🔮🎃 Meta; Remote work; Amazon’s reach; Climate tech; The brain & words that don’t exist ++ #346

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies. My book, Exponential, explores this transition at length.

🎙 On the podcast this week:
Net-zero emissions are essential in fighting the climate crisis, but too little attention is paid to the finer details of how we get there. On the latest episode of my podcast, I spoke to Michele Della Vigna, who runs the Carbonomics research program at Goldman Sachs, to discuss how capital markets, new technology, and government coordination could combine to accelerate the transition to a greener economy.

Michele and I discuss:

⚫ How carbon markets are broken, and why fixing them is crucial [11.05]
🔋 The role of big oil companies in decarbonising the economy [18.06]
🤝 What Michele expects to see at COP26 [42.37]

> Listen on your platform of choice.
> Read the transcript here.
> Read a summary here.

Dept of near future

The interoperability of the metaverse

🕹️ One thing that jumped out during Facebook’s rebranding as Meta was the issue of interoperability. This is what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about the concept in his Founder’s Letter this week:

The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.

This is a radical departure from Facebook’s core operating model. While it started reasonably open, so much so that individual developers could crawl all Facebook profiles, the firm has increasingly built itself up as a walled garden. How will the company rebrand itself and launch these new projects with such a radically different approach? These details are yet to evolve, perhaps because there is an incompatibility of logic in explaining why Facebook is closed and Meta will be open.