Meta Couchella 2022

 Week 1 of the Meta Music festival was one for the history books. Not everyone can go to Coachella IRL (In Real Life) but they can watch the Live Stream on YouTube. And now, with Web 3 we can not only watch the Live Stream, we can enjoy it with others in a shared space with peeps all over the globe! Dancing, and turning up with friends watching our favorite live sets, swapping between the three Live Streams on the main screen.

For myself, it is further proof that we are entering A Digital Pangea. Where people from all over the world can come together in this metaphysical space and experience a concert together. We may not even speak the same language but we share similar interests such as music and art. Being in these spaces with people from Nigeria, Iran, Australia, Ukraine, Amsterdam, Italy, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and many others I may be forgetting right now, has been a surreal experience.

It has renewed my hope for the future. It is the true definition of what it means to be of one race, but appreciating our cultural differences. We are avatars on a screen, it doesn’t matter our race, religious beliefs, or our financial situation, we can come together in this space unlike any other time in human history. This is where the internet was always headed for and gives a reason for what we have gone through the past decade of social media. Where algorithms have been exploited to divide people, to focus on their differences, rather than their similarities.

Being in Web 3 and conversing with people from countries, most of which I have never even visited before, has made me see life through a different perspective, one that feels like the future. We, as a species, are overcoming obstacles that have kept us apart, physical locale, language, and a shared platform. Web 3 is allowing humans to come together and talk, share experiences like Meta Couchella. I have had so many beautiful moments this past year and continue to add to them with events like this. That is why I have been hosting the Metaverse Twitter Spaces on Friday Nights as I want to bring more awareness to the power of the Metaverse.

What I love to do is go Metaverse hopping, going from one platform to another. For Week 1, we went from the Bleace VR Gallery on the Hubs platform, to the Afrodroids Lab on the Cryptovoxels platform, to The Haderach on Mona designed by our friend James, to DCL Dating Club Love where we saw Serena Elis perform Live, to Absolut Land where we held it down in the Rainbow Room both on Decentraland.

What is great about the Afrodroids Lab is the accessibility of it, as you can enter on your phone! This is not the case for every platform however and one of the hurdles that developers are hurriedly working on to overcome. On Sunday, we actually had someone join our Twitter Space from Mexico who was not only on the phone but had a weak internet connection, he was not only able to join the Afrodroids Lab on Cryptovoxels, but he was also able to see and hear the Live Stream. It was also the first time he had ever experienced the Metaverse. Hearing his reaction live, as I have heard numerous reactions of first timers, is a mind-expanding experience.

We are taking the human experience to new planes. Yes, for too many, the first initial response to anything new and unknown is to react in fear or anger. Anger, a blanket for the vulnerability they feel when interacting with something they don’t understand. It is an attack on their fragile ego so they have to use defense mechanisms like demeaning it. When you don’t understand, you stand under. That is what fragile egos don’t like, to feel small, to feel less than, they seek what many consciously or not are seeking, to feel important. I am making it my mission to reach out to them and help them not be so stymied by it all. To take one step at a time.

As someone already immersed in Web 3, I want to lend a helping hand. For me, it’s like, how can you not see this is where the internet was always going? This leads to an important question that I feel needs to be examined more in regard to Web 3. Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Physics in general. Where does the conscious come from? What is it we are experiencing?

I will borrow a quote from the great Neil Degrasse Tyson, “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

I feel like humans have had this shift in collective consciousness since the pandemic. It has finally jolted them into questioning what is really important at the end of the day. The rise in suicide rates, drug overdose rate, the incarceration rate, all of it breaks my heart to see. Everyone can point at the problem and say, oh look there is a problem, but how many are offering solutions? And what are those solutions leading to? More of the same?

In America, the focus is always on the drug smuggler rather than the drug user, and even less focus on why people are doing the drugs in such high rates in the first place. I ask people to take a step back.

In Bleace I constantly ask, what is normal? We think we have this grounding, that all of these questions have been answered, why? Because it gives us comfort, we can sleep at night thinking we have this common basis for knowledge, when actually there is still so many unanswered questions.

We, as a species, have not even been to the closest planet to our own. What does that say about where we are on the evolutionary scale? Again, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. One thing that cannot be proven yet is if we are living in a simulation.

I say this because we need to look at our physical bodies like we do the avatars on a screen. Where does our consciousness physically come from? What is that voice inside your head? Where is that physically, note the keyword here is the physical substance of the brain, where are these thoughts and dreams coming from?

This also ties to the illusion of currency. I hear people saying Crypto isn’t real. I laugh at that, because what makes their current currency real? That you can print a dollar bill? Give a dollar to an Octopus and see how much use that has. Eat a dollar bill a day and see how long you live. Therefore, it’s an illusion, one that people place a value on and are willing to accept.

Ok. Now, returning back to obstacles, another one is our currency. There are a variety of currencies circulating the world now. What would bring us closer together would be more shared currencies that can be used globally. We have been in this global economy for decades, and the global currency has not kept up with this evolution, and this is by design. There are a few who are making billions from the way things are now with certain centralized banks. This will be another mountain we must climb as humans. It is for the benefit of all those who have starved to death, especially those who have starved to death or been worked to death en masse in the past 30 years.

Who says it has to be this way? Who agreed to work five days and get two days off? No paid holidays. No paid sick leave. Pay for health care? Pay for electricity? These are basic human rights that millions need to survive. Who says we have to pay money for those services when they should just be done. I am not saying there aren’t going to be future problems with this evolution.

That is not the way of the universe. It takes protons, neutrons and electrons to create an atom. All are essential for life. We have to embrace it all for what it’s worth. What matters will be here to stay, anti-matter will also fade away and not win out at the end of the day, if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here anyway! The greatest currency there is; is your effect on others. I believe that in the fullest and most truest sense possible. Money, the value humans place on currency, is an illusion. It lives in their mind for narcissistic causes. That is the main problem, the main flaw with humanity as a whole, is narcissism. So many issues can be tied to it.

Exploding Harpoons is one. Humans invented exploding harpoons so that they could easily kill Blue Whales. They drove them almost to extinction before regulation was put in to help save them. Humans have to be told by illusory laws to not fully annihilate a peaceful, mother nature loving creature. What does that ultimately say about the illusion? The fetish humans have with it. Fetishistic Disorder, using nonliving objects or having highly specific focus on nongenital body parts. The obsession with this illusion has driven humans to commit atrocities. All for an illusion? For more on this, please check out my thesis paper, Users with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

I have bills that I CHOOSE to pay. I choose to pay those bills and ultimately that is where this kind of behavior gets ‘normalized’ is by humans saying they HAVE to do something like use illusory currency to pay for something like rent, food, or electricity. What they pay for mostly is convenience. They want to live convenient lives outside of the fact that they work at a job they hate, living miserable lives and spreading that misery to others, namely their children, who grow up to do the same thing. No one asks, why? Why is this behavior normal?

I think as a species, we need to look at our bodies as an avatar, may we downplay life a bit and call it a game, as we would playing GTA. Maybe our dreams are our reality? We glimpse outside the simulation from time to time, but again, that can not be proven or disproven given our current knowledge of Quantum Mechanics. But as we look at our life as this game, and our bodies as this avatar, certain things stop making sense, like going to a job that we hate to make this illusory money that is just numbers on a screen at this point, going from one account to another. You could call it points, you’re getting points for playing the game.

Now some of what people do for these illusory points is quite dangerous, and some are downright degrading, ever work in the service industry or at a cemetery? I have. Neither were very pleasant as the people getting served want to be made important, how is this done? By making servants not important, a steppingstone, a point of reference that they are a success in this game, they are doing better at the game than you, you are why they do the game, they walk by a homeless human being and say to their children, don’t want to end up like that when you get older.

And by looking at life like this, I hope then you will gain a little more respect for what is happening with Web 3 and these Metaverses. Don’t be a person, who lashes out in anger when they feel vulnerable. Embrace that vulnerability, grow from it. I have a deep veneration for the universe, there is a lot that I don’t understand and I welcome that. Learning is a lifelong process. Don’t become complacent in life, continue to venture in this experience. Go Further. I hope you will join us this weekend on Twittter or Twitch @BleaceNFT ! Live Streaming on Bleace YouTube Channel, be sure to support & Subscribe!