I’m too late to start the Crypto Cannabis Club, which could have been an SNL skit in 2018, and is covered by Forbes Magazine now in 2022.
But Cannabis has a lot of baggage, and when I say ‘baggage’ I mean if you smoke dope, people you wouldn’t even like smoke dope too. Cannabis signifies nothing.
That’s why ‘Badass’ is needed as a supporting adjective, to assure folks that here, Cannabis means what it has always meant. An act of rebellion that you and your friends all do together.
Quantum stuff is what we’ll be bullshitting about while we’re ingesting real strong real pot that NFT-holding members qualify for at good prices. This is the essence of the Metaverse right here; you think I’m kidding but I’m not.
People who like to do things together, like smoke dope or play games or both, used to actually do them together
Then many people realized they could still do them together if they weren’t together
Then everybody had to do things together not-together for two years and counting
Many have learned that this awful screwed up state of affairs freaking rocks in some ways and Mark Zuckerberg finally did too, decades after the idea was instantiated by a great writer.
I say instantiated and not something bolder like ‘created’ because I think Neal Stephenson wrote a wonderfully flawed novel that depicted a digital version of an idea that goes back to our origin as a species — that we can create environments in which we are transported to other worlds we feel fully immersed in.
It’s not that difficult. We willingly suspend disbelief, or some of us do, sometimes , under certain conditions that aren’t that tough to produce.
Las Vegas is where all modern VR time lines should begin, constructed as a mirage in the desert with no clocks on the walls and no views of the outside when you’re inside.
Any casino anywhere is VR, but Sin City was an early Metaverse model and Starbucks figured out how to replicate it at scale. For the same reason. People will pay a premium one way or another for the pleasure of being immersed in a cool living room with lite music, strong coffee and decent wifi.
Meta trying to kickstart Neal Stephenson’s version by spending billions on a platform not well-suited for most humans is instructive. Instructive for Cannabis people; i.e., humans who want cannabis to be a part of their Metaverse experience.
Ryan Hunter, astute CEO of the Crypto Cannabis Club, already eats his own dog food, or in his case, smokes dope irl and thinks deeply about what it would be like to smoke dope in virtual settings with a bunch of avatars. As he explains in ‘Forbes’:
I don’t think that large tech companies are likely to develop an authentic and engaging virtual approximation of the IRL cannabis community. That’s where we come in. We are deeply involved in the IRL cannabis community while we build the largest cannabis community in the Metaverse.
I’m going with Ryan on this one, the thoughtful capitalist stoner, over Blackrock Advisors, or any of the top ten hedge funds.
What is wild is that there is a Ryan, raising millions to build pot paradise.
Systems people have been building stuff almost everybody dislikes for quite a while now. The idea of stoners designing Stoner Metaverse, not as a Cheech and Chong joke but as a serious enterprise, is to me a sign of hope.
Still, it is not obvious how to implement Cannabis Club. Due to the democratization of dope, Cannabis is not a useful recommender data point.
This matters a great deal and it gets to an area not much considered by ‘Platform Developers’ because, duh, they’re Platform Developers — and that area is the very first transition into VR, which is being born in a way because at first no one in VR knows how to do shit. It’s an awful feeling, mostly, the older you get, although I’m not sure it has to be.
Making that first step into a virtual world is a Big Deal. You’d like it to be a gentle transition into your best dream scape, right? For me — I don’t want to emerge into an 80s Heavy Meta stoner Metaverse, of which there will be many, for example.
In the Quantum McCrypto Badass Cannabis DAO Metaverse, members are filtered in several ways.
Cannabis, rebellion
Badass, still rebellious after all these years
Quantum, advocate for rebel realities that are weird
McCrypto?
Obviously we need to run our own currency or else why would every other Metaverse be trying run its own currency? Fiat currencies are dead value shuffling into oblivion while something else is emerging to take their place.
But what a hassle!
Crypto now is like taking pictures of Abraham Lincoln was for Matthew Brady and thereafter. Until the Kodak guy said, hey, wait a minute … Or like buying a hamburger used to be until the McDonalds guy said, hey, wait a minute.
The QMBCD Metaverse will select for Quantum bullshitters who want their Crypto To-Go without getting out of the car. Just record my transactions on the blockchain, thank you very much. That is all I see in the distributed ledger concept, which is a little and a lot.
The DAO will do it. For sure. Even though I have never actually experienced a DAO running anything and have not eaten DAO dog food myself, I am completely confident that it will run the Metaverse I want to be in, that it will handle all the essential life details my wife handles for me now, except the DAO will do it for the whole community.
The idea of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization that overcomes all the inherent problems of States and Corporations by Ghosting them is obviously unrealistic and maybe the best idea ever. I would not bet my lunch money on DAO 1.0, (it got hacked; it’s a long story that has a fork in it).
The folks who buy NFTs to get discount dope might want to keep the deal between them and Dr. Dabber, an emerging brand, or others they procure pot from. The DAO will do it with its little blockchain buddy off in a very clean server room near a geothermal hotspot somewhere in Iceland.
Meanwhile a vast array of physical bodies will be scattered elsewhere around Spaceship Earth with their personal Cannabis delivery mechanisms close at hand, completely convinced they are co-located with a few old friends on beanbag chairs as they draw quantum tunneling images with the 3D paint brush and explain them to each other.
Quantum thinking only matters at a level that doesn’t affect us, we are told, which is the biggest bullshit of all. We are just having a whole lot of trouble letting go of, you know, the independent existence of things.
Our emotions are frequently in quantum superposition. Our lives do seem to get deeply entangled. ‘Probably’ is much more real life than ‘definitely.’
I don’t want to leave the sunny rainy green brown natural world forever and hang out in the ‘shroom room talking shit with potheads. That desire exists in superposition with its opposite and with plenty of other things I intend to do.
Wanting a dreamy goofy easy Metaverse is ok. It can coexist with loving the natural world the Mr. Rogers way — just the way it is. Except it doesn’t stay just the way it is.
Maybe Quantum McCrypto Badass Cannabis DAO Metaverse will give me everything a synthesized fantasy can give, but I already know that Nature has been the DAO itself all along and the smart contracts now being executed show just how impermanent everything we build is.
I write about VR and other topics I have no standing to write about on Medium and Substack.
I have a black belt in learning and I’ve been meditating for so long it’s ridiculous I’m not enlightened yet. But I’m definitely not.