This is a weekly update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.

Current book word count: I don’t know James Rolfe.

Struggling

I feel a certain amount of kinship with Dan Olsen. We might be the same age, although I doubt it. And I did not go to film school.

Better known as Folding Ideas, Dan has published this monumental, gargantuan documentary about the metaverse called “The Future is a Dead Mall – Decentraland and the Metaverse“. There’s just so much going on with it. He plays Decentraland in a way that feels obsessive–compulsive, with failure after failure being a reason to point at it and shout: “See?! This makes no sense! It’s naked! There are no clothes!“

I watched the thing more times than I like to admit, trying to argue that all this is true, but also not the story, not the whole story, not the point. That Decentraland obviously is a wrong thing, a cludged-together precarious mess whose wrongness is intuitively apparent even to those who have little familiarity with the concept of the metaverse.

But this thing, and his other videos, ruined my life in the way that only inexplicably perfect works of craftsmanship can. I watch them and they do things to me, his videos tingle my brain, they give me the Fizz. His latest work “I Don’t Know James Rolfe” consumes me, and I didn’t even know James Rolfe before the video.

I am always comparing my book with The Future is a Dead Mall. It never stops. Because The Future is a Dead Mall is not a video essay. It is not only a video essay. You see, Dan Olson, behind all the craftsmanship of film making, is a writer. He might not feel like one, feel like a writer of convenience, but in the literal sense, he is the professional maker of words. And compared to his writing, mine feels inferior, stale, boring.

And so I feel myself getting drawn to his videos, watching them over and over again in the desperate rage of trying to figure out what he is doing, trying to crack the code until I become his words. The longer I stare at the beast, the more it consumes me. As I am typing this I can only hear his voice, the monotonous yet engaging tone, the particular pronunciation, and the way his sentences play out, as he waves his hands to drive home the actual point he wants to make.

Is this the fruit of obsession? Is this where compulsion takes us? Are the damned and the damnable all doomed to wander to Home Depot and build the metaverse out of plywood and a handful of screws until it commands a billion Dollar evaluation? Is that really the story?

The metaverse is a dead mall. But if it is, who built it? And why? Where did the concrete come from? Even the Death Star needed plumbers, electricians and independent contractors, so did this mall. There is more to say about it, I know it. But in watching Dan’s videos, I fail to see how. Everything I write feels like an inferior version, a worse take on something that he has definitively nailed to the garage door, for everybody to see. I’m in the last phase of finishing up the first draft of the book, and I feel like it’s not even a thing. It is dead as a mall.

I don’t know Dan Olsen, but in my quest to see what else he did, I came across something, a talk he recently gave at the XOXO Festival. And it broke me. In a good way. Maybe I cried a little. Ok, maybe it didn’t break me, maybe it helped me break my own spell, just a bit. Because this is relatable.

Envy. Impatience. They’re the monster I struggle with, but they are ultimately a part of me. They make up part of my ambition, my hunger to better myself, my thirst for excellence. If I killed them entirely, I would kill some fundamental part of what drives me to make things. So really, they just need to be kept under control.

/ Dan Olsen, Dan Olson, Folding Ideas – XOXO Festival (2024)

I don’t know Dan Olsen. But what I need to do to progress is confront my insecurities and accept that I am not a writer either. And that I might need a bigger basement. And some chains from Home Depot.

TLDR: Making some good progress with the book. Getting there. But I’m struggling.