This post has maybe less to do with Footwear than the title suggests, but I hope the video below can be a useful introduction to the Metaverse with which footwear is increasingly becoming aligned and connected. Speaking in the video is also Maye Musk the mother of Elon.
We have all heard of Bitcoin, Blockchain, NFT’s, 5G, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, the Internet, Zoom and Social Media. The Metaverse from what I understand would be the ultimate digital ecosystem and merge all the digital technologies together, including Digital Footwear.
It all seems like a new and fascinating world that is being developed, with infinite fantastic experiences to chose and new flourishing economies, but at the same time it also seems a bit dehumanising to live inside a more simplistic video game world. And will we continue to value the natural world as we increasingly lose our awareness and interaction with it?
And as footwear designers will we eventually face the choice between encouraging a less physically active indoor culture, disconnected to the physical world and/or losing our commercial relevance?
The photo below from Vogue Czechoslovakia (interesting that Vogue would chose a country that no longer exists) shows Maye Musk wearing Digital Clothes and Footwear, possibly purchased online and downloaded from Wanna Kicks.
I ended one of my latest posts Digital Footwear, The Future of Footwear? with the Fermi Paradox which I would like propose again because I feel that maybe it helps explain the root cause of the current shifts.
The Fermi Paradox named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, asks “if we assume that highly intelligent beings exist, why have they not visited us (from Wikipedia)?”. If I am not mistaken, on of the reasons proposed by Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom is that “assumptions about the general development or behaviour of intelligent species are flawed and that we see no signs of intelligence elsewhere in the universe because intelligent alien life develops an “increasing disinterest” in their outside world”.
…OK stay with me :)))) This could be the main reason for why Digital Footwear may become the Future of Footwear.
Author Stephen Webb also wrote that “some advanced beings may have divested themselves of physical form, creating massive artificial virtual environments, transferring themselves into these environments through mind uploading, and existing totally within virtual worlds, ignoring the external physical universe”.
And many years ago Julian Assange also mentioned in 2017 at a London Festival (at about minute 21) that mind uploading was already being developed in Silicon Valley, but maybe more out of spite than an impartial informed observer.
“I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life,”
Stephen Webb continued: “Possibly any sufficiently advanced society will develop highly engaging media and entertainment well before the capacity for advanced space travel, with the rate of appeal of these social contrivances being destined, because of their inherent reduced complexity, to overtake any desire for complex, expensive endeavors such as space exploration and communication”. Which despite the recent space tourism and plans to colonise mars, seems pretty much what has happened in the last 100 years as media technology has exponentially grown.
“Once any sufficiently advanced civilization becomes able to master its environment, and most of its physical needs are met through technology, various “social and entertainment technologies”, including virtual reality, are postulated to become the primary drivers and motivations of that civilization”….what do you all think?
It’s not so hard to imagine that if due to continued health scares like Covid, bars and clubs will be replaced by virtual meeting spaces. And thus, maybe gradually, as a consequence of the lockdowns, home office and our digitally directed cellphone app life, with increasingly reduced physical contact, it could be that the future of footwear is digital. And who knows maybe even walk us into the Simulation Theory?
74 FOOTWEAR DESIGN CONSULTING 