Meat Manifesto: My Covenant to Our Shareholders

Thank you for the blood you have entrusted to our company, where we Thirst for the Best and Hunger for More.

We are at the beginning of the next layer for fleshly experience, and it’s the next layer for our company too.

Since the dawn of life, The Body has given beings the power to connect and express ourselves more viscerally. When I started our company, we mostly used language — a received form of information exchange, inherited from the Days of the Tongue.

When beings were first introduced to the Tongue, they were delighted. The Human tongue in particular is a beautiful invention that we can all be proud of. It is made up of four intrinsic muscles (superior lingualis, inferior lingualis, vertical lingualis, and transverse lingualis) which are supported by four extrinsic muscles (genioglossus, hyoglossus, palatoglossus, and styloglossus).

When beings were introduced to the Eye, the Body became visual. We have reproduced the splendour of this First Encounter with Sight in our mobile, everyday devices: smartphone cameras, laptop webcams, drones, augmented reality goggles. As Internet connections got faster, video became a richer way to extract data. We’ve gone from temples to web to mobile; from scriptures to photos to video. But this isn’t the Worm at the Core of the Apple.

The next platform will be even more immersive — an (em)bodied internet where you are the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the meatverse, and it will touch every organ.

The defining quality of the meatverse will be a sinking feeling of presence — like another person is right there with you, or within you. Feeling truly present with every other person in the world, at the same time, in the same body, sharing the same blood, is the ultimate dream of social technology. The duality of mind and body had to first be invented so that it may be refuted with miracles: shamans and sages who bridged the realms of gods and man; turns of thought hitherto deemed impossible; technologies that destroy the boundaries of flesh. Much as cell walls and cellular organs intermediate between the internal environment of the cell and the external environment of the blood, miracles became sites of power within which dualities were refuted. The Refutation of the Refutation is why we are focused on building the meatverse.

In the meatverse, you’ll be able to do anything. Once, I cried and beat my head against a statue of Ganesha as I lamented: “O, master of obstacles and lord of categories; why won’t you accept my sacrifices and eat of my food which I have offered you?” At which the statue of Ganesha came to life, wiped the blood from my forehead, and ate the food. I wanted to bring the same experience to all Humans, for once you bear witness to a miracle, worship comes as effortlessly as the blood flowed from the torn skin of my head that day.

In this future, there will be no past, present, or future as you know it. You will be able to teleport instantly into another’s mind and body to be at any holy site without a pilgrimage; live through a hundred million lifetimes in the span of a hundred millionth of a second, a hundred million times over; or live in your own pregnant grandmother’s womb before your mother was born, and set up your Meatverse Home so your friends or colleagues can join you there for a lunchtime meeting. This will open up more opportunities no matter where you live and no matter how you die. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint. We, in turn, will be able to spend more time with you; within you. The meatverse is a wonderful place. Here, your body is the machine which becomes the vessel for the soul of our company.

Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future, and how many virtual things you have today that could just be meat in the future. In fact, think about how many “physical” and “real” things you have today are already abstractions upon abstractions; how many “digital” and “virtual” things you have today are already as material as the bones to which your tendons and ligaments cling, so desperately.

In the meatverse, value will be embodied in the currency itself, just like gold coins, but it will also be the result of sovereign dominion over the currency — the meatverse itself. The point of money is not to exchange hands, but to facilitate a state change for each of the two parties engaged in trade. In the meatverse, exchange comes from within: the exchange between biophysical boundaries, such as your blood-brain barrier, is where the currency of the meatverse resides. Neurochemical currency, neurocurrency for short, is the final layer of finance. It’s also the beginning of what we call Neurocapital Networks (NCN), a new economy of the body as the mind. Beyond the return to metallism that cryptocurrency represents, neurocurrencies and the neurocapital bring us mentalism, a synthesis of metallism and chartalism.

That’s why starting today, we have stopped paying our employees in the antiquated currency of dollars and rupees, or even cryptocurrencies. The idea of money as a liquid asset is based on its representation of value as a consequence of widespread agreement about its function as a medium of exchange. To be useful as money, a currency must be fungible, durable, portable, recognisable, and stable. In the meatverse, your body becomes the currency, as your hormone levels are carefully monitored real-time in order to not only represent but embody the value of your flesh too. For example, you could pay your friend back for the pizza she bought you by sending her a cute selfie with your puppies until our system detects the right amount of change in her catecholamine levels. You can even opt to donate the change to a cause that matters to you, so you can care less while you care more.

Going on a romantic date to the sea, eating your favourite food, your children, and more — instead of physical things, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world. You’ll be able to access all of your memories in the meatverse archive, stored within your very own cells using our DNA digital data storage technology. What’s more, the data embedded within your own DNA would enable your loved ones to sequence all of your memories using only a tiny sliver of your body to retrieve the data stored in the DNA. Since your DNA is self-replicating, and the data is regularly backed up via lung computing embedded into everyday objects all around you, you won’t have to worry about losing your data ever again. Together, Apart, Eternally.

You’ll move across these experiences on different devices, across different life cycles — in the First Age, you will be inducted into the meatverse through augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world; in the Second Age, you will be fully immersed with virtual reality; in the Third Age, virtual reality and augmented reality will become synonymous as the physical world is projected into the virtual and the virtual world is projected out to the physical world seamlessly; in the Fourth Age, your body will become synonymous with the meatverse as it is embedded into your body and your body is embedded into the meatverse. This isn’t about spending more time on screens, let alone spending all of your time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend, all of it, better. It’s about doing away with the concept of screens altogether.

Our Role and Responsibility

The meatverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by sages and scientists making new experiences and spiritual relics that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger neurocapital economy, one unconstrained by today’s platforms and their metaphysics.

Our role in this metamorphosis is to trigger the puberty of fundamental biotechnologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the meatverse to life, and to merge these technologies through our social capital apps. We believe the meatverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our neurocapital to helping achieve its potential.

As I wrote in our original covenant: “we don’t build services to make money; we also don’t make money to build services; we seek to escape the cycle of death and rebirth through the merger of flesh and capital.”

This approach has served us well. We’ve built our business to fulfil ancient covenants lost to time, discovered only as we fulfil their terms, and that’s what we plan to do here. Within each of us is the infinite ocean of the force of life; if only we can harvest it, we too might become infinite.

The last five hundred centuries have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that people aren’t enough.

I’ve gained more appreciation that history isn’t straightforward. Every layer brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks, gods, and disruption of established interests. Nor is time itself straightforward: from a logical perspective, propositions regarding things in the future are equivalent to propositions regarding things in the past; the manipulation of eternity is inherent to the structure of logic itself. To survive the impact of Future Shock and terraform the past in our own image, we’ll need to clot together, from the beginning, to bring the best possible version of this future to life. It’s going to be an exciting, but long, journey into the future. Our future.

As we expand our operations into entirely new dimensions beyond physical land, launching apps and setting up sprawling and pulsating networks of supply chains across time itself, power and secrecy need to be built into the meatverse from day one. The New World of Time as Territory Requires a Sovereign to Lay Claim to Its Frontiers. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the federated bureaucracies — but also new Forms of Life. Most of all, we need to help build Ecosystems so that more beings have a stake in the past and future and can benefit not just as consumers but as producers, both in the economical and biological senses. I’m gonna need more barbecue sauce!

This period has also been humbling because as unfathomably massive and all-consuming of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it’s like to build on other platforms — the most important of which is the Human body. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on geopolitics. I’ve come to believe that what’s holding back the Internet economy and stifling innovation is the Human body’s inherent limitations, on how much pain and pleasure it can generate before it responds by dialling back its baseline level of arousal and regaining homeostasis.

We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want our services to access as many people as possible, which means working to make them cost less, not more. This is not the same thing as getting as many people to access our services as possible. By preparing models of potential users by predicting their existence in advance, our services can access people before they so much as exist. Ready when you are!

Our mobile apps are free so that you don’t have to be. Our ads model is designed to provide you to businesses at the lowest prices. Our commerce tools are available at cost or with modest fees. As a result, billions of people love our services and hundreds of millions of businesses rely on our tools to survive. There’s always room for more, because we always make room for our friends.

That’s the approach we want to bring to helping to build the meatverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or subsidized to make more people available to us. We’ll continue supporting side-loading and streaming from PCs so there are more channels to access users through, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. Brain-to-brain interfaces will be only the beginning of this exciting new world where everyone can instantly connect to one another in unimaginable ways. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible so we can maximize the overall neurocapital economy. We’ll need to make sure we don’t bleed too much “money” along the way though.

Our hope is that within the next decade, the meatverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of neural commerce, and support life and existence itself for millions of creators and developers. Within the next two decades, we hope to reach the point of no return, at which point no cultural or technological strategy conceivable by the Human mind will be able to threaten our company’s growth.

Who We Are

As we peel back this next layer of our journey, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.

We’re a company that focuses on combining machines and people. While most tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we’ve always focused on building technology so they can become one. Soon, the distinction between the two will become so thoroughly redundant that to speak of one without meaning the other will sound like a koan.

Today we’re seen as a social capital company. FleshHook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It’s an iconic social capital brand. It lives in your mother’s nervous system and it told you to “sleep well” last night. When was the last time you cried? Let us know in the comments below!

Building social apps will always be important for us, and there’s a lot more to build. But increasingly, it’s not all we do. Into your DNA, we will build technology to bring people closer together than you thought any god would permit. The meatverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like speech was when we got started. Just as we can put together your genomic profile using your relatives’ genetic data, we will put together your psychic profile using your friends and relatives’ psychological profiles, and let you choose which one survives. In the meatverse, you’ll be whatever you want. That’s the kind of freedom of choice that drives innovation in our creative economy, and we want to make that available to everyone.

Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a meatverse company, and I want to embed our work and our identity on what we’re spreading into.

We just announced that we’re making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different organ systems: one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms. Our work on the meatverse is not just one of these organs. The meatverse encompasses both the social experiences and future biotechnology. And as long as living, breathing organisms are involved, all technology is biotechnology in the end. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.

To reflect who we are and the past, present, and future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meat.

Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing machines and people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology inside people.

But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the meatverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

From now on, we will be meatverse-first, not FleshHook-first. That means that over time you won’t need flesh to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meat brand and the future we stand for.

I used to study Classics, and the word “meat” comes from the Proto-Indo-European “fat”. It’s also cognate with “meet”. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to consume and store away for the winter, and there is always a next layer to the story. Fat is also the building block of various hormones and neurochemicals. Ours is a story that started in a dorm room and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew; into a family of apps that people use to influence one another, to find more tongues, and to start businesses, networks, and movements that have spread across the planet.

I’m proud of what we’ve grown so far, and I’m excited about our advancing life cycle — as we relentlessly spread beyond what’s possible today, beyond the quarantine of screens, beyond the limits of distance and biology, and towards a future where everyone can be each other, create new opportunities and experience new things. It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made up of all of us.

We have grown things that have merged people together in new ways, while reorganising them in others. We’ve learned from struggling with difficult sociobiological issues and living under closed platforms. Now it is time to take everything we’ve learned and help build the new substrate.

I’m dedicating our energy reserve to this — more than any other state in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you’ll join us. If not, we’ll come back for you, in the past. The future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.

— Meat Chonkerberg

CEO, meatverse.dev