The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse 

TIMELINE OF CRITICAL CAT EVENTS*: 5:25 Amy watches Dan dance 5:49 Amy licks her tummy 42:35 Amy twitches in her sleep 54:34 Amy gets comfy 1:08:29 Amy stares at Dan 1:11:33 Amy gets a toy 1:19:50 Amy gets skritches Amy stretches at 30:06, 36:46, and 1:21:58 *Edited to add timestamps courtesy of replies below. This is what real internet communities look like.

Think about this: They made a virtual world so boring that you can't even find weird perverts in it.

I always love the comparison "it's like Ready Player One" because Ready Player One takes place in a dystopian hellscape

This is a weirdly large amount of effort for Dan to put into advertising his modern Mario houses

Funny how this “decentralised” space sounds an awful lot like an oligarchy

I know it’s such a small detail but my favorite moment is 56:40 where our host discovers that the stairs have no collision and, as a true gamer would do, begins to tight-rope walk up the hand railing in a desperate effort to restore functionality to the experience

Ready Player One: You can climb Mount Everest with Batman! Metaverse: You can go to Walmart. Ish.

this video is probably responsible for the largest amount of people who have ever concurrently thought about decentraland

The only ever correct use of Metaverse spaces was that time I performed a Shabbat service in Wizard101 as a kid.

The “no ideology allowed” bit reminded me of a line by Terry Pratchett “For you see, the reason he couldn’t see it was the same reason someone in Times Square wouldn’t be able to point to New York.”

"It's an undead mall, stuttering forward in a parody of life" is the most vicious burn I've ever heard in my life.

Dan, PLEASE NEVER STOP demonstrating the incompetence of libertarian techbros. Thank you.

Truly a libertarian utopia: you must buy the ability to sit down

"our thing is gonna be exactly like Ready Player One!" *thing can't even emulate Atari properly*

I knew it was nonsense, but I didn't realize exactly how cultish this was. Listening to them pretending to be excited about garbage was deeply sad.

Decentraland looks like it would be the main set piece for an iCarly subplot

The same 3 dogs begging to be adopted forever is honestly so fucking grim

I'm so glad to see long running character Hat Dan, the Dan who wears a hat, finally return. I was getting worried he'd been sidelined entirely

The Inner Ear: we aren't moving, but it looks like we're moving. I think we'vr been poisoned. Brain: no, it's just VR. Inner Ear: that's the poison talking *hits puke/fall over button*

Everytime a tech Bro pretends to be a forward thinking rebel, they end up making a feudal society.

Mario Maker: Hey man, why not build a dumb little platformer level for your nine friends :) Players: Build torture chambers, musical experiences, working computers, and other games within the game. Decentraland: Yo dude, how about you build an ENTIRE DINGDANG UNIVERSE WITH THIS Giant corporations: Build dumb little platformer levels for their nine friends.

I'm adding my voice to a 12,000 strong comment section and will likely be seen by no one, but it just struck me how many Decentraland users ask to be contacted on Discord, when the Metaverse is supposed to be a "place for genuine connections"????? Why would there not be native user-to-user chat in your Metaverse!? One of the foundational features that would actually make people stay on the platform in order to interact with each other?!?!? This could be something they add later the same way they added JUMPING multiple years after launch, but like, that just hit me that Decentraland users constantly ask to be contacted on other platforms that MAKE SENSE.

“Phigital” sounds like either a kind of toenail fungal infection or the topical cream you’d use to get rid of it

And once again, Dan does a video on how stupid some random tech bro garbage is, and a month later it's completely dead. Granted, this time around the metaverse was already on death's door, but it's still funny that this is basicially the exact same scenario as the NFT video.

I think the thing that techbros miss, is that, I like going outside. I like seeing my friends in person. When I use games and the like to spend time with my partner, it’s because I’m not able to be there in person. I use technology to try to fill a hole that can’t be filled. Nothing will be able to replace spending time with people in person, and this is coming from an introvert.

The focus on mining in the embedded games really implies that the developers saw Minecraft and instead of realising that kids love creativity, they took away the idea that the children yearn for the mines.

Don't you see the innovation here? In the non-metaversr world, it would be really difficult to walk into a Lawyer's office to film a bit because there would be people there and walls and consequences. So this really is a leap forward

I was pricing my work for a gallery show and feeling guilty for charging $130 for a small framed oil painting. The fact that people spend real money on this stuff and ugly NFTs makes me feel a lot better about asking to be paid for my sincere artwork.

Gotta say, I love the expression 'powered by the blockchain.' That's like claiming a ship is powered by its inexplicably unretractable anchor.

Ryan Bolger, a theologian: "The Metaverse will be so real that it would be capable of containing divinity." Me, also a theologian:

This is a very strange watch for those of us who spent a lot of time developing content on Second Life in the early 2000's. Like watching history repeat itself but far too soon. We just did this but back when I was making a living doing motion capture and 3d modeling, socially speaking, nobody cared. People looked at you like you have 10 eyes when you tried to explain to them you were spending your days building virtual spaces, gadgets, clothing, and weapons for people to share. Its very noticeable when people have just started thinking about these ideas in the last few years because they talk boldly and confidently about ideas that show they have a very loose grip on the reality of the tech.

Decentraland's DAO having votes *disproportionately distributed based on wealth* is just poetic.

To be fair, the Hersheyverse hat is amazing conspiracy theorist RP gear.

At the beginning of the video I initially assumed that the movie theater had to have been something that Dan made in Blender specifically for the video. Like, there's no way that people could be gushing over something that looks so objectively shitty

The real tragedy here to me is that a lot of the community seem like they are disenfranchised with the class structure and politics of the real world but instead of joining movements in the real world to try and enact change, they join an online world where they are essentially just taken advantage of in the same ways they claim to hate in the real world. Absolutely baffling.

I'm really baffled by the idea that people might want to permanently wear mo-cap-suits with clothes projected into you instead of real clothes. Like, people wear clothes for reasons other than fashion. You know, clothes that protect you from the elements, clothes that are comfortable to wear, clothes that have big pockets, clothes that can get dirty and protect you from thorns when gardening, that sort of thing. Also, how would you do laundry? Or do people just not sweat while in the metaverse?

It's always very funny to be to watch these 'we're gonna Decentralize the Government and get rid of all the BLOAT and do it OUR WAY' And then immediately set out to create the most astonishingly burdensome system of bureaucracy that would make the most devoted Thatcherite bureaucrat say "Isn't that a bit much?"

The comedy of techbros fundamentally misunderstanding why people go outside and spend time with friends is uniquely fascinating.

Pausing about 15 minutes in at the start of VR to say that my friend recently got a brand new PS5 VR system. He had a friend over trying out this NFL Quarterback demo in his basement, and the friend ended up sprinting into a support beam. Had to go to the ER. The human body REALLY wants to move.

Also like, we _did_ all of this. Everything depicted in Decentraland is exactly what Second Life was like, except that looked and ran better.

Decentraland looks like a video game from a movie made by people who have never played a video game

These guys are so SO mad that they slept on vrchat and that they can't tie it to the block chain Vrchat is EVERYTHING they want the metaverse to be but they are very butthurt that they would have to consider it a game

Gotta love that VR chat hit gold and everybody else is repeatedly embarrassing themselves trying to catch up miserably

"Don't shop less, shop digitally" is the perfect summary of the nightmare fuel the metaverse is

"Wait, that's backwards!" "That's backwards on both sides!" could be the best reaction to every defense of meta/crypto/nft/whatever that I've heard.

I'm 40, and this video is giving me an existential crisis. I was born into an analog world and entered a digital one. I remember navigating the nascent Internet via dial up connection. Am I too old because I simply do not understand why anyone would want a metaverse like my parents not understanding my desire to access the Internet? Or am I too old because I look at the Lindt Chocolate Store & think, "Didn't we do this once & it was bad then?" I just want to shout at corporations to touch some grass. The Internet... Metaverse... What have you should be a supplement to real life, not a replacement thereof. It's a hammer, and I don't want to live in the toolbox.

Imagine walking hours to gather clean drinking water for your family in a third world country and seeing people in the west spending hundreds of thousands to build virtual businesses that no one uses

The thing that strikes me as hilarious is that everything decentraland has accomplished in the past year or so was already accomplished by ROBLOX. in the 2010s.

8:30 - "Don't you dare f*cking shop less ..." should be the official tag line/slogan for the Metaverse.

The idea of a digital facsimile of a real dog, eternally begging for its physical counterpart to be adopted, long after the real dog has been adopted, lived a full life, and ultimately died, is genuinely horrifying.

as soon as the section 1:27:02 came up showing how the vote to address voting power, i had one helluva realization: *that's literally just Stellaris' voting system.* these guys seriously played Stellaris, and somehow came to the decision that the galactic senate's voting system is what they should use for their actual """democracy,""" y'know, the very same system that in game is *made* to be exploited.

What you discuss from 1:39:17 onward, in which you describe Argentina’s hacker flophouse Casa Voltaire as having hit “a sweet spot of anonymity,” I think would be better described as a problem endemic in today’s World Wide Web/Web 2.0. The most niche minutiae of U.S. life in the 20th and 21st century are represented online, to a secondary extent this could be said of Western Europe, and beneath that one could say historical data from both the the U.S. and Western Europe are also findable … but beyond that, it’s mostly tumbleweeds. Troves and troves and troves and TROVES of information from both the present and past of the entire Global South are absent from the Web. It’s not just Casa Voltaire that’s “anonymous” … if I look up quite commonly-known subjects pertaining to when and where I grew up - if I look up fast-food franchises of 1970s Caracas, Caracas radio stations, year-by-year pop charts of Caracas radio, a list of Caracas theaters from the ‘70s and ‘80s, popular Caracas t.v. shows, telenovelas produced by Radio Caracas Televisión, old property deeds for buildings in the greater metropolitan Caracas borough of Las Mercedes (technically actually in Baruta, in the El Hatillo municipality of Miranda), the elementary schools of Caracas, old newspaper articles from _El Nacional_ or _El Universal_ … I come up with nearly NOTHING - and God help me if I want info about a neighboring smaller city like Barquisimeto or Maracay. The little info which is findable regarding most of the world is quite broad, often written from a U.S. perspective, seen through a very particular U.S.-centric ideological lens, woefully incomplete and one-sided … and, perhaps unsurprisingly, on a factual level often simply outright *wrong!* We are very much invisible online, or reflected through a funhouse mirror: the present and past of 85% of our planet’s population is simply absent, the tip of the iceberg you do see is misrepresented … and with every year that passes, our representation online - and thus the truth of our past and present existence - seems increasingly to be regarded by the wealthy world as inconsequential. But if you did not grow up in the Global South, because we are not represented online … you’d have no way of knowing that we are so poorly represented online! It’s the anosognosia trap: you do not know what you do not know, so in the U.S. you may not even realize the extent to which information about the U.S.A.’s past and present - even the U.S.A.’s trivia - is privileged online above quite broad swaths of essential, fundamental data regarding nearly 9/10 of the world’s population. So I’m not chastising you - I kinda even love you! Instead, my point here is simply: when you can find nearly everything about your own past and present online quite easily, even the minutiae, I wonder whether you realize Casa Voltaire’s “sweet spot of anonymity” is more akin to online invisibility … and that nearly the whole lived experience, past and present, of 85% of our planet’s population is similarly invisible online?

The Lindt offering on the Metaverse reminds me of a CD I had from The Cranberries which had a special "Meet the Band" segment you could see by slotting it into your computer instead of your CD player. My favorite thing to do with it was click the one window of the building that would pop open and make one of the band members say, "I really like Guinness." The fact that I'm talking about a CD player and The Cranberries might indicate how dated something has to be in order to look that way.

It's such a minor point in the video that you can't physically sit down in Decentraland without making a purchase. But damn if it doesn't remind me of hostile architecture in American cities, where in order to rest your feet in public you most likely have to buy a coffee or french fries...

Dan killed NFTs AND the Metaverse. Dan in 2024, vote NOW!

I immediately added this video to my recommended viewing list for an upcoming lecture on cyberspace. It was then pointed out by one of my PhD students that I was cited in it! Sincerely a highlight of my career. Thank you!

Imagine your modern mario house is on one end of skyrim and your job as a lawyers receptionist is at the other end and you have to explain to your boss that you're late because wizards were fighting dragons

Something about a robot saying “Dope asf, clap clap clap clap clap clap” gets me every-time.

As a person who is glued to my phone much more than is healthy, I am surprised to realize just how much the idea of a world where social and physical interaction is replaced by digital imitations repulses me.

The bit about how people called the Decentraland fashion show innovative for having both a physical and virtual thing made me laugh so hard. Club penguin did that in like 2012 it’s definitely not the future 😭

I started a job working on a product similar to this at the start of 2022, my first proper "game dev" job outside of an internship and some hobbyist experience. It's hard to overstate how much the people designing the metaverse are at best reinventing things that already exist, or at worst adding extra inconvenience to something otherwise incredibly simple. The product itself is basically a glorified VR version of GMod cinema. You upload content to their site or just link JPvid videos directly, and watch them on screens. There are a few different rooms you can watch videos in, but that's basically all there is to do. You link JPvid videos from an external site, then you can use another external site to create and import a 3D avatar. Basically nothing in there is original and we unsurprisingly have zero users. Despite this, we've dedicated a huge amount of resources to designing and implementing extensive monetisation features, including our own bespoke currency "coins" and a subscription system for creators. The cart is so far in front of the horse it's disappearing over the horizon. It reminds me of Dan's Vidme video, our priorities are entirely focused on how people can profit and rent-seek from creatives, instead of making something anyone would want to use. We fix bugs and respond to feedback, but I'm 99% certain all the feedback we're getting is from investors being goaded into giving us money by jingling keys in front of their faces, usually just a new environment to watch JPvid videos in. I've had some other circumstances to take care of recently, but am now in the process of looking for a new job, thank christ. The developers I've worked with are all great but it's very clear the people steering the ship are either completely oblivious to how this will all sink one day, or are just grifting as much money as possible before that day comes. There isn't really a moral to this story, I just wanted to vent some frustration and maybe give an insight as someone who has spent time working on one of these metaverse "platforms".

I laughed so hard when The Defiant said "the metaverse revolves around you" and then clarified that he meant you can literally move the camera around your character. A+

I'm halfway through Chapter 3, so maybe this will be discussed later, but everything here is exactly what SecondLife tried to do 15 years ago. They tried to have offices, museums, NPR's Science Friday even had a gathering place for their live show recordings. All of that is gone now and it is a ghost town, from what I hear

Al Roker's baffled and disgusted face at 1:15:26 says more than any words ever could.

I can't wait until everyone besides me is in the metaverse 24/7 and i can finally get some goddamn peace

The cat is clearly an expert on the subject monitoring that all the info is factual.

More and more, I get the feeling that the metaverse as people describe it is just "A web browser that needs a VR headset, and much less convenient"- especially when people discuss how the internet is already a metaverse, and they're gonna sell you the next step of that in metaverse form

Glad to see the return of hat Dan, the Dan who wears a hat and is a different character from regular Dan. Truly one of the characters of all time

It only just really occurred to me how blatantly insincere it is of proponents of Decentraland to celebrate the arrival of corporate money in their space. Any other legitimate social media platform, any other legitimate game, groans as real-world moneyed interests enters their space, with rare exceptions. Their enthusiasm for any corpo representation at all is just another giveaway that this whole thing is a money-making scheme, not anything sincere or genuine, and so it's destined to die.

I like that the Dominos hut was also clearly a ploy to get free stuff by whoever had the idea. "Oh hey we could all order pizza through this Dominos kiosk here" As noted, this was really clearly just effectively a wrapper in DCL for ordering Dominos via their app or website. Meaning the creator likely had the idea to create this, link it to their account to funnel all orders through with which they could (if successful) rack up massive amounts of points in Domino's rewards system for free (shitty) food.

"Astral projection" and "McDonald's" were not two words I thought I would ever hear together in a sentence 😂 The world has truly become cyberpunk

Virtual movie theaters sound like streaming with extra steps

>"Decentralized" libertarian paradise >Makes a bureaucracy that puts the U.N. to shame

Imagine living in your modern mario house across the dead child shrine. I can’t wait for decentraland to be real 😍😍

The herky-jerky look and low-detail models gives me the impression of the kind of fake games they have in TV series aimed at people with no connection to actual games

The entire idea behind a digital place where you can buy land is so beyond dumb that it actually can't be anything other than a grift. The fact that they don't bring up VRChat as an example of the "metaverse" is really telling because that game does everything DCL does but better and for free. It's got vr and desktop compatability for most things, it's got games, and it allows people to advertise and sell their own works (Or offer them for free). More than that, though, is that it lets people choose who they want to be, how they want to show themselves. It allows them to craft worlds, bodies, and personas that more closely resemble their own wants and image of themselves, or even just a fake image that they want to act as at times.

Me: This is an interesting deconstruction of Decentraland and Metaverses as a concept Also me: hee hoo pretty kitty

1:15:40 i love how the general consensus among actual professionals in response to Decentraland is “Back away slowly”

1:40:17 It's the trolley problem, except that you are trying to market the trolley to one of the people on the tracks.

so nice of Dan's cat to let him talk during her chilling video

Today I saw a book called "metaverse: where you will soon live and work" on a magazine and it really shows how much the cryptobros, facebook and ready player one sold the mainstream media the idea that the metaverse is actually viable (especially since most of mainstream media is devoid of actual research and extremelly out of touch with online culture) and WILL occur, it's kinda sad really, the older people watching on tv saying "It really is the end times" thinking we will live inside machines when really, this reality is functionally unreachable.

When Amy looks up at you dancing and starts blinking in confusion, it's just the best. 10/10 perfect cat no notes.

It reminds me of the Kinect in a far larger scope. Everyone drooled over the idea that games would no longer require controllers as a new approach to game immersion (the player is the controller!), but devs and players both quickly came to the conclusion that lacking game controllers was impractical and frustrating to use and develop for. Just a few years later the fad was dead.

I love how Dan talks as though he didn't build all those Mario houses ;)

"My dudes. The ideology is coming from inside the house." Is one of my new favorite things. I Can't quite figure out where the sniff is supposed to go tho

The Metaverse’s understanding of what made multiplayer games fun is the Steve Buscemi ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ meme but his outfit cost 10 billion dollars.

your cat silently watching you discuss a very niche topic to an audience of no one (from their perspective) is my spirit animal

Nothing like watching a 30 year old twitch streamer with an average viewership of 9 spend the equivalent of TWICE my total student loan debt for a Bachelors in Engineering in order to buy: 1. A block of fake land 2. A flashy 3d model to put on that fake land 3. The privelage of sharing his 9 viewer twitch stream on an official port of a garbage game that somehow throws around millions of dollars in currency that only has value in theory Maybe we shouldve stayed in the trees. This existence is pointless.

The fact that they didn’t use the tagline “Gotta Catch ‘The Mall’!!” For the Gama Mall is so disappointing

The saddest part of this is realising my beloved Lord of the Rings Online only has 850 concurrent players.

Just something to add I realized thinking about the video. It's funny that the Matrix is one of the touchstones for metaverse weenies. For one the obvious reason that artificial world is quite literally a prison for humanity where the whole goal for the hero is to escape that reality and then learn to manipulate and eventually destroy it's rule based systems. The second is that when we actually see the good guys using virtual reality they intentional don't use a metaverse approach for their virtual reality. When Neo and Morpheus go from the dojo to the jumping test they don't head out the sliding doors and into some city where they have all the programs they use. They just warp there. When they need guns they don't go to the virtual gunshop they bring them up like a physical menu. Even the Matrix which runs on rule of cool thinks holding all your simulations in some combined physical space is stupid.

If a shrine to a passed child being next to a copy-pasted "meta-real-estate" mario house isn't the abyss staring back, i don't know what is

It's been two weeks and the fact that Dan owns a copy of the Lawnmower Man RPG is still living rent-free in my head.

If theres one thing that always holds true its that people in tech and finance love to make very simple things as complicated as possible.

My friend wanted me to contribute $3,000 to buy a plot of virtual land. I bought a gaming computer and an Xbox controller instead.

I died at "Want some rye? 'Course you do!" That scene has never left me. So ridiculous, and yet iconic for the gaming era that made it.

"Don't shop less, shop [blank]" is so dystopian and boy do I hate that.

I'm amused that this video has had drastically more people viewing it concurrently than Decentraland itself.

“The metaverse is inevitable” that talking point has aged really poorly as of now lol

1:08:08 I can't say I've ever seen someone pretend to be this fascinated by a third-person camera