Hi,

Happy halloween. Welcome to the metaverse.

Everything should be—should be—to your desired taste and texture and temperature and proportion and duration. It's not just the information that's curated. No, no. It's the birds and the flowers and the other humans.

Don't like a piece of furniture?

Blow it up.

Don't like someone's lawn?

Blow it up.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand what a metaverse is. It seems like the Power Glove but with commerce?

CBS News described it this way:

So, instead of Zoom meetings where people are staring at their laptop screens and looking like they're trying to pay attention ... you'll have Zoom meetings where everyone is there in the form of an avatar who appears to be fully, effortlessly, empathetically present. Their eyes will be enormous and wet and wide, wide open.

But everyone behind those avatars will secretly be playing Candy Crush at the same time on their finsta meta avatar. That avatar lives in Bali and also shoplifts, because it's a rush. He can do it because he has more speed than the other avatars, because he has four legs.

(You purchased the extra set of legs from an app developer who's in a makeshift jail. Extra legs are supposed to be illegal, but this person/avatar/developer claims that extra legs are a form of free speech, so the matter is going to the "Supreme Court." The whole justice system is still being figured out, and the body modifications aren't helping the debates remain civilized. Some of the avatars are simply enormous. Others are microscopic. Many are abandoned, swaying lazily in the breeze, clearly a third or fourth account with no light at all behind their eyes. Some of the other avatars think it's okay to eat these abandoned avatars, but your new religion prohibits that. Why? Because you said so.)

Anyway, in almost no version of what I imagine does this new universe not descend into an orgy of violence and terror and auto racing. We'll see! I have no actual idea, but I've witnessed video games, and the ones where the concept is it's basically real life, where you politely converse and share power and consume things in moderation and discuss fact-based news isn't a popular one.

So what comes to mind instead is a more impulse-driven, glandular scene, involving lots of people playing some elaborate version of FarmVille, where they choose avatars that resemble themselves, and they peacefully count cows and attempt to return to some pastoral ideal of everyday life. But then the far greater majority of people choose enormous avatars with horns or three rows of teeth or guns that wouldn't even function on earth, and they wreak havoc on said farms, upending systems of commerce and power structures that have come to feel untouchable in real life, where we don't have dental or vision coverage because of Joe Manchin.

So I don't understand that or much else, but am watching closely. In the mean time, it'd be great if someone could figure out diabetes or multiple sclerosis or endometriosis. The way the capitalist attention economy prioritizes the novel over the necessary is sometimes too much to handle.

Listen to me, now I sound like Sally Rooney. Which is a compliment, thank you.

This week's letter is short. I've been working on another thing, and my family has been visiting for the first time since before the thing with the virus. But here's what happened this week in health. Coca-Cola is buying BodyArmor, which is a sugar water that's worth 8 billion dollars. Which is a pittance. Elon Musk made $36 billion in one day. Yeah, so did I. The difference is I didn’t brag about it.

Academia remains messy and confusing. Merck is sharing its antiviral recipe with some countries. But not all! The Supreme Court declined to block a vaccine mandate in Maine. Kids are now authorized to get vaccinated, and for some it will be their first lesson in civid responsibility and collective action. For others it will be an opportunity to learn to complain about doing things that don't necessary immediately and directly benefit them. Which already seems to come naturally to kids. And to apparently millions of adults.

We'll return to regularly scheduled programming next week.

In the mean time, hope you didn't miss the Northern lights this weekend. They're coming from the metaverse. If you look directly at them, you may get sucked in.

And here's Raisin and I, and Moses guarding our candy.

Take care,

Jim