New Week Same Humans #2
Avatars assemble in Facebook's virtual paradise. London says goodbye to the Lunchtime Economy. Elon Musk enhances a pig called Gertrude.
Welcome to the Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 12,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮
💡 This week’s Sunday essay was on how the pandemic has laid the ground for a reassertion of worker power. Go here to read Work is Dead, Long Live Work! 💡
This week: the metaverse chronicles continue, as Facebook makes an epic play to own the future with Horizon.
Also, reckoning with the shifting role of cities in our lives. What Amazon’s new mood tracking device has in common with cloud kitchen giant Rebel Foods, and Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Also featuring the $8,000 houseplant, people who really like airline food, and a quick trip back to the year 2000.
Let’s do this.
👾 Facebook fires up the metaverse wars
Facebook opened their great experiment in social VR, Horizon, to public beta. Users can hang out in fantastical VR environments, make virtual noodles, shoot virtual aliens, and build new worlds of their own.
Horizon is available on Facebook’s Oculus VR platforms, and for now the beta is invite only. But it’s pretty clear the Zuck hopes that soon billions of us will be customising our avatars and diving in.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden launched election yard signs inside the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And UK electronic pop duo Disclosure created a Minecraft world to accompany the launch of their new album Energy.
Yes, NWSH is obsessed with the metaverse. But you should be, too:
⚡ NWSH Take: In a socially distanced world, social VR becomes a lot more compelling. But FB’s ambitions here are limitless. // FB knows the metaverse is the next big shift. The Biden and Disclosure campaigns are further signals that virtual worlds are becoming real places. // Horizon is FB’s play to own the default virtual space in which billions live an alternate life. But Snapchat and Fortnite are going nowhere in this fight. Snapchat’s vision is for an AR metaverse that blends physical and digital. FB is betting on VR. // Huge questions are looming. The emergence of the metaverse will take questions about power, privacy, and bad actors to a whole new place. One that could make 2020’s bots and deepfakes look quaint by comparison. // You should be planning your strategy now. What does it mean for your offering? What kind of presence should you have in the metaverse?
🏙️ Cities swallow the end of the lunchtime economy
Pinterest announced it would pay an $89.5 million fine to cancel its lease on a huge new San Francisco office. The company says it is shifting permanently to remote work.
In the UK coffee chain Pret a Manger said it would cut 3,000 jobs. Pret was a vastly popular lunch choice with London’s pre-pandemic army of city centre knowledge workers; there are more branches on the capital’s Borough High Street than there are in Wales, according to the Financial Times. But with most Londoners yet to return to the office, the once-booming Lunchtime Economy is a deadzone.
Meanwhile, a new class of WFH knowledge workers is experiencing growing pains. Data from market research company Ipsos gave a fascinating insight into their concerns.
⚡ NWSH Take: Cities are far from done. But we can’t pretend that their role in our lives and economies isn’t undergoing a shift. // Long commutes scarred health, social and family time for millions; they’re not coming back to the office full time. For those who depended on office workers for custom, the pain will be real. // Medium-term this is a chance to diversify the use of real estate in city centres; what new uses will we (or you?) find for empty office blocks? It’s also a chance to rebalance economies, as prosperous knowledge workers buy lunch and handle their dry cleaning in their local neighbourhoods. // Looking for the opportunities within this shift? See the table above! An army of WFH knowledge workers need local workspaces, new ways to connect with relevant professionals and mentors, and local services to facilitate work-life balance.
🤖 All watched over by machines of loving grace
Cloud Kitchen giant Rebel Foods – who bill themselves as ‘the world’s largest internet restaurant company’ – said they use data and machine learning to forecast customer demand with over 90% accuracy. The company’s 3,000 restaurants worldwide fulfil 1 million orders every month.
Speaking of data, Amazon announced Halo: a wristband fitness tracker that constantly listens to what wearers say in order to assess their mood. Halo will also ask for regular ‘body selfies’.
And speaking of fitness trackers, Elon Musk showcased a pig called Gertrude with ‘a fitbit in her skull.’ The demo was an update on Musk’s Neuralink project, which aims to create technology that will link human brains direct to the internet.
⚡ NWSH Take: Woah there, Gertrude. These stories may appear unconnected, by each is a testimony to a fundamental 21st-century truth: Data is Remaking Capitalism. // Rebel Foods is putting data to work to remake the restaurant industry; the company raised $125 million from Gojek and others in 2019. // Amazon are building a data-fuelled panopticon that aims to harvest the preferences, behaviours, desires, and now real-time mood of billions of customers in order to forever serve us everything we don’t even know we want yet. // We should probably think through some pretty deep questions about privacy, ownership and human identify before we connect our brains to the internet. But don’t be alarmed: some academics think Musk’s progress is overhyped.
🗓️ Also this week
🌱 A houseplant with four leaves sold for NZ$8,000. The pandemic has fuelled a boom in houseplant prices.
📱 Pokémon Go creators Niantic are teaming up with 5G carriers around the world to bring rich AR experiences to millions of users. The company has long said 5G is the inflection point that will launch AR as the next computing platform.
✈️ Airlines are selling inflight meals to people who are nostalgic for the days of frequent air travel. Next up: a subscription service that includes tiny seat and the constant sound of a crying baby.
🧐 Microsoft announced the launch of Video Authenticator, a new tool intended to help identify deepfakes.
📈 Zoom stock climbed 25% on the back of its Q2 earnings report. The customer base has grew by 458% since this time last year.
🎵 Streaming music service Napster sold to MelodyVR for $70 million. Yes, Napster. Also, I’ve overslept and missed all my lectures, and now my pager’s going off.
🦾 Japanese convenience store FamilyMart are trialling remote-controlled store assistant robots. This could add a whole new dimension to the work from home revolution.
🏢 Rapper Akon is moving ahead with plans to build the futuristic $6 billion Akon City in Senegal. The city will run on solar power, and Akon’s own AKoin cryptocurrency.
🔭 Look out for
🍿 Disney premiere their $200 million action-adventure epic Mulan on Disney+ this Friday 4 September. The film is widely seen as Disney’s play for the China; the Chinese box office has risen 35-fold to $9.7 billion across the last 15 years, and is set to become the world’s largest.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋♀️ Global population: 7,809,141,148 and counting
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7667805200
🗓️ 2020 progress bar: 67% complete
📖 On this day: On 2 September 1666 the Great Fire of London broke out, destroying much of the medieval inner city.
Thanks for reading this Wednesday update from New World Same Humans!
Elon Musk wants to build an Internet of Brains. In the meantime, we’re bringing a network of minds together in an altogether different way. NWSH has grown to a community of 12,000+ curious people on a mission to build a better shared future. And there’s so much more to come.
There’s one thing you can do to help: link in more people!
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Your membership of this community means a lot. I’ll be back on Sunday; until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.
lets aim at working on NWSH metaversa co-working space to share thoughts on anthropology, technology!
Thanks David - I really enjoy your weekly comments and appreciate your time in putting it together and sharing it with us all. :)