Every few months, some enterprising young journalist decides to write a piece about how weird it is to go on a date on the embodied internet. These dates are almost always awkward and lame, but generally for the same reason most dates people go on in real life are…

First, a quick rehash of “The Big Sort” and any of the millions of articles and books that have come after it. Basically, many in the West have increasingly self sorted based on social and political preferences, to the detriment of diverse and moderate political thought. There are almost no…

The famously calm and balanced UK media has recently been all aflutter about the dangers of the embodied internet. If you can believe this, women on the embodied internet are, gasp, being harassed. The way the article portrays it, this seems to happen only on the embodied internet, and…

Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that you are in the market for a coat. You find yourself in Soho and have two options. One, you can walk into REI, try on a few things, and walk out in under twenty minutes with a perfectly good coat. No…

Every few years, an old clip of Bill Gates talking to David Letterman in 1995 makes the rounds. In it, Gates tries to sell Letterman on the newfangled internet by pointing out that he can use it to connect with others who share his interest in topics like cigars…

Written with Pamela Jaber Right now, most brands entering the embodied internet are focused on commerce. Virtual shops, virtual malls, and virtual restaurants that look like slightly improved versions of their real world counterparts. I spent some time in a virtual fast food restaurant recently, and sitting alone in a…

Somewhere in the midst of all the discourse, it hit me — the term “metaverse” had become too unwieldy. It covered too much, and seemed too far in the future for most people to grasp. Then as I was running one day, it hit me like a lightning bolt —…

“That,” said my husband after he went through our latest racial bias VR experience, “was super uncomfortable.” He said it almost hesitantly, as if he didn’t want to criticize the work, but it was exactly what I wanted to hear, and it was echoed by all the white people I…

Ah, the metaverse — the buzzword no one can stop using since Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at Connect a few weeks ago. Coverage after the fact has ranged from the dystopian to the dismissive, with people lining up to either say it portends the death of humanity or is to be…