#50: There is no digital world

💎 Word gems

'We’re All Speculating': Inside the Wildly Hyped Metaverse Real Estate Rush (Vice / Maxwell Strachan)

The gold rush in metaverse real estate is absurd. It unimaginatively carries all the inertia of physical real estate into the digital world, and appears to be driven by a desire to ignore and escape reality.

But for all the talk of a decentralized next generation of the internet, a number of companies have already sprouted up hoping to bet big on a few platforms and reap billions in profits as a result. Among them is the Metaverse Group, a leading digital real estate company that offers “a suite of virtual real estate–centric services,” including buying and developing land and property management. In the real world, the Metaverse Group is based in Toronto, but its virtual headquarters is located in Decentraland’s Crypto Valley.

There Is No Digital World (Christopher Butler)

For all the talk of living in the metaverse, the reality is there’s still physical infrastructure to make it happen, data centers and server farms in particular. It’s mostly kept out of sight, out of mind, but they exist.

The truth is that there is no such thing as the “digital world.” It is not a realm that exists apart from the so-called real world. Everything that is digital — information, exchanges, and experiences — is also physical. And yet, as infinite as we imagine the digital world to be, there is only so much physical stuff to go around. We are facing a very real future of scarcity, not abundance, and it will only be more severe if we continue to deny the true, hard costs of digital culture. We need to begin to express it in harmony with the physical world.

GPS (Bartosz Ciechanowski)

In the theme of digital/physical, I love this piece. It’s long and technical, but it’s a wonderful interactive explainer for just how much complexity goes into making GPS work. Something I take for granted nearly every day.

It’s fascinating how much complexity and ingenuity is hidden behind the simple act of observing one’s location in a mapping app on a smartphone. What I find particularly remarkable is how many different technological advancements were needed for GPS to work.

Just the satellites themselves required the development of rockets, mastery of orbital controls, and manufacturing prowess to build devices capable of withstanding the extremities of space.

💩 Cool shit

Custom Wordle - Make your own Wordle.

Nature 150 Interactive - An interactive map of science, showing how scientific papers are linked through citation.

Can You Gerrymander Your Party to Power? - A NY Times game teaching you about gerrymandering.

Narrative Device - Get AI generated writing prompts.

Music Map - A really cool timeline/map of music genres.

Your World of Text - I’m not really sure what this is, beyond being an open text-only canvas.

Shade Map - This is pretty amazing. This map lets you slide a scrubber along the bottom to see how much shade any location will get at different points of the day.

Share this email with a friend because Bitcoin_Bulletin: How to turn 200 in to thousands of Dollars.