It's the obsession of Silicon Valley and open source hackers to build the Metaverse. From their clouds they offer safety on their platforms by locking things down, limiting self expression, and monitoring free speech. Meanwhile a coalition of artists, VR devs, and cypherpunks across the internet are converging across a spectrum of virtual worlds, creating art using blockchain technology. These are pioneers of an open source movement, encoding history into an immutable distributed ledger.

This year FB, the biggest VR company in the world, updated their policies such that new devices are connected to real names, quietly record everything in the background, while invisible guards patrol the playgrounds. Fall out of line and you may risk being deleted, losing access to everything. This is all before they plan to launch their digital currency, Libra, which would further extend their control into the real world as well.

Both clips are taken from around the same time and showcase similar virtual production techniques between one of the most powerful tech companies in the world next to a rag tag group of artists and indies talking about cryptoart. This piece is to commemorate a moment in history where the juxtaposition between a big tech and an indie underground event can symbolize very different visions for the future.