Tag: Editorial

Metafluencers, Metapreneurs, Metaclans and Metahuts: A First Look at Metafluence

Yes, you too, from the comfort of your bedroom, in your sweats and slippers, can be a METAFLUENCER! 🙄 (image source: CoinTelegraph)

The metaverse news is falling fast and furious lately, but first…another one of Auntie Ryan’s patented snarky, bitchy, and sarcastic editorial blogposts! (Priorities, people!)

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, I have gone down some pretty weird and obscure rabbit-holes lately. Among them, I have developed a recent fascination with toxic influencer culture: those men and women who become popular on social media, but sooner or later cause controversies, scandals, and scams, in some cases incinerating their “influencer” status and losing millions of followers.

(If you’re interested in this topic, I can recommend two YouTube channels to watch: Smokey Glow and Cruel World Happy Mind, both of which provide excellent summaries and commentary on what’s going down in the world of problematic influencers. They’re my current guilty pleasure!)

Well, I guess it was time that somebody linked the words “influencer” and “metaverse” to create that hybrid monster: the metafluencer!

My target today is a truly cringeworthy article from CoinTelegraph, first brought to my attention on Twitter by Tony Vitillo (a.k.a. SkarredGhost), an Italian man whose blog, The Ghost Howls, often has virtual reality product reviews and weekly news round-ups about the VR/AR/MR/XR industry and the metaverse. Here’s the tweet:

Now, this is not the first time I have taken CoinTelegraph to task for their reporting (here’s the first time, if you’re interested, complete with a mind-bogglingly tone-deaf illustration). But this time, they’ve truly outdone themselves!

The article starts off reasonably enough:

As it is currently positioned, the metaverse will hold the potential to give creators a whole new aspect of interaction and communication as they gain new opportunities to work with other creators and reach new audiences. For creators, the question now becomes not if they will shift to the metaverse, but when will they do so. After all, nobody wants to be the business still figuring out Instagram Reels while the world moves on to the metaverse.

But it turns out that Metafluence is actually the name of a proposed metaverse platform for influencers! Check this part out:

A city where influencers rule

The Metafluence platform is currently being incubated by the venture capital firm specializing in blockchain technology, Master Ventures. This engagement is set to continue over the next two years and is among a number of other partnerships the team has under their belt.

With a shared goal, the name Metafluence will come to represent the name of a single city in the metaverse, one that social media influencers will control. The city itself will comprise influencer homes, also known as Metahuts, which can be customized based on the influencers’ choice. Custom spaces will provide an added opportunity for influencers to better monetize their audience and continue engaging closer with brands.

Additionally, these huts can act as a storefront for influencers to share their digital artwork and other NFTs, providing new monetization and engagement opportunities. Influencers may also choose to come together in Metaclans as they collaborate for maximized reach and other strategic collaborations or participate in public and private virtual events.

Metafluence? Metaclans? METAHUTS?!?? Excuse me while I metavomit… 🤮

And, lo and behold, like so many blockchain-based metaverse projects that are essentially just a white paper at this point, there’s a Metafluence website!

WE ARE CREATING THE FIRST METAPRENEURS

We are on a mission to convert Social Media Influencers into Metaverse entrepreneurs through our influence-to-earn platform by enhancing their relations with audiences and brands. Our solutions for influencers automatically address advertiser and audience challenges, enabling brands to organically grow and thrive in web 3.0.

Metapreneurs? Yet another Frankenstein meta-buzzword??!? Oy gevalt!

There’s also the requisite Discord and Telegram channels (oh, why is Telegram so popular for these kinds of blockchain/crypto projects?). Oh, yes, I forgot to mention: there’s also a cryptocurrency called $METO, along with a bunch of promised future features (including decor and upgrades for your Metahut!):

Some potential use cases for the $METO cryptocurrency

O.K., I am officially metaover this metaproject with all its unnecessary metabuzzwords, jumping on the metabandwagon. I’m not even going to bother including it in my list of social VR and virtual worlds because (as far as I can tell) it’s essentially vapourware at this point in its existence. Meh. If they actually do launch something, maybe I’ll circle back and write about it more then. Until then, I will safely watch from the sidelines.

This project reminds me of nothing so much as the truly disastrous Staramba Spaces/MATERIA.ONE project, which at the time had brought aboard celebrity influencers like Paris Hilton and Hulk Hogan (you can read all my blogposts about that particular fiasco here). The people who invested in MATERIA.ONE never got anything back from their investments, so this is time for me to once again issue my standard warning for such projects:

Please, for the love of God, do EVERY. SINGLE. SCRAP. of your research before investing a penny in any blockchain/cryptocurrency/NFT project! Don’t be swayed by a white paper full of statistics, projections and promises, a Discord or Telegram full of cryptocurrency bros, and a slick-looking website! You will need to do YOUR OWN due diligence. Caveat emptor!

Thank you to Tony Vitillo for the heads up!

Pandemic Diary, January 2nd, 2022: A Playlist of Uplifting Music for Pandemic Times

My new playlist for Omicron times

It is now officially 658 days since March 16th, 2020, when I began working from home for my full-time paying job as a science librarian at the University of Manitoba.

Suffering from a wicked case of insomnia, I finally got out of bed around 2:00 a.m. and started working on a playlist of music, using a previous playlist I had created to get me through a five-week strike at my university as my starting point.

I just finished, and I have been listening to these tunes on loop all morning and afternoon, and I am feeling immeasurably better! These are songs about finding strength in the face of adversity, hope, resilience, never giving up, etc. I now share them with you in hopes that they will help you get through this pandemic.

I named this playlist after two of the songs on it: Invincible (by Kelly Clarkson) and Overcomer (an absolute BANGER of a Christian song by Mandisa, with an inspiring video; see below). Yes, I have included a few songs by contemporary Christian artists, which I still listen to even though I now consider myself an atheist (or perhaps agnostic); I hope you don’t mind! You can always skip them if it offends you. 😉

Invincible, by Kelly Clarkson
Overcomer, by Mandisa

Stay safe, and stay healthy in these unprecedented times!

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)

Editorial: Metaverse Madness Is Truly Upon Us (Caveat Emptor!)

It is wintertime here in Winnipeg, and in addition to the coronavirus pandemic (now in its 21st month), a strike by my union (now in its fourth week), and a stretch of some bitterly cold November winter weather, I have been fighting a nasty cold. (I know it is a cold and not COVID-19 because of my runny nose, itchy and watery eyes, and sinus congestion, plus I cannot stop sneezing.)

I am NOT a happy camper (Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash)

All in all, I am in a miserable, foul and cranky mood today. So I figure it’s the perfect time for me to write one of my patented snarky editorials. My target this fine and frosty day is the metaverse.

Not all of the metaverse, mind you. I have little to no problem with the actual metaverse platforms that are already out there and operating (and more power to you; you know who you are!). And I have no issue with the bulk of these social VR platforms and virtual worlds which have thus far resisted the siren call of the blockchain*. Yes, I am even willing to forgive Cathy Hackl for having the sheer audacity to rebrand herself the Godmother of the Metaverse on Twitter:

Godmother of the metaverse? Philip Rosedale and Adam Frisby would like a word 😉 but I must admit that this is a bold, nervy, and frankly savvy move. Go get that consulting coin, Cathy!

But what I do have a serious problem with, and what I want to focus on today, is the hothouse atmosphere created by the collision of the existing crypto/NFT/blockchain hype with the newer-but-no-less-hyperbolic metaverse hype triggered by Facebook’s recent rebranding.

This is getting completely out of hand, people

I have been writing this blog for four and half years now, and I have seen a lot of sketchy stuff during that time, but I have never witnessed as much absolute, unadulterated, utter bullshit out there as I am seeing and hearing right now. The number of schemes, scams, and outright cons out there, seeking to profit off of gullible investors who have not done their due diligence, is frightening. The grifters are out in full force!

I am a member of various Discord servers relating to blockchain-based virtual world projects, such as Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space (all of which, I hasten to add, I have little to no issue with, since they are all actual, working products which you can visit today). Because of that, I am inundated with DMs from people wanting to sell me on the latest and greatest get-rich-quick NFT scheme. Here are examples of two messages which I deleted (and reported as spam) just this morning:

Last night, I went and visited a couple of metaverse communities on Reddit (namely, r/metaverse and r/Metaverse_Blockchain), and I was staggered by all the johnny-come-latelies who are piling on, shilling for this or that pet project. Almost all of them involved cryptocurrency, NFTs, or the blockchain in some way or another. Here’s a couple of sample videos to give you a flavour of the overall feeding frenzy:

You get all that jargon? There will be a quiz later… 😉 Here’s another example:

My eyes rolled so far back in my head that I could see myself think! What’s worse to me, though, is the number of cryptonewbies who are asking questions and seeking advice on where to invest in these Reddit communities. Lambs to the slaughter!

These past few days, I have also spent many hours hanging out in several metaverse-related discussion rooms on the social audio app Clubhouse (or, to put it another way, rooms with “metaverse” in their title), where various people were actively shilling for any number of sketchy, dubious, and frankly harebrained schemes, seeking to part the unwary and the ignorant from their hard-earned money. No, I am not naming the names of any guilty parties in this particular blogpost, but I listen, I worry at the amount of misinformation and disinformation circulating out there, and I shake my head.**

I fear that we are going to see a LOT of people lose a LOT of money on these projects. Just because a project name-drops terms like “blockchain” and “crypto” and “NFTs” and now the latest buzzword in the mix, “metaverse”; and/or the project has an active Discord or Telegram or Clubhouse rooms full of true believers and yes-men; and/or the project has a slick-looking website all ready to accept your crypto wallet credentials—NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE ANY SUBSTITUTE FOR YOU TO CAREFULLY DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH, AND YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE, BEFORE YOU INVEST A PENNY.

Do your research before you invest a penny (Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash)

And if you can’t do your own homework because you don’t know enough, then take the time to learn what you are doing before you spend any money on any scheme—no matter how wonderful it sounds. Ask someone you trust for their opinion. And then ask again, and again, and again, until you feel you know enough to make an informed decision. If you have any doubts, pull out! Steer clear of anyone who is using the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) to try and sell a project, or who appeals to your greed with rash promises of lofty returns on your investment.

For example, there are now about 600 people on the RyanSchultz.com Discord, with actual experience in dozens of social VR platforms and virtual worlds, who are my personal team of metaverse bullshit detectors! We learn from each other, we help each other, and we rely on each other to spot and avoid precarious schemes and outright scams.

I shouldn’t have to say any of this, people, but as I said earlier, I have NEVER seen so much bullshit out there as I do right now about the metaverse. So forewarned is forearmed.

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

*I will make an exception ONLY for those crypto/blockchain projects which already have an actual social VR/virtual world platform which you can currently visit, namely: NeosVR, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space.

**Note: I am not talking about the MetaWhat? The Metaverse Show rooms on Clubhouse, which I am often a part of, enjoy participating in, and which are not devoted to selling you on any particular projects.