Looking back at 2024
Twentytwentyfour was a wild year for me. The fact that I didn’t have a corporate job, wasn’t part of a larger organization, didn’t have a team to manage, no business to run, all that really confused me for a good while. But looking back, I did get a lot done and had fun doing it. I also learned some things, so it’s time for a retrospective. When times get weird, I find it’s good practice to reflect on what went well and what didn’t.
The Book
My main project this year was writing my first book currently titled “Field Notes from the Metaverse”. Working as an author full-time has been awesome.
As I dug deep into the history of the metaverse and virtual worlds, I encountered a lot of interesting stories buried in old newsgroups, articles long taken down, and in books long out of print. Hunting down that information was a really nice challenge and very rewarding.
Through several interviews, I was also able to verify (or dismiss) some urban legends, as well as document completely new stories. That felt even better.
But what really takes the cake is the book itself. The Microsoft Word app for mobile has this really neat “Read Aloud” feature that recently got an update with new (and finally good sounding) voices. I started taking “breaks” to go for walks and listen to my current draft as an audio book. Weirdly, this way it doesn’t feel like the text was written by me and I can focus on just the experience and flow. And I start to really like what I hear. That feels amazing.
From the start I wanted the book to be as unbiased as I could write it. That meant I had to dial my own opinions and experiences back, which was sometimes harder than I initially imagined. I gained a lot of empathy and understanding for other narratives and perspectives. For example, I never was into the academic side around immersion, presence, and involvement. Or the very early works around mirror worlds and reality simulation. Crypto and Web3 was also a chapter I rewrote maybe a dozen times to give it a fair treatment. What helped me was the self-imposed rule to back every fact and statement with a proper source. I might not be factually correct about the history, but I have the receipts to show why I think I am.
But what I didn’t like is the intellectual isolation. I don’t read for fun anymore, I don’t watch movies or series, my podcast consumption has steadily dropped. As the book progresses, I find myself surrounded only with media relevant to the book. Consuming other information becomes mentally taxing as I try to keep the entire structure, flow, and content of the book in my head.
Maybe that’s a me-problem. Maybe that’s normal as a book nears completion. Or maybe that means I’m not that good at being a full-time author. That’s fine. I don’t think I want to write another book once this one is finished. As awesome as this project is, I know that my goal with the book is not become an author, but to contribute to the ecosystem around the metaverse and virtual worlds. And once that specific contribution is done, I want to get back to actively shape the future of it in a more active way.
Anyway, I document my progress, additional context and the interviews over there on the project blog. Drop me a note if you have feedback, or want to see something end up in the book.
Other Writings
I only wrote three stories on Medium this year, all of them about AI. I am somewhat proud of this one: “A Severe Lack of Situational Awareness”. On one hand I think the article wants to do too much, outlining three big ideas: That current AI models are ecologically unsustainable, that they are economically unsustainable, and that the hype around AI currently hinges purely on faith. Merging those together into one article made it a dense and convoluted mess.
The core point was this:
And yet, I wonder if the impact of using these models is accelerating in parallel to the ever increasing resource consumption. Don’t get me wrong — I do think that LLMs and generative AI in general have their use cases. But I wonder if their impact, their outcomes, their actual return on investment, is also growing in such an exponential manner. Because I don’t think it is.
And while buried in many words, I still think this is correct. In fact, all three statements turned out to be largely correct: All big AI tech companies have missed their ESG targets because of their AI efforts, there has been very little evidence that the economic benefit for AI users are in line with the cost to train and operate AI models, and AI providers now panic as they have hit a wall, now moving the goalposts by pivoting to agents and other distractions.
Speaking of taking victory laps, I am also taking a small one for this 2023 article: “Generative AI tools are the Clipart of the 2020s, and that’s a good thing”, in which I argued that generative AI was not a god-like paradigm, but rather would lead to everybody being just a little bit better:
What clipart did was to democratize digital art. Make it accessible to everybody. And it made the web more accessible through platforms like Geocities that combined web design with clipart. It turned out that designers didn’t lose their jobs, but it elevated everybody’s creativity.
And so here we are with ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midway and others. They will allow everybody access to more, better, and cheaper media (text, image, video, audio) to extend their digital creations — professionals and everybody else. It’s the next evolution of clipart. And that’s amazing and important.
That’s what generative AI tools have turned out to be, so I’m quite happy with that one.
Honestly, I wanted to write more, but my writing energy went into the book. Once that’s done this blog might pick up again.
Other Work
I wanted to stay grounded and in touch with my line of work (again, not seeing myself becoming an author), but I did not want it to distract me from writing the book. So I did some consulting and workshops for friends & family organizations, which were a lot of fun. I hand-picked the engagements to only include people and groups I previously worked with, and we had no ramp-up time, no trust issues, just a lot of fun solving some really knotty challenges around technology and strategy.
One engagement that stuck with me revolved around new types of corporate guidelines that might need to emerge in the future, for example around avatars or AI tools. One big question was how to support employees while staying brand safe and avoid leaking sensitive information. This has been a consistent issue as new types of tools and media channels came online — think of how many ill-advised social media posts individuals and organizations posted in the early days of Twitter and Facebook.
Together, we did some scenario exercises, exploring futures, what they meant for the brand, and how the organization and individuals would act and behave within these scenarios. We even created some artifact from these futures. Fun!
Talking
I didn’t do any public speaking this year. The main reason is that I sit down every year and prepare a couple of topics I want to talk about, come up with hypothesis and predictions, and then craft a story to communicate them in an entertaining an relatable way.
Due to the book I didn’t have time to do that this year. My big keynotes take around three months to craft and there was no way I wanted to divide my attention from the book project for that long. But now that the book is nearing completion, I am at it again. Expect some wild takes, as usual.
Thank you!
Seriously. This was a challenging year as I was working within an unfamiliar framework. But it also was like going on a side quest that turned out to be the best thing ever, making new friends and working with familiar ones along the way, eventually unlocking a completely new skillset and opportunities. I really appreciate you all!