Monthly Archives: February 2020

Penicillin, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine, was a product of chance.

After returning from summer vacation in September 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming found a colony of bacteria hed left in his London lab had sprouted a fungus. Curiously, wherever the bacteria contacted the fungus, their cell walls broke down and they died. Fleming guessed the fungus was secreting something lethal to the bacteriaand the rest is history.

Flemings discovery of penicillin and its later isolation, synthesis, and scaling in the 1940s released a flood of antibiotic discoveries in the next few decades. Bacteria and fungi had been waging an ancient war against each other, and the weapons theyd evolved over eons turned out to be humanitys best defense against bacterial infection and disease.

In recent decades, however, the flood of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle.

Their development is uneconomical for drug companies, and the low-hanging fruit has long been picked. Were now facing the emergence of strains of super bacteria resistant to one or more antibiotics and an aging arsenal to fight them with. Gone unchallenged, an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide due to drug resistance could rise to as many as 10 million in 2050.

Increasingly, scientists warn the tide is turning, and we need a new strategy to keep pace with the remarkably quick and boundlessly creative tactics of bacterial evolution.

But where the golden age of antibiotics was sparked by serendipity, human intelligence, and natural molecular weapons, its sequel may lean on the uncanny eye of artificial intelligence to screen millions of compoundsand even design new onesin search of the next penicillin.

In a paper published this week in the journal, Cell, MIT researchers took a step in this direction. The team says their machine learning algorithm discovered a powerful new antibiotic.

Named for the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the antibiotic, halicin, successfully wiped out dozens of bacterial strains, including some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria on the World Health Organizations most wanted list. In a monthlong experiment, E. coli bacteria also failed to develop resistance to halicin, in stark contrast to existing antibiotic ciprofloxacin.

In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first, Regina Barzilay, a senior author on the study and computer science professor at MIT, told The Guardian.

The algorithm that discovered halicin was trained on the molecular features of 2,500 compounds. Nearly half were FDA-approved drugs, and another 800 naturally occurring. The researchers specifically tuned the algorithm to look for molecules with antibiotic properties but whose structures would differ from existing antibiotics (as halicins does). Using another machine learning program, they screened the results for those likely to be safe for humans.

Early study suggests halicin attacks the bacterias cell membranes, disrupting their ability to produce energy. Protecting the cell membrane from halicin might take more than one or two genetic mutations, which could account for its impressive ability to prevent resistance.

I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date, James Collins, an MIT professor of bioengineering and senior author told The Guardian. It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Beyond tests in petri-dish bacterial colonies, the team also tested halicin in mice. The antibiotic cleared up infections of a strain of bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics in a day. The team plans further study in partnership with a pharmaceutical company or nonprofit, and they hope to eventually prove it safe and effective for use in humans.

This last bit remains the trickiest step, given the cost of getting a new drug approved. But Collins hopes algorithms like theirs will help. We could dramatically reduce the cost required to get through clinical trials, he told the Financial Times.

The bigger story may be what happens next.

How many novel antibiotics await discovery, and how far can AI screening take us? The initial 6,000 compounds scanned by Barzilay and Collinss team is a drop in the bucket.

Theyve already begun digging deeper by setting the algorithm loose on 100 million molecules from an online library of 1.5 billion compounds called the ZINC15 database. This first search took three days and turned up 23 more candidates that, like halicin, differ structurally from existing antibiotics and may be safe for humans. Two of thesewhich the team will study furtherappear to be especially powerful.

Even more ambitiously, Barzilay hopes the approach can find or even design novel antibiotics that kill bad bacteria with alacrity while sparing the good guys. In this way, a round of antibiotics would cure whatever ails you without taking out your whole gut microbiome in the process.

All this is part of a larger movement to use machine learning algorithms in the long, expensive process of drug discovery. Other players in the area are also training AI on the vast possibility space of drug-like compounds. Last fall, one of the leaders in the area, Insilico, was challenged by a partner to see just how fast their method could do the job. The company turned out a new a proof-of-concept drug candidate in only 46 days.

The field is still developing, however, and it has yet to be seen exactly how valuable these approaches will be in practice. Barzilay is optimistic though.

There is still a question of whether machine-learning tools are really doing something intelligent in healthcare, and how we can develop them to be workhorses in the pharmaceuticals industry, she said. This shows how far you can adapt this tool.

Image Credit: Halicin (top row) prevented the development of antibiotic resistance in E. coli, while ciprofloxacin (bottom row) did not. Collins Lab at MIT

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AI Just Discovered a New Antibiotic to Kill the World's Nastiest Bacteria - Singularity Hub

Artist: Rob Brown

Project: Dont Bow Down on that Dirty Ground: The Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans

Description:With an anthropologists dedication to understanding a distinct subculture, Rob Brown has spent two decades working among the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, whose ceremonial dress, mysterious vernacular idioms, a song canon of complex rhythm and rhyme, [and] unique style of dance and movement, according to Brown, constitute a folk group that has maintained its cultural richness and singularity for more than a century.

Ostrich plumes and intricate beadwork adorn the participants handmade suits as they take to the streets in a parade unlike any other in the city. Documenting the unique traditions of the Uptown neighborhoods, Brown captures the lively atmosphere of masking on Mardi Gras.

Eyes on the Southis curated byJeff Rich. The weekly series features selections of current work from Southern artists, or artists whose photography concerns the South. To submit your work to the series, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Rhythm and Rhyme - Oxford American

Its Bruce Springsteen who says it best: It was like youd never heard them before and like theyd always been there forever and ever.

Springsteen is talking about the Band, a dazzling group that for a brief period in the late 1960s used a combination of rock, country and blues to jump start the Americana sound and set the popular music world on its ear. Then, seemingly just as suddenly, they were gone.

The story of the rise and disintegration of the Band turns out to be as compelling as its spectacular music, and its good to have the tale told and the groups formidable sounds heard one more time, in the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, directed by Daniel Roher.

As the title indicates, this is the groups story from the point of view of Robertson, its most prolific songwriter and the man whose post-Band career has been the most noteworthy, and while that situation is inevitable, its not quite ideal.

Inevitable because not only is Robertson the band member most comfortable with what Joni Mitchell called the star maker machinery behind the popular song, but three of his band mates (Rick Danko, Levon Helm and Richard Manuel) have died, and the fourth, Garth Hudson, is very much not comfortable in the public eye.

But though he is in effect the last man standing, Robertson and his comrades did not see eye to eye toward the end, and though Brothers acknowledges that situation, giving him pride of place invariably unbalances the film.

Add to that the not surprising deference the 25-year-old director shows to a 76-year-old superstar with a willingness to self-mythologize, and regretting that the other Band members could not be seen and heard more than they are in archival interview clips is unavoidable.`

But it is a measure of the singularity of the Bands story, and the way their music remains such a tonic to experience, that Brothers still demands to be seen.

Just watching and listening to the group tearing through their classic Up on Cripple Creek near the documentarys opening, alive with the pleasure of making great music with one another, is enough to joyously lift you out of your seat.

Because Once Were Brothers also functions as a Robertson biography, we begin with tales of his Toronto background as the child of a mother born on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario and a Jewish gambler who died before he was born.

Rock music captivated Robertson, and when he was 15 his band opened in Toronto for the wild and crazy rockabilly group Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks.

At age 16, he took a train by himself to Fayetteville, Ark., and joined the group, becoming fast friends with the groups drummer and fellow teen, Levon Helm.

Under their influence, Hawkins hired three other Canadian youths Danko, Hudson and Manuel and the group was soon playing in bars they were too young to patronize.

More than that, as Hawkins, at age 85 one of the films most engaging interviews, avows, playing together the five Hawks shot past me musically like a bolt of lightning.

The group took a leap forward in visibility when it came to the attention of Bob Dylan and became the band that backed him and faced hostile crowds on the infamous Going Electric tours, leading Dylan, interviewed briefly here, to call them gallant knights standing behind me.

When Dylan ended up moving to Woodstock, the group followed and even persuaded Helm, whod left during the Dylan tour, to join them in a brightly painted house that became iconic when the group, having decided to call itself the Band, released Music From Big Pink in 1968.

What happened next, involving great musical success, drinking, serious car crashes and the inevitable hard drug use, is so complex and so frenetic you almost wish Brothers had the length of a limited series to deal with it all.

At a certain point Robertson, alone among the group to have married and started a family (former wife Dominique is spoken to) began to get bigger ideas. He went out to Los Angeles, took meetings with David Geffen, moved to Malibu (as did Dylan and other Band members) and became friendly with Martin Scorsese.

The Last Waltz, the concert and Scorsese film commemorating the official end of the Band in its original incarnation, was apparently Robertsons idea, and the rest of the gang did not necessarily love it.

Soon to come were disputes, referred to briefly in the film, over who should be getting songwriting credit and the royalties that went with it, and its sad to watch the wheels falling off this once glorious enterprise. As Robertson himself puts it, it was such a beautiful thing, and it went up in flames.

'Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band'

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Playing: Starts Feb. 21, Arclight Hollywood; The Landmark, West Los Angeles

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Review: 'Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band' - Los Angeles Times

Although there are many things I miss about being young (all of them too obvious to detail here), one thing I dont is the hyperawareness of age. When you are young and ambitious, your 20s can feel like a constant and unrelenting race, one in which you are vividly aware of not only your own position, but that of your peers as well. How many times did I moan about someone who seemed to be so much more accomplished than I? How much of my consciousness was dedicated to cataloging how many years (or months, even) younger or older a perceived rival was than I? I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be an editor in chief, and yet everyone always seemed so much further ahead of me; everyone elses pace looked so much brisker, their triumph so much more assured.

Anyone who is reading this and in a similar position should take heart, however: At some point, those feelings will fade. You will realize that early professional success ensures nothing. You will also realize that the most important thing is not that you were first to accomplish something, but that you did so on your own terms, with as few compromises as possible. By this time, youll probably be nearing or in middle age, but the consolation prize for being in your 40s is the relief youll feel that, despite everything, you are free from that particular tyranny.

The ticking clock is, Id venture, louder still for those of us living (or attempting to live) a creative life. We celebrate savants, prodigies, early promise. Your first gallery show, your first stage role, your first published book, your first runway collection these are laudable moments; they happen for so few, and they should be celebrated. But its after the show closes or the curtain falls that the second test begins the one in which you have to prove to yourself not just that you can produce art, but that you can be an artist. This test will consume the rest of your life, and although there will be moments of joy, the pursuit will often be lonely and mapless. Your age will not matter in this test; what will instead is your resilience, your durability and the singularity of your vision.

There are probably few fashion designers who understand this as vividly as Marc Jacobs. Jacobs was 29 and the creative director of Perry Ellis when he presented his infamous grunge collection, which made him an instant sensation. Now 56, he has been famous and an artistic director for almost half of his life. Over the course of his long career, he has been responsible for giving shape and relevance to American luxury; for transforming the business of fashion; for changing our perception of what an artistic director looks like and what a runway show can be. Of course, there have been disappointments as well: both professional and personal. And yet what I admire most about him is his constant vulnerability, the generosity of his imagination, his lack of cynicism, the wonder hes able to make his audience feel. To see one of Jacobss shows is to witness the work of someone who has never become weary of creating, who knows as all artists do that every beginning is another chance to make the world anew. He is a reminder to all of us seeking to live a creative life that trying something different is not only not a bad thing, it is an imperative.

So dont waste your time tracking who got there first, young artists. There is no stopwatch. What there is, finally, is you and a blank canvas, whether that canvas is a literal one, or whether it takes the form of a notebook or computer screen or rehearsal space or dress form. All you have to do is start. All you have to do is never stop.

Read more from Ts Feb. 23 Womens Fashion issue.

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T's Spring Women's Fashion Issue: The Test - The New York Times

Dear Editor,

The Through the Glass Darkly (GA, Feb 20th ) column finishes with the claim There is absolutely no way to drastically reduce carbon emissions in only 10 years.... without the appalling prospect of a massive global recession, which will impact the greatest on the poorest on the planet.

Given the fuzzy logic of a column dealing with such generalisations as Judeo-Christian and traditional religion it is hardly surprising that it concludes by invoking absolutes, notwithstanding its side excursions into references to science as though that word also embraced some absolute singularity despite its covering multitudinous theoretical speculations on approximations to possibilities as our sense organs coupled to our cranial processors, magnified by our ramifying technologies, attempt to unravel the mysteries of human existence without resort to assumptions unbased on evidence.

It seems to me there may actually be ways ..to drastically reduce carbon emissions in only 10 years.., and even to do so .. without the appalling prospect of a massive global recession, which will impact the greatest on the poorest on the planet.., and that the failure to attempt the effort required will be the result of continuing to abdicate our responsibilities to future generations, and the continuing of our feckless m finist thinking fed by the indoctrinated wisdom of greed is good, Im all right, Jack, there is no such thing as society ubiquitous neoliberal theologising of finance capital ideology under the deified Invisible Hand of the Market uber a$; a.k.a. Oscar Wildes definition of rampant cynicism as being the belief system of someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, i.e. the elevation of the great god Moolah to supreme being in our pantheon of assessments of worth.

In some quarters solutions have been proposed under the shorthand label of a Green New Deal, referring as it does to FDRs attempts to wrestle with the enormity of finance capitals ca$ino-capitai$t implosion which created the Great Depression after the squanderU$t of the Roaring Twenties. Meanwhile that same capitalism was indulging itself in the global arms race that fed European fascism and culminated in the mushroom stew of Hiroshima and their collective lunacy of ye olde napalm-raining Cold War, a demonically lucrative brainwave the usual suspects seem determined to resume.

The reason it is unlikely is due to the extent of the vested interests of greed, megalomanic militarist Mars-worship (often masquerading as Judeo-Christian crusades for democracy and human rights ), the power of group-think conformity lest boat-rocking sink our sacred careers, the slow pace of our emergence from religious wishful thinking of some celestial father-figure wedded to our patriarchic societies galloping to our rescue while we light candles in the dark. Examples of this resistance to the necessitated changes range from the orchestrated smears against Corbyn to our east, Sanders to our west, and even the terror of our local complacent evolutionary dinosaurs and tories at the moderate democratic proposals of SF, which are reminiscent of apartheid Unionisms militarising of the 1960s civil rights campaigns for a semblance of civic equality in the stagnant north east, and the failures of imagination in post-Lemass Dublin.

As has been predicted for decades, these global crises are indeed coming to a locality near us all, and at an accelerating pace.

Yours,

Damien Flinter,

The Regressive Hypocrite Party,

Headford,

Co Galway

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Disagreeing with the fuzzy logic - Galway Advertiser

Black History Month has been thematic since its inception in 1976, not to distill focus on the African American experience but to add to a collection of historical awareness and food for thought. This years theme, African Americans and the Vote, is deceptive in its title, and, as Penn researchers elaborate, on the face may be an inaccurate representation of singularity. In fact, the African American vote spans a history that extends beyond the adoption of Black suffrage in America, has been politically and socially fraught, and is representative of as diverse a voting body as the country at large. In short, there is not one Black vote, and there is not one history of the Black vote. The nuance is at the heart of Black History Months theme, and implores all Americans to understand the history and the current climate, to educate themselves on what it means to be Black in the American polity.

Penn Today reached out to current and former Penn faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences to expound on the idea of the African Americans and the vote.Adolph Reed, Kathleen Brown, andMary Francis Berry each spoke on the historical state of voting for African Americans, and the current election year. Black History Months origin goes back to February 1926 when Carter G. Woodson implement Negro History Week. Woodson, a writer and historian who founded of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, spent his career working to popularize knowledge about the history of Black people.It was Woodsons goal to see African American history celebrated as a one-week affair, and urged schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what students learned all year. By the late 1960s, college campuses across the country had begun to replace Negro History Week with Black History Month, and designated an annual theme.

2020 marks the 100-year anniversary of womens suffrage. It also marks 150 years since the Fifteenth Amendment, which won the right for Black men to vote in America. For both Black men and women, the constitutional right to vote has not hewed historically with the ease and accessibility of voting. Nor, as Reed and Brown point out, the privilege of voting for a candidate who most resembles them in terms of identity and cosmology. The womens suffrage movementa fractious campaign that spanned over eighty yearswas rife with tension between former abolitionists, eager to see newly freed Black people enfranchised, and white women who put their own access to vote ahead of a true womens suffrage.

Disenfranchisement for all Black voters has been a common roadblock to equality at the polls both before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For the countrys current two-party system, more Black candidates at the local and state levels may help usher new generations of voters to the polls, and even more electoral visibility for alternative political parties. But, as Brown, Reed, and Berry all stress, to reduce Black voters to an indivisible unit is to deny African American voters singular identities, and distills the implied cohesion of the Black vote to a simple matter of opposition to racial inequality, while bypassing the broad range of political issues white voters can prioritize: economic uncertainty, religious freedom, environmentalism, etc. Black politics are more complex than simply a shared opposition to racial discrimination. The theme of this years Black History Month is to highlight that.

Adolph Reed is professor emeritus of political science in the School of Arts & Sciences. He has written on voting and the American electorate for many election cycles, including an article titled Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: Its Important

The idea of a Black vote is itself historically specific, and is bound up in a circular argument. Its assumed that the definitive concern is race. To assume that all Black Americans are concerned about racial justice and racial equality slides into a taxonomy issue,that is, reduces Black Americans concerns to issues that supposedly have to do with racial classification,and contends that only questionsbearing directly or explicitly onracematterto African Americans. What marks the boundaries of Black politics? Racial justice and equality are important to all African Americans, but it doesnt end there.

What we think of as the Black vote isaproduct ofa racially defined interest-group politicsthat emerged as the consolidation of the victorious social movement of the 1960s. In that interest group peoplesinterests can be reduced to what elites have defined as Blackpeoplesconcerns. But Black peopleare concerned about a lot of things, not just racewomens issues, sexual identity, union politics, etc. But then there are arguments about political campaigns as not being Black specific.

There aremoreBlack people in the U.S.than the entire population ofCanada. DoCanadian votershave Canadian essentialism? In the U.S., income inequality has been increasingacross the boardsince the 1960s and 70s;this is a function of capitalist class dynamics, not simply race, and thats true even of the worsening economic conditions experienced by Black people. If whats understood to be a Black agenda is erasing disparities, youdontaddress the general system of inequality.In thedisparitiesframework,Black people disappear in every dimension of life except racial status. There is no room foreven imagining their interests as postal workers, homeowners, railroad maintenance workers, parents, students, stamp collectors, etc.

In a polity defined by the democratic selection of leadership, things go fine when the lower tier accepts the agenda of the people at the top.At the momentwhen the lower tier acts up, the top tries to reduce access. After the defeat of the populist insurgency in the 1890s, and since Reagan empowered the right wing, the majority went after disenfranchisement. The main reason to disenfranchise voters is to actively take Blackpeople out of the political equation for two reasons: One, because of racism, and two, because Black people voted the wrong way.

If Black voters had voted with theright-wing, disenfranchisement would not have been so actively sought. Now, in the 21st century, there is no questionthe Republican Party has been openly and stealthily disenfranchising voters. The objective is to disenfranchise Black people,buteven deeper, to disenfranchise people who arent voting Republican. Reducing the Black vote to an indivisible blochelps with this.

However, I think its narrow and shortsighted not to vote. Most of the significant votes Ive cast have been because the other candidate is worse. The time to change who and what we vote for is not at the poll but between the elections.

Kathleen Brown has been teaching early American history and the history of gender and race for 25 years. She is the David Boies Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences and the author of two books and numerous articles. Her current project is Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity. (forthcoming, Penn Press)

Black voting rights have a long history of being denied, contested, defrauded, and obstructed. In the early years of Reconstruction, formerly enslaved men in the South voted for Black Republicans, the party of Lincoln. During this era, Black men became state and national officeholders in numbers that have yet to be surpassed. Entire communities of women as well as men turned out on Election Day, testifying to the importance of the vote. Abandonment by the federal government in 1877 left Black voters vulnerable to terrorist tactics, and Jim Crow laws subsequently defrauded Black southerners of the vote.

Many Black women supported the womens suffrage movement as it gathered momentum in the early twentieth century, despite the obvious racism of the movements leadership. Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and locally, Gertrude Bustill Mossell [a relative of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander] all saw possibilities for African American empowerment in womens suffrage. White suffragists from the North pandered to white supremacists in the South, which included some of the movements most important political allies. It is no exaggeration to say that the womens suffrage amendment achieved ratification in 1920 because white allies of the movement considered white womens vote to be a valuable new tool to protect white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. Upon the amendments ratification in 1920, some African American women, including in states like Virginia and Georgia, managed to circumvent voting restrictions to cast their ballots.

The historic shift in African American national political party affiliation came in the 1930s during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, a feminist social reformer who, unlike her husband, was connected politically and personally to many Black educators and activists, advocated for programs and policies that ultimately helped to sway Black voters to support the Democratic Party.Historians now judge FDR harshly for the half-measures of his policy and his continued pandering to racist southern Democrats. But the historic shift in party affiliation had taken place.

The quandary for Black voters today is to be a minority population in a political system with only two parties in which the winner takes all. In such a system, the diverse interests of African American voters can rarely be represented. A small proportion of African American voters have become Republicans because they are tired of being taken for granted by the Democratic Party.

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and a professor of history. She is the author of twelve books, including Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy, which exposes the ways Black voters have experienced voter discrimination in the U.S., including felon disfranchisement, voter identification laws, and hard-to-access polling locations with limited hours.

Weak turnout for elections is commonplace in most U.S. elections. So, making promises, though never kept, is one way to try to inspire turnout. Another way is handing out goodies on Election Day, like fried chicken boxes, or influencing the absentee ballots of nursing home residents and other probable targets. Both parties in elections at every level utilize these approaches.

For Black voters who, when they vote, usually vote for Democrats, arguing that Republicans are engaged in voter suppression is the main approach to increasing their turnout. It doesnt require serious support for easing the wealth gap, such as increasing slave-descended African American enrollments in elite higher education institutions, or actually improving K-12 education by giving poor children what well-off children receive in school (concentrated attention), or reducing mass incarcerationor even reparations. As one young man told me recently on the importance of nonviolent protest along with voting, Ive been voting and voting, and the people I vote for dont do what they say they will do, and most of the time they dont even try.

Clinton lost in 2016 in part because young people especially are wary about the efficacy of voting. Democrats ought to remember this during this 2020 election cycle.

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African Americans have been blocked from voting, but the Black vote is not a 'bloc' - Penn: Office of University Communications

Following web forums, web platforms and mobile apps, we are entering a new stage of social media the multiverse era where the virtual worlds of games expand to become mainstream hubs for social interaction and entertainment. In a seven-part Extra Crunch series, we will explore why that is the case and which challenges and opportunities are making it happen.

In 10 years, we will have undergone a paradigm shift in social media and human-computer interaction, moving away from 2D apps centered on posting content toward shared feeds and an era where mixed reality (viewed with lightweight headsets) mixes virtual and physical worlds. But were not technologically or culturally ready for that future yet. The metaverse of science fiction is not arriving imminently.

Instead, the virtual worlds of multiplayer games still accessed from phones, tablets, PCs and consoles are our stepping stones during this next phase.

Understanding this gradual transition helps us reconcile the futuristic visions of many in tech with the reality of how most humans will participate in virtual worlds and how social media impacts society. This transition centers on the merging of gaming and social media and leads to a new model of virtual worlds that are directly connected with our physical world, instead of isolated from it.

Multiverse virtual worlds will come to function almost like new countries in our society, countries that exist in cyberspace rather than physical locations but have complex economic and political systems that interact with the physical world.

Throughout these posts, I make a distinction between the physical, virtual, and real worlds. Our physical world defines tangible existence like in-person interactions and geographic location. The virtual world is that of digital technology and cyberspace: websites, social media, games. The real world is defined by the norms of what we accept as normal and meaningful in society. Laws and finance arent physical, but they are universally accepted as concrete aspects of life. Ill argue here that social media apps are virtual worlds we have accepted as real unified with normal life rather than separate from it and that multiverse virtual worlds will make the same crossover.

In fact, because they incentivize small group interactions and accomplishment of collaborative tasks rather than promotion of viral posts, multiverse virtual worlds will bring a healthier era for social medias societal impact.

The popularity of massive multiplayer online (MMO) gaming is exploding at the same time that the technology to access persistent virtual worlds with high-quality graphics from nearly any device is hitting the market. The rise of Epic Games Fortnite since 2017 accelerated interest in MMO games from both consumers who dont consider themselves gamers and from journalists and investors who hadnt paid much attention to gaming before.

In the decade ahead, people will come to socialize as much in virtual worlds that evolved from games as they will on platforms like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Building things with friends within virtual worlds will become common, and major events within the most popular virtual worlds will become pop culture news stories.

Right now, three-quarters of U.S.-based Facebook users interact with the site on a daily basis; Instagram (63%), Snapchat (61%), YouTube (51%) and Twitter (41%) have similarly penetrated the daily lives of Americans. By comparison, the percentage of people who play a game on any given day increased from just 8% in 2003 to 11% in 2016. Within the next few years, that number will multiply as the virtual worlds within games become more fulfilling social, entertainment and commercial platforms.

As I mentioned in my 2020 media predictions article, Facebook is readying itself for this future and VCs are funding numerous startups that are building toward it, like Klang Games, Darewise Entertainment and Singularity 6. Epic Games joins Roblox and Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) as among the best-positioned large gaming companies to seize this opportunity. Startups are already popping up to provide the middleware for virtual economies as they become larger and more complex, and a more intense wave of such startups will arrive over the next few years to provide that infrastructure as a service.

Over the next few years, there will be a trend: new open-world MMO games that emphasize social functionality that engages users, even if they dont care much about the mission of the game itself. These new products will target casual gamers wanting to enter the world for merely a few minutes at a time since hardcore gamers are already well-served by game publishers.

Some of these more casual, socializing-oriented MMOs will gain widespread popularity, the economy within and around them will soar and the original gaming scenario that provided a focus on what to do will diminish as content created by users becomes the main attraction.

Lets explore the forces that underpin this transition. Continue reading through the seven articles in this series (which will be linked below as they are published daily over the next six days):

Originally posted here:

A multiverse, not the metaverse - TechCrunch