🔮 Seven rules of the metaverse; the Waste Age; Binance; optimism ++ #355

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.

The near future

🗑️ Ending the Waste Age
We live in the Waste Age, argues Justin McGuirk, the curator of the Design Museum in a challenging essay.

Nature and waste have fused at both planetary and microbiological scales. Similarly, waste is not merely a byproduct of culture: it is culture. We have produced a culture of waste. To focus our gaze on waste is not an act of morbid negativity; it is an act of cultural realism.

Rather than an age of dematerialization, our current age is very tangible: seen in the waste we produce – as much as 12bn tons of plastic waste in landfills by 2050. (And, not to mention that hundreds of billions of tons of invisible CO2 we have put into our atmosphere.)

McGuirk argues that the discipline of design is finally turning its attention, not to persuade us to consume more and waste more, bu…