LEI: Aww!
BUCK: Lei, my friend, is that you?
LEI: Yes, Buck.
BUCK: A primal scream, that’s not like you. Remember what you told little Ruby: “Use your words.”
LEI: Sorry, Buck. I’ll try again. Let me outta here!
BUCK: Outta where?
LEI: Wuhan. It’s just too hot. I’m living indoors 24/7 in AC.
BUCK: Gee, Lei, that sounds like what’s happening here in the U.S.
LEI: No, Buck. It’s a record for southwestern China — 11 weeks and counting — for the most intense heatwave in 60 years. It was 104 degrees or above for two straight months. It hit 113 for the first time in Chongqing with its 16 million people.
BUCK: Yikes.
LEI: If it’s not the wildfires or the flood risks, then it’s the drought. When a ship gets stuck, it has to offload its cargo onto maybe 500 trucks. People are taking selfies on cracked riverbeds. Ugh!
BUCK: A global heat wave is drying up waterways across Europe, too. They can see the “hunger stones” again and the long-lost “Spanish Stonehenge.”
LEI: Here in Wuhan the Yangtze River has receded to reveal ancient Buddhist statues.
BUCK: That’s nothing, Lei. In the Mojave Desert, where Arizona meets Nevada, the drought has lowered Lake Mead to reveal something more interesting.
LEI: What’s that?
BUCK: Ancient mob hits out of Las Vegas
LEI: Oh, Buck, that’s very American. I hear there’s been a lot of mass shootings lately.
BUCK: Well more in the last five years than in any other half-decade since 1966, according to The Marshall Project.
LEI: So many, in fact, I hear Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne are threatening to leave the U.S. to return to England.
BUCK: What else is bothering you?
LEI: The economy — the factory closures, the pathetic job market for our college grads, the mortgage crisis with all the street protests, our poor farmers staring at yellowed rice stalks and withering Sichuan peppers.
BUCK: Inflation is wilting us, Lei. Recession is the new watchword. Our stock market tanked the other day after the Fed chairman channeled Mr. T and played the role of Clubber Lang in “Rocky 3.”
LEI: What do you mean?
BUCK: He was describing his battle against inflation by increasing interest rates. Then when he was asked for his fight prediction, he said: “Pain.”
LEI: Ha! Remember, Buck, if you cross Mr. T, he’ll dot your eyes.
BUCK: I’m worried about that scream, Lei. There must be more to it.
LEI: Well, there is something really scary.
BUCK: What’s that?
LEI: Nancy Pelosi.
BUCK: You mean the House Speaker and all those visits to Taiwan by our members of Congress, not to mention our two warships sailing through the Taiwan Strait in a show of force.
LEI: Yes, Buck, you can tell them to stop. We get the point.
BUCK: You mean all the posturing isn’t doing the Chinese people — on either side of the Strait — any good, eh?
LEI: No, it’s not. The only ones enjoying the idea of World War III are in the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex.
BUCK: Well, Lei, you cheer me up. I thought China was poised to supplant us as the No. 1 country in the world. Now those fears are gone, especially with you thinking about leaving.
LEI: Wait, Buck, I’m not leaving China. I love my country. And you love yours, too, despite all the difficulties. I have a better idea.
BUCK: What’s that?
LEI: Buck, we can escape to the Metaverse! We can live in a world of our own creation.
BUCK: Oh, Lei, I think the heat fried your brain.
LEI: Well, they made fun of Vannevar Bush, too.
BUCK: Who’s that?
LEI: He’s the engineer and inventor who predicted the Memex: “Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”
BUCK: You mean the iPhone in my hand?
LEI: Right, and Bush predicted that in 1945. His essay in The Atlantic was titled, “As We May Think.”
BUCK: I may think you’re serious.
LEI: Yup. I’m looking into buying all my clothes at Tribute Brand. It’s a high-end digital fashion boutique.
BUCK: Digital? Why would you buy clothing that doesn’t exist.
LEI: Au contraire, mon ami. It does exist in a world that really matters to my friends and colleagues — a virtual world. No more closets for me. I can be the best-dressed free thinker in cyberspace.
BUCK: Where did you get that idea?
LEI: I heard Tribute Brand’s founder, Gala Marija Vrbanic, interviewed on the TED Radio Hour in an episode titled, “Incognito.” She launched the first-ever direct-to-consumer digital fashion brand in 2020.
BUCK: Ah, that’s when people ditched face-to-face encounters during the pandemic. What appealed to you?
LEI: Augmented reality, or AR, which can combine real and virtual worlds.
BUCK: What virtual world would inspire your new Metaverse lifestyle?
LEI: I would head back to 1899, so I could live in the Wild Wild West, sitting around a bonfire, chatting with outlaw Arthur Morgan.
BUCK: Sounds like you’re playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
LEI: Yes, the greatest game of all time. I would weave in and out of that virtual reality with a full array of “skins” or graphics that change my look.
BUCK: What happens when a bounty hunter — or tax collector — comes after you?
LEI: I turn myself into a peacock.
BUCK: Ha! That’s crazy.
LEI: Here’s something crazy for you, Buck. Vrbanic says in her TED talk that someone in a Roblox video game resold a virtual Gucci bag for almost $800 more than what it costs in real life.
BUCK: You’re kidding.
LEI: No, $4,115, or 350,000 Robux, for a $3,400 Dionysus Bag with Bee. Both prices are really out of this world.
BUCK: Well, partner, you’re going to need to dust off this road map for your Wild Wild escape. It’s a new book, “The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything,” by Matthew Ball, a former Amazon Studios exec.
LEI: What do you think of it?
BUCK: I had a flashback to what Duke University professor Dan Ariely said a decade ago about the big data craze in computing. I think the same is true about the Metaverse.
LEI: And that is?
BUCK: “Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”
LEI: That’s hilarious.
BUCK: Ball offers his first official definition of the Metaverse: “A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds …
LEI: I see.
BUCK: There’s more. “… that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence …”
LEI: Uh-huh.
BUCK: “… and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications and payments.”
LEI: Oh jeepers, Buck. When will the Metaverse arrive?
BUCK: That is Chapter 12’s title. The answer ranges from it’s “already here” from Microsoft’s CEO to it will emerge “over the coming decades.”
LEI: Who gave the long-range forecast?
BUCK: The CEOs of Epic Games, a video game and software developer based in Cary, N.C., and Nvidia, a California technology company that designs and manufactures graphics processing units.
LEI: Does Ball mention a China connection?
BUCK: Yes, several times. China is one of the key players among the global bettors pouring tens of billions of dollars a year into Metaverse development. Ball predicts “multiple national Metaverses” as different nations will have their own specific regulations.
LEI: Oh, so you and I won’t be zooming around together much, eh?
BUCK: China’s Metaverse will be more “centrally controlled” than those in Western nations, Ball predicts. Then there’s an interesting twist in terminology.
LEI: What’s that?
BUCK: Tencent’s Steven Ma introduced the Chinese company’s “Hyper Digital Reality” vision in 2021 rather than use the “M-word.”
LEI: So what will it all mean for me as a teacher?
BUCK: “The best example of impending transformation might be education,” Ball says, adding, “among COVID’s top lessons was that ‘Zoomschool’ is terrible.”
LEI: Amen to that, Buck. Missing was a sense of “presence,” something the Metaverse can provide in a virtual classroom, where I can interact more with my students.
BUCK: Tencent’s Ma calls current technologies “primitive” and “experimental.”
LEI: So, Buck, you’re saying I’m ready for the Metaverse, but it’s not ready for me.
BUCK: Right.
LEI: Argh!
BUCK: Lei, you just turned into a pirate.
About the authors: Buck Ryan, a University of Kentucky journalism professor, and Lei Jiao, an English lecturer at Wuhan University of Technology, Hubei Province, China, collaborate on articles to advance cross-cultural understanding. You can read their last article (‘I was wrong’ about The New York Times: Commentary on China’s censorship squeeze was a lemon — and the mea culpa, too) here: https://chathamnewsrecord.com/stories/i-was-wrong-about-the-new-york-times,14177