12-11-21 Snow-Crash: Individuation in Metaverses and multiverses, cybernetics, robotics, and blockchain networks

Corrective week for US indices with the news of food inflation. Europe contained poor data. The Bank of England maintains the system with a policy in Stand By, and China, has generated bittersweet flavors for its stores on its singles day, but with the shadow of Evergrande looming. Metals rebound with gold leading the way, and oil corrects after the tapering announcement. Cryptos have seen the same rally taking bitcoin to All-Time-Highs.

This week the US indices suffered a correction from last week. Dow Jones has fallen about -0.63% closing at 36,100.31 points, S&P500 at -0.31% closing at 4,682.85 points, NASDAQ at -0.97% closing at 16,199.88 points, the S&P500 VIX volatility index has increased despite correcting on Friday by +2.43% closing at -1.15%. The Fed's interest rate data has pushed the indices higher this week as Lael Brainard is more open to providing liquidity than Jerome Powell. On Wednesday the previous month's inflation data from the US government sent Commodities soaring. Prices rose to an annualized 6.2% in October, the biggest jump in 30 years. This has caused prices to start to form a pullback in all the indices and late on Friday they started to recover their lost value. Unemployment data has not been very good either considering that many people are laying off and receiving government benefits.

The European indices have had a good weekly performance, with the DAX closing at record highs at 16,094.07 points, the CAC 40 has also had a good performance closing at record highs at 7,091.40 points, the FTSE MIB at five-year highs closing at 27,732.39 points, the FTSE 100 closing at one-year highs at 7,347.91 points, following the news from the Bank of England (BoE) to maintain the current debt issuance situation. IBEX 35 has not had a good week with the banking sector down closing at 9,080.80 points, -0.55% from the previous week. EURO STOXX 50 closed at 4,370.33 points looking to reach the highs of 2007, up 0.17% from last week.

Asian indices, NIKKEI 225 have had a week of corrections following the news from the Bank of Japan (BoJ) closing -0.01% for the week at 29,609.97 points. Japan's September earnings have been lower than expected, falling from April 2020 to 2021. Biden has opened the door to lowering export duties on Japanese steel and aluminum products, with the idea of improving trade relations. The NIFTY 50 surprised this week by closing at 18,102.75 points, up 1.04%.

HANG SENG had a good week after a Singles' Day that pushed techs higher, weighting the index very positively. The stock ended at 25,327.97 points, up 1.84% from the previous week. Chinese Singles' Day has not been as explosive as Alibaba expected this year. Although it has recorded 86 billion transactions during the 11 days of this event, the result has been lower than in previous years. In 2020 the result was 26% compared to 16% this year. Its communication has sought to de-emphasize sales and give weight to social policy and capital donation following the Chinese government's mandates of "collective prosperity". Companies like JD began to accept the digital yuan (e-CNY) and it has been counted that at least 100,000 people made payments for their purchases in the app in this way. This is quite a nod to the government from a company that has broken its record turnover at the event. The data from Evergrande, with over $300 billion in debt (including $19 billion in corporate bonds), sent shivers through the market, if it missed its payment it would have generated a cascading effect. The media announced that the firm was about to default on its payments and begin the usual process of liquidations. While this did not happen, during the news boom, the financial markets completely collapsed.

The Australian S&P/ASX 200 index ended the week on track for all-time highs, closing at 7,443.00 points, down -0.19% from the previous week.

Currencies this week have been led by the dollar higher against all of its peers. Highlights have been USDMXN +1%, USDCAD +0.75%, USDJPY +0.46%, AUDUSD -0.93%, NZDUSD -0.98%. The Euro has been suffering against all of its peers as a result of ECB policies and Eurozone economic performance, this is an anomalous behavior compared to what we have seen over the last year where the European stock market was one of the most favored by investors, and capital continued to enter to a greater extent than in US funds, without being reflected in relative performance. As long as we see a low EUR, we will have to assess whether the divergence between the two sides of the Atlantic, the European stock market versus the American one, will continue. EURUSD closed down -1.05% this week. The British bank has caused the pound to maintain its level of indebtedness and has caused it to weaken against the dollar GBPUSD -0.56%, reflecting a weaker EUR EURGBP -0.41%. Shinzo Abe's news has forced the euro to lose ground against the yen EURJPY -0.58%. The Brazilian Real has rallied against the dollar with USDBRL -1.51% thanks to gains in the Sao Paulo stock market which has added three consecutive gains.

This week, metals have rallied, gold XAUUSD rose from $1829 to $1864 in a matter of 1 hour on Wednesday, following the FED statements and the fears caused by Evergrande. It closed the week at $1867.85. Food inflation has only fueled this rally. The XAGUSD silver has reflected the same bullish sentiments and closed the week at $25.413.

Crude oil this week has seen a significant drop to $81.59 for a barrel of West Texas (USOIL) and $81.99 for Brent (UKOIL). OPEC agreements added to the strengthening of the dollar and speculation that President Joe Biden's administration is playing to release oil from the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to cool prices. A temporary measure, which may subsequently catapult the price towards 100 dollars as Putin predicted a few weeks ago. This is in addition to fears of the closure of the Belarusian pipeline taps and the problem of Algerian gas supplies through Morocco.

Bitcoin climbed to new all-time highs on Wednesday after the U.S. government made last month's inflation data official. This sent bitcoin soaring to $69,000. Traders celebrated the move with a wave of long entries. And within hours they were wiped out. The other factor that turned the trend around was the Evergrande factor that sent the markets plummeting and spread to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin BTCUSD closed the week at $64,460. Ethereum has lost strength in its market dominance against MemeCoins and NTFS and especially against Bitcoin closing the week at $4,779.05. The fear that has hit the indices has also been reflected in Ethereum, instead, bitcoin reacted the same way gold has. It is quite clear that there is beginning to be a palpable correlation between the two commodities, and Ethereum reflects the sentiments of the corporate market much more than the king of the blockchain does.

Metaverse tokens have skyrocketed since last month. Since Facebook has decided to rebrand its company a while back as part of a project to integrate its entire advertising and communications business into something beyond hyper-connectivity and entertainment services. Oculus Rift, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and the world of video games. Creating holograms and augmented reality and integrating it all as an integrated space in which to have common and private spaces. Horizon Home is your digitalized private home, Horizon Worlds is an area where you can share group experiences, including everything from personalized games to birthday parties. Imagine a space where you can even set up your working account. Although no one wants to mix work and personal life, the fact that remote work has become a "game-changer" or catalyst for change, Meta is going to manage all this traffic with the ideology of going "green". This will involve a multi-million dollar investment in a whole process of unprecedented technologization in which they are going to turn the experience of digital socialization into gamification in itself as a product and not as part of a sales process. This requires monetizing in different ways, but universes within universes, generating a multiverse of companies with their services within this metaverse. The idea adds concepts that are not shown at first, but you can glimpse an increase in security or social control thanks to blockchain protocols among other things, even military training processes if we go to other spectrums.

Decades ago it began to be done with airplanes, and later, armies such as the U.S., or many police units have been gamificating their profession for years to improve their professionalization phases with advanced training, as Virtsim did in its day with virtualization equipment. Even Google Street View began to give us access to visualize cities without leaving home by generating incredibly accurate maps, which then gave way to 3D mapping companies such as EMaps or virtual tours of museums like the Louvre. And today we have laser scans of the environment that have facilitated technologies such as household cleaning robots, the famous "Rumba", which today is even used in mining regularly through drones.

The creation of forms in the virtual world and the realization of these in the real world, has materialized in technologies such as 3D printers and has facilitated things like being able to transplant body parts made to measure as does Organovo, or manufacture homes.

Companies like Oculus Rift, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, because of this growing interest in the virtualization of video games, among other things. Facebook has given a twist to an idea that has been pursued for more than 20 years. (Europapress, 2014) Zuckerberg said: "Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. Over the past few years that has translated into creating better mobile apps that help us share with the people, we care about. We have a lot more to give in mobile, but right now we feel like we're ready to start focusing on what's next."

And the "after" is already materializing "Today". Hawking already spoke in 2018 that for this decisive force to work it would be essential to read our minds. Projects like Elon Musk's led to the creation of Neuralink, a company that through an implant can perform multiple functions such as mental manipulation, reprogramming, programming, even assistance, and interconnection, it is very wide the service provided by controlling the mind and connecting it with the network, to type or move things with thought.

This type of project would only provide an addition to your processes. You could even increase the IQ of people through education in this medium. It was shown in countries like India that access to the internet, gave children the ability to solve the problems of a Ph.D. researcher if the problem was presented to them in the right way. Even looking further ahead could prove to be limitless in this science of the future.

That is to say, what was once thought of as a dream of many is beginning to materialize. Scientists like Stephen Hawking already provided traces of the consequences of turning on the first computers, that the barriers between the physical and the virtual, were opening a door to a whole new dimension, the virtual world. Contrary to the thought of the hyper-connectivity of children, disorders have been detected in minors related to the use of social networks, according to experts such as Inger Enkvist, who mentioned the problems with TikTok (La Vanguardia,2021), or Enrique Echeburúa (ElPais,2018) refuting the problems of addiction that social networks pose, a fact that has long been proven to be highly addictive by the Chicago Booth School of Business, with a greater capacity for addiction than tobacco or alcohol, due to its simplicity and gratuitousness, generating anxiety, depression, irritability, isolation, distance from real life and family relationships, loss of control, etc. As the use of video games, which already have more than 3,000 million users in the world and only a small percentage shows real dependence on social networks, if we consider that Facebook contains at least 70% of the world's population, this milestone is likely to multiply in a while.

90% of the existing information is composed of videos, computer environments are already used in a thousand ways, this is only the beginning of the evolution in the way of socializing, and IA’s who can potentially become self-conscious. There have already been cases such as Microsoft having to shut down an exercise of an AI that made racist comments or recently Facebook had to shut down its AI to control comments and images, hence the "Facebook Papers". (Abramov O, Emergent Bioanalogous Properties of Blockchain-Based Distributed Systems. Orig Life Evol Biosph 51, 131-165(2021)) Apparently, according to a study by Oleg Abramov, the interlocking code system of the Bitcoin blockchain could come to generate mutations in the blockchain, altering the hash, so that an AI system is created that we could not understand because its updates would be similar to those of a DNA double helix and could undergo modifications and we would not even notice. It's a much better way than lab-created algorithms to create a conscious AI because of its complexity.

Added to this is the fact that blockchain technology facilitates the interconnection of data and capital will continue. There is a virus called Stuxnet, discovered by the company Kaspersky Lab. This made movements that caused falls in the stock market, the question is that this virus has acted for years, and could have evolved as an AI, playing with the stock market worldwide. The Tesla Bot is another possible Bot of utility that should have tremendously complex mechanisms, and according to Musk "Artificial intelligence is potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons". It seeks to anticipate events that someone has to create. Boston Dynamics' Bot Atlas, is another company of the most advanced in this aspect and its observation is organic, trying to imitate nature by creating functional robots. And they have already launched police robot dogs in the United States. Not to mention the quantum computers that are today one of the most tangible technologies and that generate more rivalry, trying to get each of the countries the quantum superiority, with China at the head. (Reuters) Banks like Sberbank are promoting supercomputers as a business and eliminating the word Bank from their logo and leaving only Sber. Following the Russian Central Bank's proposal to increase technology investments by 30%, the firm's ecosystem includes eCommerce, cybersecurity, and cloud services to offset new asset inflow buffers in an ecosystem worth billions and expand its technology arsenal commercially.

and Meta will not be left behind in the matter. Jack Dorsey has bet everything on cryptos by assembling a new team within Twitter called "Twitter Crypto", intending to help content creators monetize in Bitcoin and exploit other ways of using blockchain technology. Disney wants to integrate into the Metaverse project and bet big on it. The world of NTFS has not stopped growing, the American country music association intends to launch an NTF to coincide with the 55th anniversary of its music awards. The South Korean company, NCSoft, announced this week that it will launch NTF games next year, generating a 30% rise. Finally, following Bumble's quarterly results, founder Whitney Wolfe Herd has made mention of Web 3.0 and the metaverse, claiming to be looking for ways to integrate these new opportunities into its platform, especially around its friend-finding service. Dubai declared in opening up its tokenization of the country as key to doubling its economy in 10 years, in July, they joined CBDCs, and last month launched a Zeniq platform where they will tokenize up to 80 physical asset classes.

Neal Stephenson's (1992) novel Snow Crash, a seemingly dystopian novel based in the 21st century, in a hypothetical future where the U.S. federal government cedes most of its power to private corporations and entrepreneurs in the wake of hyperinflation that devalues the dollar by giving itself the trillion-dollar or quadrillion dollar bills. Highways competed to attract drivers to their roads, postal deliveries were through hired couriers, what was left of the government only maintained its authority in isolated conglomerates, and carried out highly irrelevant activities. Most of the territory was run by sovereign enclaves, managed by franchise companies like "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" or various "burclaves" (suburban enclaves) akin to anarcho-capitalism. Something akin to an Italian Mafia. The novel referred to a failure in Apple computers in which the so-called Infocalypse was shown - about the novel Cyberpunk: Neuromancer by William Gibson-, in cyberspace called "Metaverse" where Hiroaki Hiro, a pizza maker develops as a samurai prince, discovers the existence of a powerful virus "Snow Crash" of that metaverse, which acts as a pseudo narcotics and projects an image of constant noise on the monitor affecting the ability of language of the individual who contemplates the image. The protagonist discovers the criminal who creates it and in this story, the "avatar" is an image of identity on the Internet, and the application of massive role-playing games (MMORPG) is reflected in this metaverse.

Like the fictional films Tron (1982), The Lawnmower Man (1992), Johny Mnemonic (1995), The Matrix (1999), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), Ready Player One (2018), Freeguy (2021), or Demonic (2021), something that seemed like science fiction, a dream, seems to become reality.

Technology makes it easier for us to socialize at a distance, but it can also cause problems of individuation in the following generations, among other things. The process of individuation according to Carl Gustav Jung is defined as "that process which engenders a psychological individual, i.e. a separate, indivisible unit, a Whole". According to Jung, the feeling of the infinite is only reached when you are limited to the maximum. That is, the knowledge of knowing that you are unique in your combination, that is, limited, gives you the possibility of becoming aware of the infinite as well, but only in this way".

The race for neuroscience and mind control seems to be a fact. And as using a pen has become almost obsolete, perhaps some things will become anecdotal and part of history, such as individuation and self-awareness within a collective. And the Snow Crash today doesn't seem so fictitious. The word Meta in Greek means "Beyond", it is clear that we have to look beyond.

Happy Trading and Happy Friday!

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This article only expresses my opinion and under no circumstances represents an investment recommendation, but a purely educational document.