Welcome To Pottersville

The metaverse imagined by the tech giants, online gamers, and social media engines lining up to vie for controlling it looks more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls.

The two towns feature in the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, in which George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) is shown what the world would look like without his benevolent presence, and extols the virtues of fairness, trust, hard work, and loyalty.

You see, Bailey runs a small building & loan company and sublimates his dreams of personal aggrandizement — “I’m going to go places and build things!” — to help his neighbors own their homes. He even spends the money he’d saved for his honeymoon to help his borrowers get through an economic crisis.

A plot device has him question the value of his life, though, and he’s shown what the world would look like had he never been born. In this alternative future, an evil financier named Potter has ruthlessly crushed everyone’s aspirations for financial freedom and monetized their behavior. The church and movie theater in the town George knows as Bedford Falls have been replaced by the gambling joints and speakeasies of Pottersville, his friends reduced to binge drinkers.

It’s the roadmap for how we’ll experience the metaverse.

Fundamentally, the metaverse — or the collection of metaverses that evolve from our favorite websites — will be structured for one purpose, and one purpose only: Extracting money from our pockets, our relationships, and our every behavior.