The Future Tense Industry

In 2022, I used to get calls from journalists asking, with great sincerity, what our lives would look like in the metaverse. How would we work, socialise, buy property, and fall in love once we had all moved there? The crypto questions followed the same pattern. How would governments collect taxes when tokens displaced national currencies? What would geopolitics look like once blockchain DAOs had dissolved the state?

Almost nobody called to ask whether any of this could or would happen, or how. Some CEO, VC, or portfolio manager had announced the future, and the questions began from there. The imagined future arrived inside the grammar of the question. “What happens when?” quietly replaced “By what conceivable mechanism?” We skipped over technical feasibility, economic demand, institutional adoption, and political consent, then began decorating the world on the other side.

It’s not 2022 anymore, and we seem to have collectively memoryholed the metaverse, along with the brief period when having an opinion about NFT property laws was part of being a serious person. Revisiting that episode helps us understand the different forms those collective psychotic breaks took, and why they made so much sense to the people caught up in them at the time.

There is nothing wrong with asking what would follow if a technology became widespread. The failure begins when the conditional disappears and preparation is mistaken for evidence. A lawyer can sensibly investigate virtual property rights without believing everyone will soon live inside a headset. The question is whether the scenario remains a possibility to examine or becomes a future everyone is professionally obliged to anticipate.

I call this techno-inevitabilism, the peculiar malaise of the professional managerial class in treating a proposed technological future as inevitable before establishing the causes that would bring it about. A company invents a noun. Investors attach a large number to it. Consultants draw an arrow pointing up and to the right. Soon the chattering class is discussing the social consequences of a product whose technical and commercial premises remain, shall we say, tenuous at best.

It is a comorbidity of tech psychosis, a phenomenon in which otherwise functional adults appear to completely lose contact with causality and reality when presented with a sufficiently fashionable technology. Side effects may include spontaneous white-paper production, hallucinations of trillion-dollar markets, and an uncontrollable urge to appoint oneself Global Head of the Future. Scepticism becomes a failure of imagination. Asking whether the machine works marks one out as a dreary reactionary who simply does not understand exponential progress.

But a sensible career move for each person can leave the whole crowd talking nonsense. Nobody needs to believe the whole story. A consultant needs a client who believes competitors believe it. An executive needs a strategy the board will recognise. A journalist needs a development an editor considers important. The resulting consensus can be much stronger than any participant’s private conviction.

A technology becomes historically important through a tedious sequence of causes. What can it actually do? Who benefits enough to pay for it? Who has the incentive and power to impose adoption? People need not want a product for it to spread. An employer can mandate it, a dominant platform can bundle it, and a buyer can capture benefits while passing the costs to users. A serious forecast has to explain how the thing gets built, who pays, and who can make everyone else use it.

Remove that sequence and any future becomes available. A headset becomes a civilisation. A token becomes a monetary system. The missing causal chain is replaced by adjectives such as inevitable, exponential, transformative, and disruptive. Repeated often enough, the adjectives become incantations.

The metaverse was an almost perfect specimen. Virtual reality had games, simulators, training applications, and enthusiasts willing to wear a warm brick on their faces. The grander proposition bundled virtual worlds, remote work, digital property, advertising, crypto, and several science-fiction novels into a noun, then presented the bundle as humanity’s next habitat.

In February 2022, Gartner forecast that a quarter of people would spend at least an hour each day in the metaverse by 2026, across work, shopping, education, socialising, and entertainment. Its definition covered a persistent shared virtual space accessible through different devices, including tablets. This was a much broader claim than predicting compulsory VR office attendance.

The World Economic Forum’s article repeated the forecast under the revealing headline “We could be spending an hour a day in the metaverse by 2026. But what will we be doing there?” The first sentence retained a conditional. The second was already arranging the itinerary. The article’s opening then described where a quarter of us would be working, studying, shopping, and socialising. A forecast had become the setting for the story.

Even before the forecast’s deadline, a precise adoption claim was travelling much faster than the account of why people or institutions would make it happen. Existing demand for games did not by itself establish demand for a shared environment spanning work, commerce, and social life. Nor did buying virtual land establish that other people would have reason to visit it. Yet the surrounding discourse was already furnishing this world with property law, workplace etiquette, fashion, and governance. The metaverse acquired zoning disputes before it acquired residents.

The literature from the period deserves to be preserved. Just read the titles. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy, and Navigating the Metaverse: A Guide to Limitless Possibilities in a Web 3.0 World. In hindsight they read as completely unhinged, artefacts of a collective fugue state that briefly acquired ISBNs.

Even major banks were opening metaverse lounges with little apparent reason for anyone to visit. Innovation departments had their own strain of the psychosis, in which a virtual presence counted as progress before anyone established what it was even for.

Once institutions commission strategies and appoint advisers, each response can make the original claim look more credible. The evidence that the metaverse would exist becomes the fact that serious people are preparing for it. Serious people prepare because other serious people have begun preparing. Circularity acquires a conference-circuit lineup and a travel budget. The consultant can point to the client’s interest, and the client can point to the consultant’s report. Neither has supplied independent evidence of demand.

Crypto produced the same confusion about institutional change. Journalists asked me what would happen when tokens replaced central banks, treating a distributed database entry and a sovereign monetary institution as competing versions of the same object. Issuing a token does not reproduce the institutions that make a monetary system function. Even a widely traded asset supplies no automatic replacement for monetary policy, emergency liquidity, or the legal machinery of credit.

Replacing a central bank would require an account of how states abandon monetary sovereignty, how taxes are assessed, how credit is created, how payments settle, and how liquidity crises are contained. A white paper describing token issuance and transfers leaves those institutional questions open, however high the token’s price climbs. Asking how Bitcoin would replace a central bank on that basis was like asking how a roulette wheel would replace the Treasury. Some hand-wavy connection to money was apparently all the explanation needed, even for institutions like the New York Times.

Technical prestige helped the substitution pass. Assessing the claim required understanding both the software and the institutions it supposedly superseded. In these discussions, the Venn diagram of people who understood technology and people who understood finance had a very small overlap, and the intersection looks precisely like a sphincter. A journalist could accurately describe the ledger and still leave the central premise untouched. An executive could commission a blockchain strategy without identifying which institutional function the blockchain would perform. Grammar performed the due diligence.

For a lot of investment bankers and finance professionals, the career ladder kept having its rungs sawed off just as they were about to reach them. Crypto offered an escape from another decade of going nowhere. You could cross the street and become Head of Digital Asset Strategy. You already knew how to assemble a pitch, manage a client, and project confidence about an industry you did not operate. Now those skills came with the prospect of executive titles, conference stages, token upside, and proximity to venture capital. Understanding whether the software could actually do what you were selling was a separate matter. You can see the appeal.

Crypto gave that frustration somewhere to go. It arbitraged professional disappointment. A move into a speculative industry could be narrated as an escape from institutional stagnation into the future of global finance. The new title supplied an immediate reward while the promised monetary revolution could remain comfortably in the future.

There was plenty of work in keeping all this going. A metaverse laboratory needs a mandate. A metaverse consultancy needs engagements. A conference needs speakers who can explain why the revolution is both unavoidable and in permanent need of another panel. The less the technology did, the more interpretation it required. A virtual office that nobody wanted to use could keep a team busy devising a metaverse engagement strategy for another year.

Ambiguity was an asset in this arrangement. A working implementation can be tested, its costs measured, and its limitations made embarrassingly specific. The next great technological age is a little harder to pin down. If a project disappoints, its advocates can argue that the institution was too early, the implementation too narrow, or the transformation still ahead. Each explanation may sometimes be true. Without agreed conditions for failure, however, the promise can survive every result.

Journalism has its own version of the incentive. A recognisable trend supplies a story, prominent sources, and a reason to publish now. Establishing that its premise is weak takes work and may leave an editor with less of a story. Investors can gain deal flow, consultants engagements, and executives mandates from the same proposition. These rewards arrive before the forecast can be judged. The whole thing can keep going as long as joining in is good for enough people’s careers.

A coherent discussion of technology begins with causal verbs. What acts on what? Through which institution? Under what incentive? At whose expense? What observation would falsify the claim? Those questions should precede the appointment of a Global Head of Whatever Comes Next.

Technology has transformed the world many times and will do so again. That history makes it easy to sell the next grand prediction, especially to people whose careers might benefit from believing it. Before long, an uncertain proposition becomes something everyone is professionally obliged to take seriously. The consulting fees, promotions, and conference invitations arrive long before anyone has to deliver the promised future. For a while, the whole thing can look like progress. But in the end, reality has this funny way of asserting itself.