Let's Get Phygital.
The tallest tower in town is the where they are building the metaverse.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we once again want to welcome all the new subscribers. Bill McCamley’s essay about tending bar during a labor shortage is now the most-popular piece we’ve ever published. And Frank Spring is back with the latest chapter of Regulator, which might be the best thing we’ve ever published. (Here’s the first chapter if you need it.) And I want to talk about an office tower downtown that I can’t stop thinking about.
As always, we recommend things to do (learn the algebra of wealth), read (Aisha Harris’s incisive analysis of And Just Like That…), watch (Station 11 on HBOMax), and listen to (Lady Wray’s terrific new album, Piece of Me).
But first, have you heard about the new office tower downtown?
Last week I mentioned the stretch of Sixth Street where the bars are. If you keep walking west, you’ll soon reach the Driskill Hotel where LBJ used to keep a permanent suite. When the hotel was built in 1886, it was famous for having flushing toilets on the fourth floor. Col. Jessie Driskill called it “the most sophisticated hotel west of St. Louis,” and he wasn’t wrong. In fact, each of the twelve corner rooms came with private bathrooms, “an almost unheard-of feature for any hotel in the region,” my friend Skip Hollandsworth writes in his excellent New York Times-best seller The Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer, but we’re not staying here. I only stopped to make the point that Austin has always been innovative. (Yes, Austin had America’s very first serial killer. But focus people, c’mon, keep up.)
Cross Congress near the bronze statue of Angelina Eberly firing a cannon, past the building where Sandra Bullock’s bistro used to be, past the place where Sandra Bullock’s lunch place is now, and one more block to where the Extended Stay America is. Look up. Way up.
Austin has always been innovative.
You’re standing at Sixth and Guadalupe looking at a building called, get this, Sixth and Guadalupe, and when it’s finished this year it’s going to be the tallest tower in Austin at 66 stories, but that’s not why I can’t stop thinking about it. You see, along with the 10,000 feet of retail and 350 condos — though I think by local ordinance I’m required to refer to any new construction as “luxury condos” — Sixth and Guadalupe will have 590,000 square feet of office space taken up by one company: Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
Facebook planting a flag in and of itself is not news. Sixth and Guadalupe would be their third office space in downtown Austin. Tik Tok is moving to town. Twitter apocryphally launched in Austin at SXSW. Facebook’s tower won’t even be the most iconic one downtown occupied by a tech company. Block 185, which looks like a gleaming sail on Lady Bird Lake, is more commonly called the Google Tower.
What’s noteworthy about Sixth and Guadalupe is what Meta plans to do there: build the metaverse. A company founded so people in real life could connect digitally is occupying thirteen and a half acres of space in the real world to build a digital world. The hotel that used to be there was two or three stories tall, which means the office space where the metaverse will be built was constructed where nothing once existed at all. It’s built literally out of thin air, or at least where thin air used to be. It’s like the human power generation plant in the Matrix, but with nicer amenities.
The metaverse already exists, but it’s an office tower in downtown Austin. Remember when we used to think of brick-and-mortar retail stores and online stores as different things? Now we live in what they’re calling a “phygital” world that blends the physical and the digital.
The metaverse already exists, but it’s an office tower in Austin.
The pandemic forced a decade’s worth of progress into a few months in 2020, and now we scarcely notice that we live phygital lives. Consider how mundane this now seems: You place an order on the computer in your hand, and in a kitchen somewhere a different computer tells a cook what to put on your sesame bagel. (Smoked salmon, red onion, capers, tomato, and just a little cream cheese, obviously.) Then you drive to the bagel shop, perhaps letting the computer access maps and traffic data so a computer-generated voice can give you directions, and pick up your bagel sandwich that still has too much cream cheese on it.
We are living in a phygital world where BOPIS is boring. (Buy online, pick up in-store. C’mon, keep up.) Loreal’s augmented reality app that lets you try on make up in a virtual reality mirror has been downloaded twenty million times. Soon, you’ll be able to try on clothes in brick-and-mortar stores with digital mirrors.
I understand the anxiety about the digital world, but it’s too often mischaracterized as Future Shock. Driving to work recently I noticed an office tower for the first time. It was as if it appeared overnight like a gleaming, black, glass-covered spaceship had landed. Reader, I don’t know why but I began to feel frightened. The anxiety the metaverse causes isn’t about the future or not exclusively so. This anxiety is triggered by the recognition of an unstoppable now.
I agree with Scott Galloway that Facebook, which depends on keeping you on its site and never leaving, is unlikely to succeed at creating the singular metaverse. Lots of companies are doing this. The metaverse will probably be an interconnected world of these different online worlds.
The full metaverse lies in a distant future in which distinct virtual worlds coalesce into a single integrated online world that is in turn integrated with the physical world. Your identity, your relationships, your money are the same online and off, and among different communities within the Metaverse. It’s probably not a proprietary, branded environment, like a single website, but a linked world of multiple environments of varying public and private nature, like the Internet. Put another way, the interoperability of a metaverse is the key to becoming THE metaverse.
You know that meme of Morpheus saying, “What if I told you…”? The truth is that he never actually said that in the movie. He asked Neo, “Do you want to know what 'it' is?”
I was reminded of that bit of Clavin-esque trivia when doing research for this essay and ran across the Twitter handle for Matrix Resurrections. After Mark Zuckerberg announced his plan to build the metaverse, @TheMatrixMovie tweeted a picture of a red pill and a blue pill with the caption, “Now based on real events. The choice is yours.”
But what if told you there were no pills? If The Matrix accurately predicted a dystopia in which technology enslaves humans eight years before the first iPhone, the great insight of The Matrix Resurrections is that there won’t be one physical world of truth and a digital realm of illusions. It’s all going to be the same damn world, which means no matter how cool your avatar is, you’re still going to have to floss.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Bemoaning conspirituality
Agreeing with Trevor Noah
Being historically miserable
Enjoying the new moral panic
Learning the algebra of wealth
Giving Evan Smith some credit
Solving our own crossword puzzles
Getting rich listening to happy music
Being calmest when things are craziest
Comparing inflation rates for chicken parts
What I’m reading
Mark Brown: “Camden Yards vandal elected to Baseball Hall of Fame” - Has to be the funniest thing written about Ortiz making the Hall.
A baseball player whose career is best known for the time he reacted to being called out on strikes by whining about it, getting ejected, then taking his bat and destroying a dugout phone at Oriole Park at Camden Yards was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Aisha Harris: “'And Just Like That... ' has a Diversity Girlfriend problem” - This gets right at what was bugging me — though I never could have articulated it so well — about the SATC reboot.
As it is, the protagonists on And Just Like That... have been stuck in a hamster wheel of processing white, heterosexual guilt, apologizing for SATC's missteps. It's as if they were acquaintances who made fun of you in high school and then DM you years later to tell you they're so sorry. They want to sand over their legacy – even though most of us have already made peace with it all and moved on.
Dan Zak: “Anthony Fauci is up against more than a virus” - This one almost made me cry with moral exhaustion.
Fauci stares out the kitchen window into his small backyard. Right now he sees a crossroads for America. The best-case scenario: increased vaccination, more immunity, antiviral drugs, a virus under control. If we work together. The worst: a new variant, as transmissible as omicron but more deadly, exacerbated by that comorbidity — the deterioration of our minds and politics.
What I’m watching
This Way Up, the Hulu comedy, is pretty funny.
I know I’m late to the party, but I’m enjoying Station 11, but I’m going to like anything with Mackenzie Davis.
What I’m listening to
I can’t love this album enough.
I have a Jonathan Richman-sized hole in my cultural awareness. This song popped up on Spotify recently and turned my head.
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.