I was reading about some Metaverse projects the other day and started thinking about tech use. Seems to me that we've entered an era when invention has been replaced by feature creep, mostly driven by consumer expectations and market share more than necessity or industrial/commercial viability.

The assumptions about web3 and integration with Metaverse/Augmented Reality/VR seem to be behind much of it and its direction (deterministic as it might be).

Back in the mid to late 90s when I was working on computers, they had inherent use in many forms, but the flaws were all still there. Now we've refined it all to plug-and-play simplicity, but to what end? In the 90s you had people who made and used computers to hack phone lines, get free cable tv, browse the boards and IRC, write code, and figure out insane formulas. Now it seems that all the energy is spent on making faster mobile apps for ordering burgers from DoorDash, or easier to click LIKE buttons on social media sites.

How in the hell did we go from trying to build an open source network for super smart nerds to working ourselves to death just to buy a 3D tv or a slighter better smart phone? Where did the utility go?

It seems we're stuck in a mode of watching tech build things that aren't needed, then refining it, then going onto the next unnecessary consumer fix. Do I need a new message app? Why? Email, Skype and PMs work just fine. Do I need a Metaverse browser? Why? I'm not invested in it, and my internet Brave/FireFox/Opera browsers do the job. Why do we keep making things to replace other things, when the previous thing works and has worked for years?

I know much of it is simple marketing and start-ups trying to make a buck, but what's the point if economies are tanking and no one's buying it anymore? At some point, the bubble has to break in a direction of need rather than a cash grab with no insight or creativity. The current timeline reminds me of the late 90s Dot.Com bubble, when you had thousands of companies trying to cash in on the internet craze, creating websites with little to no function... businesses not understanding the world they were inhabiting.