The book is in two parts, although not separately but interwoven. The parts that discuss potential changes brought in by augmented and virtual reality technologies are more credible, although without original, radical new use cases. Most of these have been discussed in great detail for years.
The book's primary objective is to promote decentralized technologies, including DAOs, DeFi's, and NFTs. Despite the occasional, balanced arguments, the author claims that any metaverse without these is undesirable.
The book was clearly written at the peak of the crypto bull market. A year of crypto winter makes one far more skeptical about the tall claims around what DAOs and the likes have to offer. The much-discussed advantages of these technologies are nowhere near being delivered, while their disadvantages continue to accumulate as things stand now.
So far, the crypto world continues to show the same tendencies of centralization for anything meaningful (and a lot that is not). A good, useful decent-sized product requires a lot of planning and decision-making that is perhaps as unlikely to happen without hierarchical decision-making as an orchestra. For DAOs to upstage centralized entities' far more user-friendly, secure, responsible, and legal-backed products, much more proof is needed. Until then, any claims of their superior privacy offering - themselves debatable so far - are far too small for most regular users. They require far too much time, effort, and technical skills to appeal to non-gamers or those not interested in only token values.
DAOs and Defi's have a place. Their developments are making the centralized world work on their shortcomings. But all said and done, it is far more likely that centralized entities with their digital certificates, CBDCs, official fractional ownership tokens, etc., will continue to rule the years ahead until DAOs emerge with something much, much better.