The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has forced things in a way that a lot of human activities have gone virtual. Key activities like the work, education, commerce or health care are going virtual due to imposed isolation by the quarantines. The reduced mobility is being compensated by an exponential growth of telecommunications-based activities. In this way, the resilience shown by the digital networks, mainly the internet, has limited the brutal negative impact of the pandemic. The combined action of health and basic service professionals with virtual activities has avoided a worst sanitary and societal collapse. Moreover the accelerated adoption and the use of the digital technologies, even improvised, have surprised by their effectivity. A great cultural change is ongoing —in all walks of life— with long-term implications that can be vital in the current climate and environmental emergency at planetary scale. While this occurs in the mainstream societal life, at the same time, in the background, a new generation of decentralized network tools matures as a new virtual economy. The birth of "the new Internet", the metaverse.