> Multiply this kind of channel x1000: Mario, Transformers, Marvel’s superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon — all of these and countless more will exist as reality channels that you can turn on, transforming your daily routine into something a bit more magical, intriguing, exciting — and most of all, a little more fun. Importantly, all of these experiences will be shared by countless other people, so that the adventure is a catalyst for spending time together and deepening social relationships.
But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience.
When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?"
The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it.
The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.