The metaverse (wearing a helmet while browsing Amazon for knockoff shirts) is here! McKinsey & Co., the ahuman nightmare company that lends 3D-printed consultant freaks to sweaty bosses so the latter can say This guy told me to enter your bedroom as a mist and drain you of your blood as you slept, predicts that, uh, "annual global spending related to this virtual landscape could reach as much as $5 trillion by 2030," according to Bloomberg. Whatever that means. If it means anything.
"Related to"? "This virtual landscape"? "Could"? "As much as"? You could not write a slipperier sequence of words if you were describing an industrial lubricant. Also McKinsey predicting that a drastically new business paradigm is upon us is rather like an oar salesman predicting that soon rowboats will be the most popular way to commute. None of that is the point! The point is: Behold! The dawn of the Age of Metaverse (a 32-bit shopping mall that you wear on your face)!
Gartner Inc., a company I had never heard of before 20 minutes ago but whose Twitter bio reads "We enable faster, smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization's mission-critical priorities" says that, "By 2026, 25 percent of people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education, social and/or entertainment," according to its own press release, which amounts to a sales flyer, and which Bloomberg's Matthew Boyle barely even rephrased before credulously passing its claims along into print. Seems credible! Anecdotally, probably close to one quarter of the people I know are big-time dumbasses (sorry). Clearly it is time to adapt. It is time for forward-looking businesses to invent a new, obscenely compensated executive position, the well-established solution to all business challenges.
Firms as varied as consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co., talent manager Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Spanish telecom carrier Telefonica SA, luxury-goods maker LVMH and wedding-registry retailer Crate & Barrel have all decided they need a chief metaverse officer.
Bloomberg
It is important for Crate & Barrel to have a chief metaverse officer:
Chief Executive Officer Janet Hayes said it’s “essential” that the company has “an impactful presence in the metaverse.”
Bloomberg
By 2026 nobody will want to shop for cutting boards or shower-curtain rings without getting motion-sickness anymore. Already the tech-savvy early-adopter demographic grows sick and tired of having to climb down out of their Lawnmower Man virtual reality gyroscopes and boot up some stupid laptop every time they want to check out some dang wicker patio furniture online. How can Crate & Barrel possibly navigate the 21st century home-goods space without paying an MBA ghoul eight figures to also think this?
You gotta have a chief metaverse officer. The advertising company Publicis Groupe SA's CMO, Leon, isn't even a real, living being, or even an artificial intelligence! It is just a "lion-esque digital avatar," according to Bloomberg. You might say that Leon sounds an awful lot like an advertising mascot, an example of something very much older than the concept of the metaverse or the idea of a chief metaverse officer, and that reporting even cheekily that it is a "chief metaverse officer" is not even one percent different from reporting that Joe Camel is a tobacco industry spokesman, but you are not thinking about paradigm shifts or like synergized user modalities or whatever. You are not assimilating the key learnings, here.
Here at Defector we are all about nimble, forward-looking business technology solutions. We are all about lean and optimized, baby. The blogs of the future will of course be in the metaverse (Facebook that starts to smell like brewer's yeast if you don't clean the face-sweat off of it every once in a while); nobody is going to want to just look at some dumb two-dimensional surface with words on it, unless that two-dimensional surface is within an uncanny and deeply unpleasant three-dimensional digital space that has Mark Zuckerberg wandering around in it. It is essential that we navigate this changing blog landscape. For this reason I am very excited to introduce our company's new Chief Metaverse Officer, Devin the Mixed-Reality Dugong:
Devin comes impeccably credentialed for this position: As previously established, he is a mixed-reality being, meaning that he can represent the physical world in the metaverse and the metaverse in the physical world. Also he is very cute. Here is Devin, hosting a tour of Defector's still-in-development-but-extremely-intriguing virtual space, "Lauren's apartment."
Devin is gonna beat the living shit out of Leon.
