Which world will it be in 2023?

As the title of one of the last Bond films so beautifully put it: "The world is not enough". Quite a few people seem to be following this motto these days and are approaching noticeably unreal delusions of grandeur. This no longer only refers to the physical realities around us, but these ideas have long since arrived with force in the digitally expanded pseudo-universe.

We can no longer really speak of a "world", as we are talking about "platforms" around which everything ultimately revolves, like the earth around the sun. The starting point is actually always the inadequacy and imperfection of Mother Earth, the only habitat available to us (so far anyway).

Since 2017 at the latest, journalist David Wallace-Wells has put the climate apocalypse firmly in the spotlight of visions of the future with the most widely read article in the 52-year history of the weekly "New York Magazine", "The Uninhabitable Earth", and the bestselling book of the same name published two years later. At the World Climate Conference in Egypt, UN Secretary-General António Guterres even spoke of a "Highway to Climate Hell" (alluding to a well-known AC/DC hard rock song). However, Mr. Guterres obviously didn't have the German freeway network or even the A45 in mind, because then we wouldn't really have to worry! Or maybe we would, because the journey would be the destination ...

Now, however, Wallace-Wells has suddenly rowed back and recently said in a follow-up article ("Beyond catastrophe: A new climate reality comes into view") that things would not be (quite) so bad. People don't really want to hear the bad word "hell" anymore anyway, just as Copernicus and Nietzsche denied its existence in the first place (even Pope Francis once, but the Vatican promptly collected this). In any case, discussions on this topic will remain in vogue in 2023.

Meanwhile, climate activists ("Last Generation") are drawing inglorious attention to themselves with their own sticky "double whammy". Tomato soup and mashed potato on expensive paintings with simultaneous "sticking" of their slopes to prevent removal are intended to show how serious the situation is. Increasingly, the flow of traffic is also being attacked by sticker blockades. A growing market of protests: the trend is rising.

Those who find it all too much can simply opt out, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested. The current idea of the CEO of the company "Meta Platforms" is a new kind of parallel world, this time a digital one, called "Metaverse" (or Metaverse). However, this should be closely interlinked with the real world and be located somewhere above it ("meta"). It should then be possible to move seamlessly back and forth between the worlds. The construct ultimately represents an enhancement of virtual reality (VR), only with many more possibilities.

For example, you can travel around the world as an avatar and meet up with friends, go on dates or even earn real (crypto) money. The avatars really have to be imagined as artificial, self-created people or simply graphic figures. This kind of thing is already commonplace in computer games.

The idea of computer avatars and the metaverse actually comes from the 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash" by the American writer Neal Stephenson. In this deeply dark end-time prose, a world is presented in which the state withdraws completely from public life and everything, including the police and judiciary, even governments and therefore states, is privatized. The only way to escape from this terrible "anarcho-capitalist dystopia" (what a great expression!) is as an avatar in a metaverse. Incidentally, the word "avatar" comes from the ancient Indian Sanskrit (avatara) and means something like descent. In Hinduism, this refers to the descent of a deity into earthly realms.

However, it was not a god that fell, but merely the share price of Zuckerberg's Meta Group. The stock market value fell by no less than 67 billion dollars within a few hours, which corresponds to 25 percent of the market value, and since the beginning of the year it has fallen by more than 70 percent. One reason is the metaverse, which devours a lot of development costs for new virtual worlds, but turnover is comparatively low. The fact that the project could become a success at some point is like a bet with an uncertain outcome. Zuckerberg is acting according to the "all-in" poker rule. He still has a lot up his sleeve. He can also flee to the metaverse to save the world. The 11,000 employees who are now to be made redundant are unlikely to be able to do that.

In all this confusion, the VUCA world emerges, almost unnoticed by most people. This actually refers to the capitulation of the human mind to what it is doing. Sounds terrible, but it is. VUKA simply stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambivalent. These four ingredients can be used to stir up a nice spicy soup of chaos. In this world, companies are finding it increasingly difficult to remain successful on the market. This is characterized by rapidly changing framework conditions, a lack of planning certainty, complex networks and ambiguous and contradictory information. The main pressure comes from the speed at which everything happens. The term originally comes from the American military and describes the conditions in war zones. A sad reality and highly topical, especially in 2023.

With all this damage, the concept of resilience is increasingly coming into focus. Originally borrowed from psychology, it describes the robustness of a system when disruptions occur. We have enough of these, and not just with regard to dilapidated bridge structures. The targeted severing of lines, as has happened and been seen with the railroads, can paralyze entire regions. It is probably not so easy to prevent attacks; we should be more concerned with the possible consequences.

But then there's always the metaverse, in case Zuck (his Instagram name) turns things around. He seems to want to overtake the VUKA world, but his avatars are obviously not fast enough for that. In any case, there will be plenty to do in our (brave new?) world in 2023.

About the author: Prof. Dr. Michael Schreckenberg, born in 1956, studied theoretical physics at the University of Cologne, where he gained his doctorate in statistical physics in 1985. In 1994, he moved to the University of Duisburg-Essen, where he was awarded the first German professorship for the physics of transport and traffic in 1997.