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

Current book word count: 150,185

Writing

I just cracked the 150k!

To be honest, I don’t have a word budget for the book. It will have as much words as it needs. And I absolutely expect the editors to throw a good chunk out to make it more streamlined. In fact, they are already doing it. On the side I have a file called “cutting room floor”, which now contains tens of thousands of words with concepts, paragraphs and in some cases entire chapters of content that just didn’t fit the book. Maybe they will end up in a separate article. Maybe they are just bad. Or maybe, just maybe, some of them will make a comeback into an extended edition of the book.

In terms of progress, 51 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. I still haven’t made it to the Web3 chapters. I noticed that I needed to do too much explaining in the field notes chapter, so I pulled some of it out into a new, separate milestone. Explain first, then comment on it. It feels better already, but is still not finished. But I really, really want to finish this section and not look at it for a while.

When I started this book, I thought that the section around crypto, Web3 and blockchain-based virtual worlds would be the hardest for me to stay neutral. And indeed it took several rewrites to get them right. But now I am already sitting four weeks constantly rewriting the section around the centralization of the Web, algorithmic companies, algorithmic biases and ordinal thinking. The entire section fills me with rage. I hate how naïve we were when building these systems. How we should have known better. How some did know better and we didn’t listen. And how we continue to not listen.

I know, this is ultimately why I wanted to write this book, but damn.