The Multiverse™ consists of eight different realms: Reality, Virtuality, Augmented Reality, Alternate Reality, Warped Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Physical Virtuality, and Mirrored Virtuality. This maybe considered cutting edge storytelling, see what celelbrated author Joe Pine author of Infinite Possibility says about about the Multiverse. I asked Joe in a podcast, “Can you possibly simplify this message for the listeners that are hearing about it for the first time?”
Related Podcast and Transcription: Multiverse with Joe Pine
Joe Pine: I’m not sure I can, frankly. But we’ll try, and we’ll see what happens. I freely admit that the core framework in “Infinite Possibility” is the most complex thing I’ve ever brought together. But I think it does, in fact, provide a sense making tool, a map, if you will,help people figure out what is going on with all this explosion of digital technology.
While it may be difficult to understand and to internalize it, I think it will reward those who do, and use it as their map to figure out where they can find new opportunities to create economic value on the digital frontier. That’s what it’s about. It’s about how do you use digital technology, again, to fuse the real and the virtual?
At its core, one of the reasons it’s complex is that, well, you know, I often say, it’s actually a very humble framework, because it merely attempts to redefine the known universe, which physicists tell us is made up of three fundamental dimensions – time, space, and matter. That’s what the universe is.
We’ve always viewed those as constraints that we’re limited by time; we’ve got only so much space, we’ve got to move matter around and it costs us whenever we expand resources on matter. But, in fact, they are resources that we can use, particularly when you see what is possible with digital technology.
What brought it forward to me was that I was reading Stan Davis’ book “Future Perfect.” I’m here today because of that book. He coined the term “mass customization.” I read that as a strategic planner at IBM. My first full book was on that topic. I was rereading it once, and Stan also had another term in that book he called “no-matter.” No-matter, which is recognizing that, increasingly, the value in companies will come from immaterial things, in other words, from bits as opposed to atoms.
I got to thinking about the three fundamental dimensions in the universe again, time, space, and matter. I realized no?matter is the opposite of matter. Matter is about atoms, again. No-matter is about bits. Matter is about the material substances that we can touch and feel and use to create physical offerings whereas no?matter is about the digital substances that we can’t touch and feel. They are immaterial. They reside inside of a computer somewhere. But we can use them to create digital offerings.
Once it struck me that you take the three dimensions and the X-Y-Z axis and you move matter backwards into no?matter then you can do the same with the others. If there’s no-matter, there must be no-space. Space is about the real places that we inhabit in which we have experiences. No-space is about virtual places. Places that do not exist in reality that, actually, only exist in our minds and reactions to what we see, generally, on a screen.
Then, if there’s matter/no-matter and space/no-space there must be time and no-time. Time is about the actual events that are unspooling before us, moment by moment. Whereas no-time is about autonomous events, any way that you get outside of actual time, whether to put people into the past, make them envision the future, get them in flow where a sense of time falls away.
Hyperlink it like you can on the web, where you’re on Facebook or LinkedIn where you post something at one time, and somebody comes back with an asynchronous time. Later, you respond to that, and it’s like you have this conversation, but it’s all done at different times. So that’s autonomous events, any way that you play with time.
What this then yields is, in fact, a complex, yes, two by two by two where you’ve got eight realms of experience, depending on which choices you make between the time and no-time, matter and no-matter, space and no-space.
Are you with me so far, Joe?
Related Podcast and Transcription: Multiverse with Joe Pine
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