Welcome to all of the beautiful new good young moneyers who have joined us since last Thursday. We’re building a values movement.
Hi 👋 hello. This week we’re exploring metaverse territory, where neighbourhood disputes are rising with land values, AKA exponentially. P.S. Have you noticed something different? We’ve had a makeover. I hope you like it, it was done for the sake of our comfort. Bad design is painful, I’ve learnt.
Conflicts between virtual neighbours are on the rise in the metaverse. From new builds that ‘ruin’ the neighbourhood aesthetic, to building on other people’s land and messing up the boundaries - online world’s are increasingly seeing the same problems plaguing IRL property ownership.
What is it about proximate property ownership that makes humans hate each other?
The thing is, this kind of behaviour doesn’t come with the territory. These spaces have existed for years, as communities where people could come together and connect over their enthusiasm for emerging technology. Even before emerging tech, Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin provided similar outlets. The only difference now is big money is on the line. Four parcels of Decentraland have sold for the crypto equivalent of more than US$200,000 in the last month. The result? Neighbourhoods are gentrifying. Digital spaces are undergoing rapid development, while the early adopters feel a growing sense of loss with the decline of ‘the old days’. We’ve written previously about how putting prices on things displaces non-market values. Neighbourhood tension may well be correlated with rising land values:
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars and murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruit’s are everyones, and the Earth no-ones.”
- Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Rousseau, a superstar of the 18th Century Enlightenment, wasn’t against property rights. In fact, he believed they came about with the advancement of civilisations and could have a legitimate basis under a legitimate state (Social Contract, Book I Ch. 9). In its absence, Rousseau believed property rights were the basis of all inequality.
We can see how Rousseau arrives at this conclusion in an earth context. We didn’t create the earth, we’re here because of a big bang. Everything that exists was ultimately, at some stage in the distant past, owned by no one. Add to that, land supply is finite. With enough money, we can create artificial land in the sea, like Dubai’s Palm Island for $12 billion (albeit at enormous cost to the environment). But it’s not really the same.
In the metaverse, though? This is conscious design. Decentralised, conscious design. Land is not finite. Land is code. There can be as much digital land as we decide. Yet the collective consciousness has decided upon the same dynamics of scarcity and ownership and risk and return that pervade offline spaces.
The Money Game has set up shop.
“The irony is that this is a money game and money is the way we keep score. But the real object of the Game is not money, but it is the playing of the Game itself. For the true players, you could take all the trophies away and substitute plastic beads or whale’s teeth; as long as there is a way to keep score, they will play.”
-Adam Smith (pseudonym for George Goodman), The Money Game
The thing about the Money Game is that we’re all in it by default. While not everyone cares for Fortnite or Beat Saber or Sims, we all have a stake in the markets. Whether we choose to play or not - money and wealth determines our access to the things we value. This makes investing - the markets - the greatest game of them all.
So if you’re one of the creators of a digital world, trying to attract people to join your world, you’re going to introduce the Money Game. The easiest way to do that is to transplant real world dynamics into digital ones - neighbourhood tensions and all. The Game doesn’t care how you feel:
“If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.”
- Adam Smith, The Money Game
As such, disputes don’t come with the territory but they do come with the Money Game. We can’t blame the game we benefit from, so we must look to our neighbours.
But right now, the metaverse is in the early days of the internet, where websites looked like paper flyers and there was no ability to search. The real opportunity for innovation exists in the emergent spaces, where we transcend making everything look like what we already know, inequality and neighbourhood disputes included.
As always, thank you for reading. I hope you found value here. If you did, why not share this article? We’re so so so close to hitting 100 subscribers and giving away a stack of the very best books when we do.