Massive companies are betting everything on The Metaverse. As investors funnel money into crypto and Metaverse technology in the hope of making it the next big thing, there are a large number of critics. In the running, Russian tech founder Phil Libin.
Reported by Insider, the developer behind popular note-taking service Evernote and Mmhmm CEO has publicly criticised the trend. However, despite backing from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, Libin believes it won't take off.
Russian tech founder Phil Libin on The Metaverse
Speaking on the Eric Newcomer Podcast, Libin explained his skepticism towards the Metaverse hype. The Russian tech founder claimed that the push was “obvious bulls**t” and compared the situation to the Soviet Union.
As a child who grew up in Leningrad — now known as St. Petersburg — Libin was subject to Soviet propaganda. As the country was failing, Libin remembers being told that the “horrible, horrible place” he lived in would one day get better. “It's going to be great when it gets here.”
He explained: "I went to first grade in the Soviet Union. I was subjected to a lot of Soviet propaganda. ‘Communism doesn’t exist yet. We haven’t built communism yet. We’re building towards communism.'”
Obviously, Russia’s attempts at making a communist state didn't go as planned, and Libin sees a lot of parallels between that and the proposed Metaverse.
He said:
“You know, you can smell a bad idea before it’s fully built. So I don’t want to hear ‘Oh yeah, the metaverse doesn’t exist yet. No, no, no, all this stuff, all this stupid, useless, crappy stuff that exists right now, that’s not the metaverse. The metaverse is coming — it’s coming.'”
Read More: All NFT fighting games all look like complete garbage
The Metaverse fallacy
The Metaverse currently has a faux sense of popularity funnelled by crypto enthusiasts and investors. As Metaverses like Sandbox and Decentraland gain brands and celebrities like Adidas and Snoop Dogg, it's obvious that investors are injecting a lot of money to try and make the technology successful.
Metaverses are being designed as a second Internet, another platform to exploit with advertisements and data harvesting. Combined with cryptocurrency and NFTs, the tech is making a lot of money from a relatively tiny amount of users.