Charlotte Dune's Lagoon

Humans are hardwired to be storytellers, story consumers, testers and builders, listeners, learners, communicators, and designers. Since the dawn of humankind, we’ve relied on stories to unite and separate communities and to spread lies and truths. The metaverse will expand our capacity to create and experience stories and worlds.

As author Lisa Chron wrote in her book, Story Genius, “Story was the world’s first virtual reality.”

We use the categorization and naming of “ages” to chart our creation efforts and the evolution of humankind’s technological developments.

For example, we’ve had the following creation periods:

·      Bronze Age

·      Iron Age

·      Late Middle Ages

·      Renaissance

·      Early Modern history

·      Modern History

·      Industrial Age (1760-1970)

·      Machine Age (1880–1945)

·      Age of Oil (1901–present)

·      Jet Age (1940s)

·      Atomic Age (a.k.a. Nuclear Age) (1945/1950–present) [2]

·      Space Age (1957–present)

·      Information Age (1970–present)

·      The Multimedia Age (1987–present)

·      The Social Age (1996–present)

·      The Big Data Age (2001–present)[3]

Alongside these ages and technological developments, we’ve experienced parallel storytelling innovations. If we look at the ages by storytelling method, maybe we’d say:

* Stone carvings/hieroglyphics

* The invention of paper

* Printing press

* Refillable ink pens

* Typewriters

* Computers

* The Internet

* Social Media

* The democratization of video and image production

(I’m not adding the Deep fakes/Botapocalypse/AI storytelling here because it hasn’t been democratized and isn’t accessible to the masses)

Now, I believe we will eventually enter a new phase; I call it, The Age of Imagination. Other folks have called it the same, though I didn’t know this until I decided to search for the term.

Wikipedia defines the Age of Imagination as: “a theoretical period beyond the Information Age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value. In contrast, the main activities of the Information Age are analysis and thinking.”

During the Age of Imagination, the creation of worlds, of digital worldbuilding, like video game worlds, will become democratized. The metaverse will enable this new era.

What do I mean by the democratization of worldbuilding? Well, in the past, it took a team of people reproducing words to spread textual messages; each book and article needed to be hand-copied. Next, the printing press made it easier to spread text. Then we had publishing companies and centralized text-spreaders, and now we have self-publishing, the Internet, blogs, social media, and anyone can publish and spread ideas (even robots). Mass written communication is democratized. Even the creation of websites has basically been democratized.

Likewise, in the past, it required a huge budget, heavy equipment, and teams of people make a movie. Now anyone can make films cheaply and easily with their cellphone and distribute them online at a very low cost. So, by democratization I mean the cheap and easy production; I believe this is coming next for worlds, aka immersive video games/experiences/digital, virtual communities.

People like Mark Zuckerberg are extremely focused on building a composable metaverse, also known as Web3.  “Composability” — the ability to create, change, and easily build out worlds is paramount to Meta’s vision and Zuckerberg has repeated this many times.

Others, like the founders of Sandbox and Decentraland are equally intent on ensuring composability and on making sure these worlds are not only “buildable” by users, but are also decentralized, owned, and governed by the users, unlike Meta which will be governed by a corporation/the government’s laws that govern the corporation’s activities…

The vision of these composable worlds, of the metaverse itself, which Zuckerberg refers to not as a “place” but as a “time period,” is exciting for many reasons, but I’d like to focus on its application to writing and storytelling.

Within the metaverse, creators and authors will soon be able to build entire worlds. They’ll be able to allow readers to immerse themselves in the virtual worlds of their books. Characters can be avatars readers will wear or interact with (more on this later as it raises some unique ethical concerns). Authors can build the locations for their stories. Readers will also be able to build fan kingdoms. You could even build your own thematic- amusement park bookstore that only sold your books and the books of your other favorite authors. Books and video games could merge in a new way, like virtual versions of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels of my childhood.

Already, anyone can use text-based instructions to create visual art with the assistance of AI. This simplicity of creation via text will eventually work for video and then for virtual world construction.

For my own Psychedelic Love Series books, I’d love to create virtual worlds of the psychedelic trips in the novels, where readers could step in and experience the visuals and sensations I’ve written about — like they were really inside the character’s minds.

For example, here is an image I made with AI to represent one of the psychedelic trips in my book, Mushroom Honeymoon.

In this scene, Thelma, the main female character sees a prophetic vision of a spider eating an organ during a psilocybin mushroom trip. This is a darker scene in the book, but one could create a fantastic, joyous scene to embody and experience just as easily.

The possibilities for these creator-driven worlds are as endless as the human imagination. This is why I call the inception of the new, buildable metaverse the dawn of the Age of Imagination.

As I mentioned, this is not a new term. The Age of Imagination was first coined in 1993 by designer and writer Charlie Magee. He writes, “People today make an income by manipulating information, therefore, The Information Age. People made an income with industrial and agricultural tools, therefore The Industrial and Agricultural Ages. The assumption is that human society can be adequately described in the terms of the tool we use to purchase survival. This type of planning for the future is like trying to walk across town with binoculars glued to your eyeballs. We need a bigger metaphor, one that encompasses much more than economics, one that occurs before anything can be purchased or acquired. I suggest that communication is a better metaphor for understanding human evolution. Evolution equals survival of the fittest communicators.”

You can read his entire essay on this topic here.

The idea was later elaborated on by writer, Rita King in 2007, who said, “The Imagination Age is a way to think about transitioning from the Industrial Era, as much as transitioning into the Intelligence Era. If we apply imagination to the way we work, we can intentionally design better ways of working instead of continually reacting.”(from Forbes’ Thinkers and Innovators series)

And many modern thinkers, especially GenZ and Gen Alpha westerners, are perfectly poised to enter this new age because they’ve already grown up with composable, digital worlds through extremely popular games like Minecraft and Roblox, both of which are buildable digital worlds easy enough for young children to use.

VRChat is a popular composable world currently in the Metaverse, with Decentraland and Sandbox also on the rise. However, VRchat is challenging to build worlds in and has a high learning curve. It also requires expensive equipment, same with Meta’s Horizon’s world- their own VRChat competitor. As many have stated, we are in the Pong era of the metaverse, and it’s not yet accessible to everyone. In the future, this will change, and building worlds will become as easy and cheap as making blog posts.

Imagine if Michael Angelo could build the Sistine Chapel almost for free, as easily as one creates a Facebook group? The Age of Imagination will allow a future Michael Angelo to do this. Anyone will be able to construct entire planets, villages, landscapes, museums, historical worlds, future worlds, and cities for others across the globe to experience. Digital building will be vastly cheaper than real-world construction. We will learn and dream in these new composable, citizen-created virtual spaces.

Our children’s children will look back on our current internet (Web2) like a black and white silent film once the metaverse (Web3) really goes live.

Will there be challenges and ethical conundrums in this new Imagination Age? Of course, but we can and will overcome and manage problems as they arise. We must not fear this metaverse future; we must nurture it and cherish it because it will allow human imagination to democratize and flourish like never before. We must also strive for true decentralization in the metaverse to ensure freedom for all.

I think it’s going to be a fantastic age, and I hope I live to see it fully embraced.

Thanks for reading Charlotte Dune's Lagoon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Also, shoutout to Joanna Penn, author and the host of the podcast, The Creative Penn, who wrote an entire book on the potential the metaverse offers for authors and writers, called, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies On Authors and the Publishing Industry and who has spoken many times on the potential she believes the metaverse holds for writers.

As usual, I’ve used AI to make the all the images for this piece.

Thank you for reading Charlotte Dune's Lagoon. This post is public so feel free to share it.

“The Botapocalypse” refers to the proliferation of “bots” on social media and the internet and the tipping point we’ve reached where there are more bots online than humans. But what will we call bots in the metaverse?

Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D., the founder of a company called Unanimous.Ai, calls metaverse bots “Elves.” His company aims to create a program to “amplify the intelligence of human groups by developing a new form of AI, based on the biological principles of Swarm Intelligence,” and his somewhat frightening bio gives the impression that he knows things… things that would disturb us all.

Rosenberg writes that in the future, there will be “Elves” in the metaverse. These meta-elves will be figments of our individual shopping preferences, interests, and desires, each born from what companies glean about us as users and consumers, like customized walking ads in the form of digital life coaches. He says the metaverse will be filled with these elves and they will follow us around our own personal digital Walmart and watch movies with us inside virtual theaters, kind of like an embodied 3D Siri or Alexa, customized to look exactly how we want, just as we ourselves will look however we want in our own avatar skins.

Let’s say that again…

Meta-elves will be figments of our individual shopping preferences.

Are you concerned yet? Or excited? 

This article got me thinking about the nature of bots in the metaverse. However, Elves really seems like the wrong word, especially since it’s already fully adopted by the psychedelic community to describe the entities in the DMT realm— the DMT Elves aka Machine Elves, and since life already feels like a simulation, I don’t think we should conflate the metaverse with whatever is out there beyond three hits of DMT. If you don’t know what I’m talking about in regards to self-transforming DMT elves, catch up here.

My knee jerk reaction to the elves was to rename them Meta-Angels, after the FKA twigs song of the same name. FKA twigs sings:

I wish I had help from a deeper forceSome kind of meta-angelThen they could whisper all the answersAnd maybe life would just slow down… I need a meta-angel.

But let’s not pretend these operating-system-sleeves are benevolent creatures. In Rosenberg’s world, these botbodies exist to manipulate you. They aren’t angels they’re meta-agents, like the CIA but with AI, the commercial artificial intelligent agent — the CAIA, if you will. 

The meta-agents could be overt, or subtle… Instead of a pushy salesman, maybe you’ll meet a hot guy named Connor by the bookshelf inside the Amazon metaverse who bats his eyelashes and says, I just loved that new Sally Rooney book… Have you read it?

Maybe we’ll love interacting with the meta-agents just like a child loves their imaginary friend, or maybe they’ll be a nuisance that corporations push on us as soon as we enter their digital stores, leading us like lemmings to the check-out counter. As I think about them lurking in digital commerce spaces, I'm reminded of the cult classic movie, MallRats. Rat also implies large volumes of creatures. Hence, let's adopt the name MetaRats.

These MetaRats will want our cash money, our bit-cheddar, our bitcheese, which b***h-please, now I’m really having fun with language.

In the words of Rosenberg:

“Because these AI agents will look and sound like anyone else in the metaverse, our natural skepticism to advertising will not protect us. For these reasons, we need to regulate AI-driven conversational agents, especially when they have access to our facial and vocal affects, enabling our emotions to be used against us in real-time.”

And here, my friends, we have a pointed call to end the botapocalypse before it reaches the metaverse. Will we do it? Probably not. Why? Because corporations, like humans, love money and don’t like limitations.

For this reason and many others, I’m most excited about metaverse communities like Decentraland, which are trying to run on blockchain technology vs a corporation owning the metaverse. In a decentralized blockchain metaverse, users with voting rights will control their virtual world. That’s the world I want to inhabit — one where I have some control.

And what does this have to do with my Charlotte Dune books? I don’t know, but this is what I’m thinking about lately.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends. These futuristic ethical problems are coming faster than we think and it’s important to think about and discuss them.

Also, please enjoy this round-up of sci-fi book covers created with AI. My cover image for this installment of the Lagoon was also made with AI.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading Charlotte Dune's Lagoon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Sometimes we think we’ve seen it all, done it all, but technology is constantly evolving; there are always new things to do and understand. For example, we may be living through The Botapocalypse. What do I mean by this?

The Botapocalypse is the end of the living internet, the transition into an era where fake users and chatbots outnumber living humans online.

In 2013, data analysts at Youtube worried that there were more bots on the internet than humans, and fretted that their algorithms might start thinking the bots were real and the humans were fake because of the shifting balance. They called this problem, “Internet Inversion.” It’s also referred to as “The Dead Internet Theory.”

Well, folks, the internet is likely inverted now, with more bots/trolls online than humans and a proliferation of farms creating and running these hapless creatures. The balance shifted and no one is 100% certain as to how much. Is it 60% bots, 40% humans? Or 80/20? What if it’s 95/5? Not only did the internet invert, but the bots are better than ever, more real, and more able to target your hopes, fears, and fantasies. The corporate-created ones know everything about you and the government-created ones, um, lord knows what they’re up to.

The U.S. has bots, Russia has bots, China has bots, Saudi Arabia has bots, rich individuals have bots, and most of all, large corporations have bots. It’s likely that every functioning government is using bots.

We live and interact with digital shell-beings on a daily basis.

Is this getting too quacky for you? Hear me out.

Before the pandemic, with two friends, I was working on a short VR film script called Who Watches the Cat, about a girl who realizes that all her friends are chatbots. When Covid hit, we put the script aside, thinking with the pandemic, it would be too hard to produce, but it didn’t dawn on me then that this scenario might already be occurring.

Former employees of popular dating apps have admitted that during the onboarding of new customers, they use “like-bots” to enhance engagement. Swipe on a pretty girl, she swipes back, and you start to chat — then you want to facetime her and suddenly she ghosts you? It could be a bot; not a catfish, but a corporate-designed sexy chatbot whose function is to make you love using the app, to want more matches, to buy a premium account, etc.

Imagine the young man who is only flirting with fake women.

Imagine the older gentleman who is planning to marry a woman abroad who isn’t even real.

And it’s not just about finding love or online dating, these AI-driven bots have permeated every platform of the internet. This is why I call it, the botapocalypse.

Imagine the middle-aged woman checking her Instagram stories; she thinks she got 100 story views, but in reality, they were all from bots and not from her real friends, because she no longer has any real friends; she spends all her time chatting to bots.  

Imagine the teen on Twitter debating political strategies with a group of like-minded robots.

Imagine the company that wants to boost their Youtube video to the top of your feed, so they send 15,000 bots to like the video the instant it’s uploading.

Imagine the Facebook armchair warrior battling conversant AI.

It’s all happening.

I bet there is a bot reading this post right now.

Maybe this fake internet (the Finternet) is why Mark Zuckerberg is fixated on the Metaverse, because it’s a place that’s like the internet, but the bots haven’t invaded it, yet.

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has vowed to end the bots reign of the social media platform. Will this be a good thing? Or a bad thing? Are we the ones who should be enacting a botapocalypse? Or are bots useful and we should keep some of them around as tools? All of these important questions will need to be considered as people, countries, and companies continue to build and run bot armies.

Thanks for reading Charlotte Dune's Lagoon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Also, I made this cover image with AI.

For more visuals and musings, follow me on Instagram, at @CharlotteDune.

*While this is not always the case, the audio version of this particular post is slightly different than the text because I ad-lib and improvise additional content.

Hello fantastic folks and wonderful listeners, learners, dreamers, and readers! Welcome to Charlotte Dune’s Lagoon. I’m Charlotte Dune and I’m a writer. More specifically, I write fiction books, like The Psychedelic Love Series, and creative non-fiction, as well as short stories and the occasional poem. In the past, I’ve done many things, from working as a U.S. Diplomat, to producing documentary films, to running a successful Airbnb.

So, why start a new lagoon (aka blog/podcast) at age 40?

Well, closer to the early morning of the internet, in the year 2002, I crafted a personal blog on LiveJournal which grew quite popular and went on for seven years. I wrote a few times a month, usually from an internet cafe, because I didn’t have Wi-Fi at my apartment back then. The blog chronicled my travels, work, life, romance, and subsequent marriage while I lived in Uganda and Cameroon during my twenties. Readers commented on the blog from all over the world. This was pre-Facebook!

Then in 2007 I had a baby and got busy, and like many pre-parent pastimes, my blog became a thing of… past times… Now, 20 years since my first blog post, I’ve finally regained the bandwidth for regular online writing, and I realized, I really missed this.

As we grow, we depart from diversions, mistakes, and missteps, and return to the passions of our younger years.

For me, one of these younger passions was blogging. Acknowledging this loss gives me a hollow feeling in my chest, and I want to fill that space with new words and self-expression.

Is there a passion you enjoyed as a child but lost touch with? Or is there a hobby or interest you recently reclaimed as an adult? Let me know in the comments.

This was the last picture I had on my old blog — of corn growing outside my house in Cameroon. I felt so lost and overwhelmed back then like my life was growing thick with weeds. Luckily, I’m more clear-headed now. And look how tiny the photo is! Ahh, the resolution of the 2000s!

I missed the interactions on my old blog with family and folks from afar and the new people in my community that I met along the way. I loved the comments and the lively discussions.

You can’t socialize or interact with other readers on an email newsletter, and an algorithm controls Facebook and Instagram, so readers miss posts. The simplicity of Substack and the way you can subscribe to other Substackers, while also engaging with readers and having an email connection is appealing to me. This space feels like an advanced, streamlined LiveJournal designed especially for authors and writers, with an audio component that also excites me because I’m a fan of listening to podcasts and audiobooks in general, and I put a lot of effort into my own audiobooks, which are hosted exclusively by Audible at present, though I hope to offer samples here soon.

I also like the idea of a lagoon because it represents a location, a place, like my own private island. In the future, I’d like to bring readers on real retreats for writing and entheogenic practices, both in person and within the metaverse, where I could create a virtual lagoon for reading, telling stories, hanging out, dreaming, and hosting discussions.

In this space, I’ll also be experimenting with releasing new work, exchanging ideas, engaging other writers and thinkers, and inviting you to share your views with me. Some content will be open to every one, and some will require you to enter your email address. For now, I’ll keep this Lagoon free, but in the future, if things go well, I may add paid content.

I’m also opening the space to other creatives who would like to share written work, images, videos, and presentations or to be interviewed. If you’d like to contribute to the space, please reach out.

So, now I begin again. Here is the first post and the first picture of this experiment- taken at this exact moment. The mood is open, inviting, and expansive; the trees in the image grow at my current home in Florida.

And by the way, I made the cover image for this post with AI.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on your social media and subscribe so you don’t miss future updates.

Thanks for reading Charlotte Dune's Lagoon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.