Douglas this is powerful stuff, all true, thanks for posting.
But I think our perspective shifts, if we can imagine the difference between viruality designed to make profit for the platform owners, at least to enable them to pay the energy overheads for running the platform, and virtuality desgined without that constraint.
My theme in Medium came from a metaverse related PhD candidate project, on which I was working, after a long career already as systems Engineer, it became apparent that there was a fundamental energy barrier to my product, which could not be solved by any metaverse we've seen so far.
As you say, a metaverse or virtual world is just a simulation of the real world with some virtual extensions.
The problem in both is that all of us are driven by necessity to have to find ways to make money, by doing business, which usually involves making promises to pay, which translate at the end of the chain to the work of extracting energy.
So the net flow of energy is from the ground upwards, from poorest to richest.
In the case of the virtual world, that is from users to owners, and in the case of the real world it is from all of us workers, to the owners and controllers of banks and governments, formerly kings and queens.
The problem for the real world is that this net flow of energy out of Earth, ends in catastrophe, the phyiscal destruction of Earth. We can see this now starting to manifes as extreme weather events, but we can also trace it to pandemics, war, and economic inflation.
I saw this coming five years ago, because I saw first that it was unsustainable in virtual worlds, during my PhD candidate research. Since virtual worlds are working models of the real world, it follows that if something we try to do with those can't be done, then it can't be done in the real world either.
They can't be run at profit. It is physically impossible from an energy point of view.
Realising this, tracing it all out, we come to the conclusion that to be sustainable, the energy has to come from top down, and it has to be free, then we look for the free source of energy and see the sun.
So the ideal, fully sustainable world, and virtual world is solar powered.
We could prove this, if one or more platforms go solar powered, as has to happen, sooner or later.
In the case of a virtual world, there becomes no need for the owners to draw profits from users, since the income they can get from converting energy received whiich is not used by the virtual world to money / fuel / food (See "Solein"), so in the interests of maximising the platform metcalfe utility factor, instead of charging for prvilege, such as owning virtual property etc, why not give it away for free? This would increase the utility factor to something greater than unity (The conventionally accepted maximum utility factor), by offering users free money, just for being members of the platform, and that money can be backed by solid product creatable interchangeably with the money issued inworld, by pow tokens.
I wrote a story on how this can be done in either virtual or real world, named "The money-fuel Tree".
By operating this way, humanity becomes like a tree, or plant, which spent all of the first part of its life drawing energy up from Earth, against gravity, by way of its nutrients pulling the energy from Earth up into itsself, to create its structure to the point it starts to shoot leaves.
After the leaves shoot, the nutrients in the plant have to flown downwards, from leaves to root, conducting the energy the plant received on its leaves to Earth, thus the plant becomes another tiny part of the front end interface between the energy of the sun, and all of llfe.
Humanity is just shooting its first leaves, we now collect tens of GigaJoules of solar energy every day, putting those to economic use, and it steadily scales up, as well as all the energy received so far being accumulated in Earth as latent, unmonetised value.
It can't be monetised by money as debt, because that can only translate to labor of extraction, whereas there was no per-Joule labor of extraction associated with the solar energy received, it was gifted, so only money issued for free can represent it.
We saw a demo of how this works, when the US was issuing 4tn stimulus, and the dollar itself went up, whilst the price of oil went negative, and the environment in terms of fish and coral stocks took the only spike of recovery seen
This could easily be demonstrated again, by any platform going solar powered.
The motivations of all stakeholders become suddenly aligned, when money is issued for free, so many other things rapidly happen.
If the platform didn't start out as a virtual world or metaverse, it would quickly become one, because for sure everyone would want that, and there would be no shortage of funds to make it happen, without expecting users to stump up for the additional functionality.
Anyway, sorry for rambling, it is a huge subjetct to try to cover in a single response, but I hope you see the difference it will make, when we finally get the profit monster removed from the picture.
