Category: SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus and COVID-2

EDITORIAL: How Big Tech Layoffs, the Deepening Crypto Winter, and Global Chaos Will Impact the Metaverse

So (like many of you), have been following the news media these past seven days, and between the U.S. midterm elections, the jaw-dropping layoffs at both Meta and Twitter, and the collapse of major cryptocurrency exchange FTX, it’s been quite a week!

As I write this, I am listening to a Sept. 22nd, 2022 report written by Adam Fisher for clients of the investment firm Sequoia, titled Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too.

UPDATE 3:08 p.m.: Sequoia has just removed Adam’s report from its website but, as always, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has you covered! WARNING: I listened to all one-and-a-half hours of the audio version of this article, and I want that time back! The level of hubris and cringe in this article is off the charts!

Given what’s happened in the past 48 hours, this report has aged like milk—badly. I had bookmarked it yesterday, and when I went to revisit the page today, I noticed that it had been updated:

UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.

Of course, the best front-row seat to the three-ring circus that is crypto is the r/Buttcoin cryptosnark community over at Reddit, and let me tell you, there has been no shortage of things to talk about. Many there predict that (much like the unraveling of the LUNA cryptocurrency “unraveling “stablecoin” on May 7th, 2022, which in turn led to the failures of cryptofirms like Celsius and Voyager) there will be a significant impact to the sudden FTX implosion (Sequoia announced that they have written down their investment in FTX to zero). Even in the crazy world of crypto, the speed with which Sam Bankman-Fried has fallen off his pedestal and destroyed his reputation and his companies (not to mention his investors’ money) is bonkers. But that’s not the only big news these past seven days.

First: The crypto crash is looking more and more like a sustained crypto nuclear winter. Blockchain is now tainted, perhaps irredeemably so, and blockchain-based metaverses are tainted by association. What this means is that the already-established, relatively stable platforms (Decentraland, Voxels, Somnium Space, and a handful of others) are going to have a very difficult time selling NFT-based land, avatar accessories, etc., as well as encouraging new users to come and set up shop. We’re rapidly reaching the point that the general, non-tech public will run the other way when crypto, blockchain, or NFTs are mentioned, given the unending litany of bad news.

People and companies who invested in these platforms at the height of the hype cycle may have to make some hard choices between holding on (perhaps forever) in hopes of seeing a profit, or being forced by circumstances to sell at a loss, because they desperately need to get out of the market. (Perhaps they worked at Meta or Twitter or some other company downsizing during this increasingly brutal recession?). In my opinion, this will keep prices for NFT properties at or near rock-bottom for the foreseeable future, and it will impact these metaverse firms and their future development plans.

But, as bad as that is, the news is even worse for those blockchain-based metaverse projects which have not yet launched. In my opinion, many of these projects are doomed to fail, taking their investors’ money along with it. Some were designed to be rugpulls from the very beginning, hoping to cash in on the ignorant, while others were just weirdly-hatched and poorly-executed but honest proposals (e.g. Cirque de Soleil’s Hanai World project, which I am told has now folded).

Second: Meta is wounded, having lost the public’s trust and investors’ confidence, and facing increasing blowback for its decision to heavily invest in the metaverse and virtual reality. Meta’s missteps are negatively affecting the general public’s impression of the “metaverse”.

Say the word “metaverse” to your average man (or woman) on the street and you probably would get one of the following two responses:

  1. The “metaverse” is Meta/Facebook’s Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms only; or
  2. The “metaverse” consists of the blockchain/crypto/NFT-based platforms only, e.g. Decentraland, Voxels, Somnium Space, The Sandbox, etc.

I’ve already dealt with the blockchain-based metaverses above; now let’s turn to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg and his team at Meta have spent a fair deal of time and money to promote Meta’s visions of the “metaverse”. Mark doesn’t want you to spare a thought for the countless other metaverse platforms which have been in development for years, and in some cases like Second Life, decades. He wants you to focus on Meta. Meta, people! Pay no attention to those other people!!! (Yeah, I know; it’s going about as well as you can expect, given people’s lack of trust in Mark or his company.)

Things have not been going especially well for Meta at the moment, with numerous new media reporting on its financial turmoil, as Mark Zuckerberg invests billions of dollars into research and development to build his vision of the metaverse. Venture capitalist Nathan Benaich recently tweeted (please note that Meta Reality Labs is the R&D arm of Meta working on VR/AR/MR/XR projects.):

In fact, things have been going so badly for Meta lately that many metaverse pundits (myself included) have begun to worry that it is tainting the general public’s perception of the “metaverse”, perhaps unfairly so. Tony Vitillo (a.k.a. SkarredGhost), an Italian man whose blog, The Ghost Howls, covers the VR/AR/MR/XR industry and the metaverse, wrote a recent editorial which I think needs to be read. He echoes what I and other metaverse pundits have noticed for quite some time now: the general public’s mood on the metaverse has soured quickly.

Tony Vitello points out something that many of us writing about the metaverse have noticed for quite some time now: the concept of the metaverse is developing a bad reputation

In an article titled Meta bad, metaverse bad, Tony writes:

After my usual Sunday tour of Twitter and LinkedIn feeds to gather news for my weekly newsletter, I feel the need of writing a rant about a trend I’m seeing online after the Meta Connect about Meta and its involvement in the “metaverse” field.

Many journalists of important tech magazines (TechCrunch, Business Insider, etc…) are all playing a common sport now: targeting Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. They are all writing posts about how Meta has failed, the metaverse has failed, the Meta Quest Pro failed, and also Zuck has failed. Everything is a huge failure. I admit that this news has caught me by surprise, because I have many projects in XR that are doing pretty well, and actually this has been one of the best moments to be in the ecosystem for me. I’m sorry that I hadn’t received the memo that everything failed: I’ll stop doing what I’m doing now and immediately go looking for a job to make fries at McDonald’s.

Look, I get it. Bad news draws eyeballs and clicks, and most people don’t like or trust Mark Zuckerberg or his Meta/Facebook empire. So the negative press pile-on in the wake of the Meta Connect 2022 event was not unexpected. Here’s an example of the recent coverage, by Paul Tassi of Forbes:

Meta shocked the financial world this Thursday by posting a 52% profit decline, its second straight quarterly decline, and a revenue decline of 4% year-over-year. This decimated their stock so badly with a 24.5% drop that it caused financial analyst Jim Cramer to break down crying and apologize on air for having faith in the company.

A main culprit of Meta’s decline is the thing it was named after, Mark Zuckerberg’s relentless pursuit of the metaverse through the company’s Reality Labs division, which has lost $9.4 billion this year so far, and there are warnings that bigger and broader losses are to come in 2023.

And, of course, the news yesterday that Meta was laying off over 11,000 employees has not helped matters in the slightest. It’s not yet known how these massive layoffs will affect Meta’s work in virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few projects in that area are trimmed. Many in the financial community are attacking Mark Zuckerberg and his desire to repivot Meta to be a metaverse company, and the negative blowback will also impact other companies working in this space. I’ve written more about this on my blog in this August 2022 editorial, How the Crypto Crash—and Meta’s Missteps—Are Souring the General Public on the Metaverse, so rather than repeat myself, I will direct you there if you want to learn more of my thoughts on the matter. On to the next point!

Third: Elon Musk is killing Twitter, and its death throes, plus Meta’s continued struggles, will lead to many people radically rethinking their use of social media, and leaving Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Image source: r/EnoughMuskSPam subreddit on Reddit

If you haven’t got the memo yet, surveillance capitalism and algorithmically-driven echo chambers/walled gardens are about as popular as crypto nowadays. Despite daily reassurances from the Chief Twit himself, the MIT Technology Review reports that Twitter may have already lost one million users, many of whom have moved to Mastodon and other federated services, beyond the control of capricious billionaires. And, while not in dire straits like Twitter, Meta’s social media platforms are similarly bleeding users, as the younger generations abandon Facebook and Instagram for TikTok (which, of course, has its own user data privacy and surveillance capitalism issues, not to mention a parent company now marketing a standalone VR headset to compete with Meta, but that is an issue for a different editorial).

How will this affect the metaverse? Well, for starters, it’s going to be a lot harder for metaverse-building companies to get attention using traditional social media during this time of turmoil and upheaval, which is their primary form of advertising. For example, Mastodon is notoriously resistant to influencer culture and corporate shilling, even going so far as to ban entire instances/servers to avoid being tainted by the filthy lucre of capitalism. (For example, the overly-protective but proactive moderator of the well-established scholar.social Mastodon instance/server just banned the new journa.host instance, because of problems the latter has had in setting up their server, which means that journalists who set up accounts on journa.host are barred from seeing what is going on over at the scholar.social server. These people, many of whom were burned by older forms of social media, are not playing around!)

Another example of the impact: I have unfollowed all the people I used to follow on Twitter, deleted almost all of my tweets, and deactivated my account, in direct reaction to the callous, heartless way that Elon Musk handled his layoffs, gutting half the Twitter staff (I wrote about it in an update at the end of my previous blogpost). This means that I deliberately cut off one venue by which I leaned about news and events taking place in the VR/AR/MR/XR and the metaverse. However, I am still a member of almost 100 different Discord servers, including the 715-member RyanSchultz.com Discord, and my connections there keep me just as well-informed, without having to take part in Facebook or Twitter! I am also quite active on Reddit, although lately most of that time has been spent lollygagging in r/Buttcoin! 😜

Finally, we are entering a severe global recession, with both mass layoffs (see above) and staffing shortages, combined with skyrocketing inflation, which means that we are going to continue to see chaos, disorder, and upheaval all around the world. The war in Ukraine is still upending global supply chains, and China’s continuing strict COVID lockdowns are still impacting product manufacturing. Oh, and did I mention that we need to act now to put the brakes on global climate change before many parts of the world become inhospitable and even uninhabitable? If you’re not depressed, then you haven’t been paying attention!*

Fasten your seatbelts, kids; I have a feeling it’s going to be a bumpy ride, and not just one bumpy night! While chaos can be liberating for some people, it is anxiety-inducing for many others (including myself). We are also still operating under an ongoing pandemic that is absolutely NOT over (for example, my best friend’s 92-year-old mother passed away from COVID-19 in hospital a couple of weeks ago). I am, still, barely leaving my apartment, and my university still has an indoor facemask mandate in place. (Good thing my passionate hobby is virtual reality and the metaverse! Avatars can’t catch the virus. 😉 )

In summary, this global chaos (plus all the other points I made above) will impact the people and companies building the metaverse, as well as the people using it! There will be new challenges, but also new opportunities. Expect the unexpected!

* If you are struggling with your mental health, at the start of the pandemic I pulled together a list of helpful resources, which you can find here. It’s a little out-of-date, but most of the links should still work. Remember, help is out there if you need it!

Pandemic Diary, December 15th, 2021: Six Hundred and Forty Days Later

On March 16th, 2020, I began working from home for my full-time paying job as a science librarian at the University of Manitoba. A week later, my library colleagues were all sent home to work and the entire campus was shut down during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

Manitoba was lucky to have been spared the brunt of that first brutal and frightening wave; we were unfortunately not nearly so lucky on successive waves. At one time, in May 2021, Manitoba had the worst outbreak in all of North America (Canada, U.S.A., and Mexico), and had to airlift patients to neighbouring provinces and states as our hospital ICUs were overwhelmed.

The New York Times, May 27th, 2021

Today, December 15th , 2021, a full 640 days after I first started working at home, is officially my first day back on campus, the beginning of what is planned to be my permanent return to the office.

Note that I did come into my office on a few Mondays over the summer and autumn of 2021, but I am now expected to show up in person every day rather than work from home. I am the last of the librarians in my library to return to full-time work in the office; our returns have been staggered over the past few months. I asked to be the last librarian to return, because I have several underlying health conditions (obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and asthma) that put me at risk of a severe case of COVID-19 if I were to become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Ever since news broke about the Omicron variant in southern Africa, I have been scouring the daily headlines, desperate to glean what updates the doctors and scientists could provide. The news is not encouraging. It would appear that cases of people infected by the highly-transmissible Omicron variant are doubling every two to three days in various countries, such as the U.K.

Even more worrisome, fully-vaccinated people are becoming infected; a triple-vaccinated Israeli cardiologist got Omicron at a British conference, and passed it on to another triple-vaccinated doctor! Even though most of the cases reported to date have been relatively mild, the fact that so many people are getting sick means an additional strain on an already overburdened healthcare system.

I will be receiving my third booster COVID vaccination at my local pharmacy next Monday, and this science librarian is profoundly grateful for the researchers whose pioneering work on mRNA vaccine technology made this possible. TIME magazine has named four of those vaccine scientists as its Heroes of the Year for 2021 (and quite frankly, they should have been named People of the Year instead of Elon Musk!).

Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman

While my university has made plans for a full return to normal, on-campus classes and other activities starting in January 2022, I believe that COVID still has the possibility of upending those carefully-laid plans! Already I am reading news reports of Canadian and American university campuses with outbreaks (for example, over nine hundred cases at Cornell University), leading in some cases for in-person final exams to be abruptly cancelled, and switched to an online, virtual format. Yesterday, I tweeted:

So I am feeling particularly anxious. Between the recently-concluded faculty strike (which lasted a full five weeks and broke the record for the longest strike in the history of the University of Manitoba), and this rising new wave of the pandemic, I must confess that I am utterly exhausted. Stretched to the limit. Burned out.

Thankfully, my Christmas holidays start next Monday—the same day I get my third booster shot—and I am looking forward to two weeks of vacation. I still plan to continue my December vacation from blogging, even though all the metaverse news and announcements are coming fast and furious! Now more than ever, there is no shortage of things to write about. But I need to take a break.

Stay safe and stay healthy in these challenging and stressful times!

Get vaccinated—and if you are fully vaccinated, get your booster shot as soon as you are able!
(Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash)

Pandemic Diary: May 21st, 2020

Well, according to the calendar, I am now in day 67 of my self-imposed isolation in my apartment, working from home for my employer, the University of Manitoba Libraries. I have not set foot in a supermarket since March 16th, and I have not set foot in a pharmacy since January 30th, choosing instead to have my groceries and prescription medications delivered when I come close to running out. Aside from a few short trips to my office at the university to pick up some papers, my office chair, my Oculus Rift VR headset (as an emergency backup), and my keyboard and wireless mouse (also as backups), I have stayed at home and helped flatten the curve.

I consider myself fortunate to live in a province (Manitoba) where, to date, we have only had 290 cases of COVID-19 so far, in sharp contrast to the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, and the sea of red that is the United States:

We here in Manitoba have truly benefited from the fact that we live in a relatively geographically isolated area of North America, while the coronavirus pandemic hit other parts of the world first, giving our provincial and city governments valuable time to prepare and implement strict social distancing restrictions. While Canada’s chief public health officer has admitted that they should have closed the borders sooner, Canada is in a much better position overall than many other countries, particularly the United States, Russia, and Brazil, which have seen a surge in cases due to haphazard or even non-existent government responses to the crisis.

I have already explained, via this blog, that I have several underlying health conditions at the age of 56: I am significantly overweight, and I have hypertension, type II diabetes, and asthma. All four conditions (which, of course, are interrelated) put me at much higher risk for a severe, possibly even fatal, case of COVID-19 if I should become infected with this novel coronavirus. And it means that I will probably be among the last group of University of Manitoba Libraries employees to return to the campus. I could be in self-imposed lockdown until there is a vaccine.

I have made peace with this fact, and I have now settled into a kind of routine in working from home, becoming more comfortable with virtual staff meetings held in Webex and Microsoft Teams (our university seems to have largely abandoned its use of Zoom).

The librarians of the Sciences and Technology Library are currently hard at work developing a for-credit university course in information literacy for undergraduate science students, which is to start in September 2020. The University of Manitoba has announced that all its classes in the fall term will be taught remotely, and the head of our libraries system has told us that she does not expect us to return to our physical library offices before January of 2021. The science librarians had been originally planning to deliver our information literacy course in-person and in the classroom, but we are now pivoting to package and deliver the course remotely using Webex.

As part of my little one-man crusade to destigmatize mental illness, I have been honest and up-front with my blog readers about my own struggles with depression and anxiety during the pandemic. In addition to taking antidepressant and anti-anxiety prescription medication, I also have biweekly sessions via telephone with my psychiatrist. On the whole, while I still have some bad days, I am doing pretty well.

You might be interested to learn that, in addition to the above-mentioned supports, I have also entered into a peer mentor/support relationship with a friend of a trusted friend, who has experience as a peer counselor in a healthcare setting and has worked as a volunteer at a telephone crisis hotline in the past. We actually meet up every couple of weeks or so in my Linden Home in Second Life!

I log in as my avatar, she logs in as her avatar, and we have a conversation using voice chat. This is an opportunity to get things off my chest and gain another person’s perspective on my mental health issues, and where I can even talk how I sometimes use Second Life to cope with my self-isolation, without having to provide the kind of contextual, background explanation I would need to make to a real-world counselor! I can also ping her via Discord anytime I feel I need to vent in a safe, supported space.

This person is currently considering setting up a peer listening/support service in Second Life, and I am a sort of guinea pig for her, a test to see how well that would work. She’s also pretty new to Second Life, still working her way up the steep learning curve and getting her bearings, and I have shared many of the things I have learned from my 14 years of experience in SL with her—like the concepts of alts, furries, Gorean role-play, and the absolutely critical importance of ankle lock 😉 .

So, how are you holding up during the pandemic? Feel free to join the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, where we have a fairly active #coronavirus-chat channel, or just leave a comment to this blogpost. I’d love to know how you are doing!

UPDATED! Coronavirus Pandemic: What You Are Feeling Is Grief (And What You Are Seeing Is Plagiarism)

I make no secret of the fact that I have been struggling emotionally during the coronavirus pandemic, which is why I found the following five-minute YouTube video to be comforting. Psychologist Dr. Sarb Johal tweeted it with the following comment:

We feel the world has changed, and it has. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. Here’s what’s going on and what you can do.

Now, this is not something that I haven’t already heard from my psychiatrist and other people. But there’s just something about the way Dr. Johal puts it.

If, like me, you are struggling, you need to set aside five minutes and watch this:

Thank you, Dr. Sarb Johal! I thought the least I could so is repost this video, since at the moment it has a criminally low 44 views! So get out there and share this. Thanks!

UPDATE 10:45 p.m.: One of my regular blog readers, Brinlea, just shared with me the following article from the Harvard Business Review: That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, an interview with renowned grief expert David Kessler (thanks, Brinlea!).

Hmmm, this article was written March 23rd, over three weeks ago, and Dr. Johal posted his YouTube video just six hours ago. And the HBR article is pretty much the exact script of what Dr. Johal said in his YouTube video, right down to the examples used. Even the text of Dr. Johal’s tweet (which I quoted up top) is lifted verbatim from the article.

Hmmm… I think at the very least, the good doctor should have credited where he got his information from. Read the Harvard Business Review article and then watch Dr. Johal’s video and you’ll see what I mean. And I wouldn’t even have known about it if it weren’t for Brinlea.

So I will take back my earlier praise. This is still useful information, engagingly imparted, but this is also plagiarism. Dr. Johal basically lifted, almost verbatim, what David Kessler said in his interview with the Harvard Business Review. As a librarian who teaches proper citation style to university students, this is a major no-no.

Not impressed. If you’re going to steal another person’s words, then have the guts to cite your sources. (Do not fuck with the librarians, we will catch you out!)

And if you are looking for some properly cited sources of information about mental health during the pandemic, here is a blogpost I keep updated—to which I have now added two excellent articles from the Harvard Business Review.