What is the metaverse, actually?

There is a concept in tech and innovation – branded by an expensive consultancy company, naturally – known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. Any innovation, be it NFTs (a means of owning ‘unique’ digital art), blockchains (the technology powering crypto-currencies like bitcoin), self-driving cars or wearable tech, will go through distinct (buzzword-heavy) stages before it is adopted by the mainstream.

First, it will head to a ‘peak of inflated expectations’, before entering the ‘trough of disillusionment’. As people then work out what the tech might actually deliver it climbs the ‘slope of enlightenment’ to the ‘plateau of productivity’.

It’s an idea that definitely fits lots of the technologies that we use today – think of the mobile internet, for example. As it was being developed we heard much of the promise of what it could deliver for us, only to find that on our pre-3G networks what it meant in practice was waiting for 90 seconds to load a bus timetable that was unreadable on our tiny phone screens. Only years later, with better phones and new infrastructure, did it actually deliver on its promise.

The problem with the cycle is it comes along with an embedded premise: all of these technologies can deliver, and even if they are currently obviously over-hyped or widely dismissed, this can all be explained away. Just give it time, hold the faith, invest more, and you’ll reach that plateau.

Two books, in quite different ways, serve to trouble that narrative. One, Money Men, by the Financial Times’s Dan McCrum, sets forth how Wirecard became the darling of the European tech scene (and obtained a
$1 billion investment from SoftBank), turning the boring, low-margin world of payment processing into something much more lucrative, of which more later.