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I want to talk about being nice to the people stomping all over my space right now.
Blockchain and NFT hype has brought a lot of bad actors to the metaverse. The hype has also grabbed people who are genuinely interested in the technology and culture of the metaverse, but they are being distracted by the promise of money or clout. Thankfully, a lot of the work being done is actually in the right direction, but I’m afraid people are going to lose steam once they realize the hype has ended.
The stages of grief are real and apply to all kinds of things, including finding out something you were really excited for is a scam.
In the coming weeks, the current citizens of the metaverse will need to do their best to not point, laugh, and I-told-you-so at the bulk of these NFT idiots. Eventually they will realize they don’t need blockchain to do all the neat things they’re putting together and will slowly phase it out of their projects. In order to keep some of these new people interested, we’re going to have to act like nothing happened.
The majority of the space is cisgender, white men. It is known they generally have a problem taking criticism, especially when they are demonstrably wrong and pressured to admit it, and ‘sea lions’ are an obstacle to productive discourse. Pushing the matter might cause a otherwise welcomed citizen to walk away out of pride. A scorned voice is louder than others and could keep others on the fence from checking it out if we’re not careful.
I would personally love to shove it in their faces - writing this post is kinda’ doing that, I guess - but the metaverse has room for everyone. Sure, these fools have shuffled a billion more dollars into the pockets of the 1%, but now everyone knows the metaverse exists! Let’s grit our teeth, put on a happy face, and do our best to welcome wayward NFT bros. We can tease them about this next year.