didn’t make enough money.
Imagine if they’d charged Mario for his skin, his hat, a moustache comb, and all those years at plumbing school?
Those are revenue opportunities we’ll never get back. That fictional freeloader took us all for a ride.
They’ll make no such mistakes in Decentraland, the libertarian paradise.
I was intrigued by JP Morgan’s announcement that they had launched a metaverse store, because I figured they would have to do something to jazz up their presence.
As a newcomer to the scene, I was concerned that I might not be able to find their store.
I needn’t have worried - I entered Decentraland right here:
There was a tiger walking about inside, for some reason. Perhaps that’s as far as the budget would stretch, after paying for everything else.
It’s not easy to navigate Decentraland, because you have to use a keyboard unless you have a controller plugged in.
And there are a lot of glitches and bugs to contend with, so I couldn’t even grab more screenshots of my actions. Not that there was much to report: I walked around a few shops, looked at some billboards, and tried to figure out how to buy things in there. To be clear, I would not have bought anything even if I could have.
Unfortunately, I must admit that the experience would benefit from integration with a social network. Even just knowing when events are happening, or where to find people I know, would be helpful. As it stands, there is no compelling reason to spend time in Decentraland.
Yet the point bears repeating: What they are trying to achieve here stands in opposition to Meta’s vision. Decentraland claims that its users are also owners and they can vote to make changes to how this virtual world functions. It’s all nice in theory, but it chafes against reality.
I listened to a BBC radio show this week called ‘The End of Invention’.
In the show, they spoke to a scientist who said that in the 18th century, the University of Basel used random selection to choose professors from their pool of candidates. The University’s reputation had fallen and they wanted to try something different, knowing that cronyism was a big problem. The same kinds of people kept getting the same kinds of jobs and the whole system was stagnant.
The experiment was a success. They had a more diverse staff and new ideas broke through.
As soon as he got the chance, Napoleon shut this selection process down. Basel went back to selecting candidates based on their leaders’ recommendations. The status quo will protect itself, and why not? It’s got the most to lose.
I would take the argument that these are early days for Decentraland. The experience will be completely different in a couple of years. Plenty of people looked at the first websites and figured the internet was a fad, but what we have today is unrecognisable from those early efforts.
And yet, progress is not inevitable. If the worst people take charge of the virtual world, it’ll be just like the one we already have.
So far, Decentraland plays host to financial speculators and brands that just want to sell virtual clothes. With so few customers, it’s not exactly sustainable.
It is telling that the one activity people have actually taken to in Decentraland is gambling. Poker is big business on there and the casinos are busier than anywhere else.
Analysts like to talk about the fundamentals of a business when assessing its prospects. It’s hard to see what those fundamentals are in Decentraland today. Come to think if it, it’s not even much fun.
🎨 DALL-E 2
But on the other hand, this really is the kind of technology that makes the future exciting.
If you haven’t taken a look at DALL-E 2 yet, I’d encourage you to do so here.
We wrote about the original DALL-E some time ago - it’s built by OpenAI and it can generate original images from a short text prompt.
What does DALL-E 2 do?
Well the website says:
DALL·E 2 can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.
For example, the prompt, “A bowl of soup that looks like a monster made out of wool”, results in these options:
Not bad, eh?
Or how about an avocado teapot? No problemo:
And this could lead to new way of working with AI. It becomes a tool that extends our creative capabilities, based on our inchoate ideas.
What else can it do?
DALL·E 2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.
This is really impressive - when you move an element of an image (they offer a corgi as the example) it changes to suit its new context. So if you move the corgi into a painting, it assumes the style of the artwork.
That will make more sense if you try the example on their website, I promise.
Tech Bites
📺 Samsung releases new art TV - The Verge
Really want one of these.
🤖 You’re Still Being Tracked on the Internet, Just in a Different Way - NY Times
🌳 How we’re fighting climate misinformation - Pinterest
🐦 The cello and the nightingale: 1924 duet was faked, BBC admits - The Guardian
This has shaken me to my core. If you know the recording, you might feel the same. The BBC recorded a duet between a cellist and a nightingale, which was then played on the radio every year until the 1950s.
I wasn’t there, but I learned about the recording from a David Attenborough show about songbirds.
And it is my ambition, once I’ve made my billions from writing sarcastic newsletters, to bring the nightingale back to London. So I like this recording.
But get this: the recording was faked. And it’s not even like they recorded the bird separately. The “bird” is actually Maude Gould, “a whistler known as Madame Saberon”.
I feel like Shelley once more, like:
a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
Until next time!