[ This is the full version of a short piece which went out on our regular weekend newsletter “Brain Droppings“. This version went to my paying subscribers but I wanted to share it with my entire listserv ]
A surprising number of people seem to think that technological progress ended with the smartphone, and that augmented reality, virtual reality, and connected experiences between platforms will never come to pass.
I won’t take that bet.
31 October 2021 (Paris, France) – I watched the Zuck’s virtual event on Thursday which showcased Facebook’s name change and it’s technological bets on the future. The social networking giant took an unmistakable step toward an overhaul, de-emphasizing Facebook’s name and rebranding itself as Meta. The change was accompanied by a new corporate logo designed like an infinity-shaped symbol that was slightly askew. Facebook and its other apps, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, will remain but under the Meta umbrella.
The move punctuates how Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, plans to refocus his Silicon Valley company on what he sees as the next digital frontier, which is the unification of disparate digital worlds into something called the metaverse. At the same time, renaming Facebook may help distance the company from the social networking controversies it is facing, including how it is used to spread hate speech and misinformation.
Facebook defenders note that it is a public, profitmaking company with an obligation to shareholders. But as I have written before, it’s not that simple. Facebook (and its fellow big tech platforms) have created a new version of the public square. Only it’s private. The exponential growth of big tech platforms in information delivery has led to the digital disaggregation of our normal old-line public square media and other outlets. Facebook actually recognises that and has huge numbers of people working on analysing and fixing its content problems, but the latest trove of leaked documents and conversations show that trade-offs, organisational structure, conflicting priorities, language, tech limitations, politics and massive growth means lots of that work and process is broken.
And some perspective: the New York Times might have an idea how tough it is and they had a fraction of the users. The New York Times stopped moderating their Facebook cooking group of 77,000 because they didn’t have sufficient staff and they had no clue how to moderate run away, divisive debates. So here is a major media player who themselves couldn’t moderate a couple thousand – but they have the nerve to ask why Facebook can’t moderate every single user on the platform at once.
There is a long history here – too much for this post. But in brief, since the 1970s, Silicon Valley’s giants have succeeded because they figured out you could win by displacing incumbents when the rules of the game evolved. The shift from mainframe computers to desktops, and then to smartphones, opened the door to new rivals to the throne. IBM lost to Microsoft (desktop). Microsoft lost to Apple (mobile). And everyone lost to Facebook (social networking).
Today Facebook is an $890 billion company with more than 3 billion users; its valuation has tripled since 2016. And while the company’s reputation may have soured, Facebook the incumbent has not forgotten the lesson of Facebook the upstart. Zuckerberg’s primary obsession is holding on to 18- to 29-year-olds, whom he calls the “north star.”
In the past, Facebook would have acquired its way out of this conundrum: After all, buying Instagram and WhatsApp cemented its place in the lives of billions of people. But wary regulators are closing that route, leaving Facebook to fend off challengers by dominating the next platform: “the metaverse.” Zuckerberg predicts the metaverse will require digital clothes, digital spaces, and an entirely different – ideally, Facebook-defined – digital experience. The goal, he says, is “1 billion people and hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce a day.”
Once the sound and fury of this year passes, Facebook’s long game will not have changed, though its name will have. The parent company is now called Meta. Facebook doesn’t just want to survive the next platform shift; it wants to once again define it. The rest is just noise. Let’s dig a little deeper.
STARTING PLACES
At the end of the day, of course, there was ridicule by most pundits. After all, a brand is a sum total of decisions and behaviors expressed in words, actions, naming, graphical elements, digital interactions, and many other elements – not just talk. If Meta still looks like Facebook, sounds like Facebook, and runs its business like Facebook, then people are going to see it as Facebook.
The Pleasantville tone of metaverse presentation and the intro video was galling:
As Charles Warzel noted on his blog:
With all that the company knows about the ways that its current products act (in unexpected and sometimes horrific ways) and all that the public knows about it feels like a slap in the face to debut something new and, frankly experimental, in such a sunny, oblivious way.
It reads to me like a declaration that the company can and will act with impunity. Here’s a company marching forward and optimistically into the future and ignoring the smoldering mess it made in the background.
But think about it. With Facebook and its business practices facing intense scrutiny, it would be impossible for Zuckerberg to announce anything other than an open, interoperable future. Whether or not that’s what the company can deliver in the long-term is an entirely different story. Without details on this significant shift, how will the company gain back the trust that it has lost in the last couple of years? An open, interoperable Facebook would be a major improvement, but can we trust that the company will deliver it?
There is, of course, a bigger “thing” afoot here. We’ve caught up to what Facebook hath wrought (2012-2020) and Mark Zuckerberg and executive leadership seem to regard that version of Facebook as almost an outdated node of the company. They’ve got a new digital realm to colonize: “The Metaverse!!!” As I have noted before: the architecture and nature of these platforms (all of them) is changing, and how they act on us and how we, even reluctantly or unwittingly, absorb some of their characteristics, is making us lose perspective. This needs a deeper dive, a more discerning perspective and (hopefully) in 2022 I’ll finish a monograph on the pipes-tubes-string-and-glue of that new architecture.
The corporate machinations are even more intriguing. It’s not often you see big public companies survive a scandal without taking major action, such as booting the CEO. Think Boeing and the 737 Max drama, which prompted the resignation of CEO Dennis Muilenburg in 2019, or the uproar over Uber’s corporate culture that precipitated the exit of founding CEO Travis Kalanick in 2017. A lesser option, for companies controlled by the CEO, is a restructuring. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp broke in two in the wake of the phone hacking scandal at the company’s U.K. newspapers.
Facebook, confronted with a seemingly never-ending scandal around how it deals with problematic content on its site, is taking a less disruptive approach – a change of name to Meta Platforms Inc. That’ll solve everything, right? Well, no. But I’m sure Travis Kalanick is probably wondering right now why he didn’t simply change Uber’s name to Taxi and refuse to leave. But when Zuckerberg unveiled the new name on he made it clear that the more standard crisis responses, such as his departure or a breakup, weren’t options (at least not in the near term).
And in interviews this week Zuckerberg didn’t seem to rule out a breakup at some point, though, saying the idea of fully carving off Facebook Reality Labs, the augmented and virtual reality and metaverse development unit, from the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp triumvirate is “not something I’ve thought about very seriously yet.” His argument was that the businesses are all too integrated to take such a step. Well, ok. But a more practical reason is likely that Facebook Reality Labs is a money suck right now. This year alone, it will reduce the company’s overall profit by $10 billion. That money is coming from the cash cow of social media apps.
The bigger question is likely to center on Zuckerberg’s determination to remain CEO. He could have followed in the footsteps of tech founders like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Bill Gates and stepped back – even while retaining his controlling voting stake. That would allow someone with fresh eyes for Facebook’s problems to take charge of day-to-day operations. Instead, Zuckerberg has declared, “I really run the company on a day-to-day basis. It’s not like I just sit back and try to set a vision. I feel pretty strongly about making sure we continue to innovate and go in a good direction.” That’s fine. But Zuckerberg needs to know that as a cosmetic change, the new name may only exacerbate Facebook’s image problems.
THE METAVERSE
So what about the metaverse? The Zuck discussed it in detail and the event dropped a few products and developments to add flesh to the bones:
• Social VR spaces in Horizon Home, Messenger calls in VR, and business accounts for the Quest.
• Two-dimensional progressive web apps are coming to the Oculus Store, enabling productivity apps like Slack and Dropbox to be used in VR.
• Project Cambria is an expensive, high-resolution, standalone mixed reality headset coming next year.
• Project Nazare is Facebook’s augmented reality glasses prototype. It’s still a few years away.
• Presence Platform is a new set of SDKs for building mixed-reality experiences for the Quest.
• The Oculus brand is going away for hardware, replaced by Meta. But it will stick around for some software and developer tools.
I’ve been struck by the degree to which that single word … metaverse … has taken over so much of the conversation in tech. Skeptics in the tech world have a word for these kinds of visionary design presentations – “vaporware”. And I’ve certainly been attentive to what Casey Newton calls “a feeling around how old and out of touch Facebook has been lately, how strong the Boomer vibes were coming from those reacting to Thursday’s presentation. A surprising number of people seem to think that technological progress ended with the smartphone, and that augmented reality, virtual reality, and connected experiences between platforms will never come to pass”.
I won’t take that bet. Not with Apple, Microsoft, Snap, Epic, Roblox, Niantic, and others already at work building it out. Eager to demonstrate that it can innovate, Facebook — er, Meta — has been among the industry leaders in its willingness to build in public.
But the company is not building alone. In fact, Facebook will not build “the Metaverse”. The Metaverse is not a centralised experience that is built by a solo contributor. The Metaverse is an immersive experience layer built on top of the web3 universe – an open sourced ecosystem of interoperable digital assets that is verifiable on public blockchain protocols. These include NFTs, stablecoins, and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), which will function as the third generation of the internet.
However … Facebook will bring the capital required – social, intellectual and monetary access – to accelerate the adoption curve of web3 technology. It will throw the spotlight back to some amazing people and their projects who have been quietly building parts of the web3 universe, and have made it more open, accessible, and fun to be a part of. Facebook will accelerate the curiosity of other brands who want to be a part of the web3 revolution, and bring new engagement experiences to their communities. Many are building some creative toolboxes for the third generation of the internet. The web3 revolution is just getting started.
But the most underrated Zuck move was this. Facebook realized that the only sustainable biz model in the stack is one that requires them to own the the OS & hardware. The move to Meta is about to be followed by a shift to more Facebook owned devices other than the new watch & Occulus (its VR headset). As everything he does, the Zuck is trying to own the entire stack from payment, to commerce, to social network, to messaging. So that he is the one who stores all the aggregate identity data. One can only imagine the level and extent of advertising to come to Zuck’s metaverse. It’s a pure authoritarian move as a corporate.
Notice that Apple, Amazon and Google are after the same thing, the only difference between the FAANGs being the biz model they use to monetize:
• Google owns Android, search and mail which is enough to monetize selling user data and surveillance. The Android distribution is a huge advantage.
• Amazon’s marketplace includes the same surveillance but also owns the cloud for other applications. The market is their business, all sides of it.
• Apple sells the best package and experience tailored according to their rules, their payment rail, App Store, identity and security.
For there to be any other new competition we need to make Web3 happen. Crypto is the only infrastructure that can assure the new stack is open for there to always be a “rage quit” option to any their services. A truly digital economic rail has to be built for others to compete. Instead, as Maya Zehavi (a crypto veteran and finance, techno, privacy wunderkind) notes:
Instead we’re running after Shiba pumps, exploits & weird turf wars on DeFi. Zuck just declared he’s going to try and be the Big Brother in the physical word and virtual one so he can hook in kids on new social networks. That’s a scary thought considering he’s proven to be a pretty lousy steward of the world’s identity data & a Machiavellian curator of social networks.
And the issue … as always … is will the metaverse be less freighted with harms than our existing internet? As I have noted numerous times before, we need to go back in time … when it was the best of decisions, it was the worst of decisions. The internet’s founders made the network open. Security experts and true network architects wouldn’t have done it. They’d have added encryption and required authentication before anyone could play. And they would have added network structural perturbation.
The definitive text? Read “The Future of the Internet” by Jonathan Zittrain, published in 2008. Basically how we got here and his spot on predictions of where we were going.
Yes, the internet would now probably be much smaller. Tim Berners-Lee has said many times that had his then employers, CERN, decided to patent the web and charge a royalty per click, it would not have taken off in the way and at the speed that it did. But the internet – and the personal computer industry before it – were largely built by idealists who saw the developing network as an opportunity to change the world. And to be fair, it was designed that way and functioned that way because the thought was it would stay within the public sector (first the Pentagon, then the National Science Foundation) and places like the lab at MIT. So they made it open, just as they made the computer a general-purpose platform.
But then it was privatized and because of those decisions we got Skype and Twitter and free software and YouTube – but we also got phishing, viruses, poisoned DNS caches and DDoS attacks, and Facebook.
Nothing about mixed reality or interoperability can resolve fundamental questions around the balance between free expression and safety. Harassment and hate speech will come to the metaverse along with everything else. Yeah, someday it might connect us across long distances and give us a heightened sense of belonging. But it could also further bleed the life out of our physical communities, as we spend an ever-higher percentage of our time staring at screens and interacting with virtual worlds.
PRIVACY
As for privacy … well, just another nail into that coffin. As my regular readers know, I have written how the value (and enforcement) of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was always going to be a tough task. All of the “consent” elements and many of the compliance elements are nebulous, much of the connective tissue between sections having been stripped out during negotiations, aided and abetted by law firms and consultants and vendors hired by Big Tech to do everything possible to cripple it. I was fortunate to watch the process over its four year gestation, living in Brussels and having contacts with EU Commission insiders and numerous lobbyists. To watch the machinations of Big Tech was a Master Class in manipulation. And much the same can be said about efforts in the U.S., especially in California.
In Europe, the fundamental problem was always the collection of data, not its control. When the European Commission introduced the new GDPR it was aimed at curbing abuses of customer data. But the legislation misdiagnosed the problems. It should have tackled the collection of data, not its protection once collected. As I reported several years ago, the original intent of the EU regulators was limiting data collection. But Big Tech lobbyists and lawyers turned that premise 180 degrees and “control” became the operative word. That has always been Big Tech’s mantra: don’t ask permission. Just do it, and then apologise later if “control” goes bad. Zuckerberg was the poster boy for that mantra.
I certainly hold no grudge against data privacy practitioners and consultants. Just like all of us, they need to make money: to sell, be it their services and/or products. Most know data privacy is a fiction. But they have the luxury of ignoring the real world. Their mantra is that you must comply with these acts … or get fined!! They will help you. What is happening out there in the real world is not material. “Don’t want to get a big fine, now, do you?” No, nobody is ever going to jail over stuff like that. It’s just a cost-of-doing-business. When Big Tech moved the focus to control and not collection it was a gift to data privacy practitioners. The money trees were shaking. And the money to made dealing with stuff like the new GDPR’s Data Subject Requests. Eureka!
But let’s face it. Our institutions of governance and law and commerce mostly originated during the 18th century Enlightenment. As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, linear thinking and logic (Cartesian and otherwise) are no longer suitable for this connected and complex world. Yes, we have gone through many evolutions and revolutions, each different. We have been able to discern some patterns from the past – but they will not serve us today. Our shift to an electric-digital-networked age is unique. Distributed information and communication technologies have converged, creating a societal infrastructure like no other we have experienced. We are unprepared.
In this digital age, we struggle (delusionally) to defend liberal values we developed in an analogue era. We refuse to honestly address the death of privacy and the infantile disorder of imagining there is data privacy – or any privacy – anymore.
And what’s next? Well, take a look at this:
Japanese IT multinational NEC is building a huge submarine cable for Facebook, with a capacity of up to 500Tbps across 24 fiber-pairs. The private cable will connect the US to Europe – but the companies did not disclose which European countries the cable will land in. The new cable provides 200X more Internet capacity than the transatlantic cables of the 2000s. The cable is also the first in the industry to feature 24 fiber-pairs, with cables previously capping out at 16. This makes it the highest capacity cable to date for a long-distance repeatered optical subsea cable system.
Why is this important? Earlier today I had a chat with my “go to guy” for all-things-IT, Alan Woods. It was a long chat so herein the salient points:
Alan noted:
“that one cable is essential for the metaverse to work in Europe, I would imagine, as I reckon most of its core processing capabilities and source code will/must remain in the U.S. So it calls into question the likes of the ‘Schrems 2’ decision. And I suggest, in due course, there will be other such massive data transfer exercises going on as this meta lark goes live world wide. And not just the metaverse. Other large data transfers, too”.
He continued:
“If all you have to do to pull this kind of exercise off is to produce a couple of Standard Contractual Clauses SCC (or whatever) or rephrase accordingly, according to the guidance from the various Data Protection Authorities and the European Data Protection Board, then what exactly does this privacy and data protection law actually do? Not much it seems. But you and I knew that”.
Alan thinks for various reasons this “meta lark” is a massive gamble but he agrees with me: don’t look at meta as one, big, seamless entity. It is being developed (by Apple, especially) for a host of “non meta” reasons.
We are so entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (economic, physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible, incomprehensible networks. And we cannot fathom their extent. And virtually nothing is private. It is a power shift, really. A power shift from the ownership of the means of production, which defined the politics of the 20th century, to the ownership of the production of meaning.
Our digital century was going to be democracy’s Golden Age. It did not work out that way. It recalls a pre-Gutenberg era of extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge, as the tech giants seized control of information and learning itself. They manipulated the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself. Distracted by our delusions, we failed to notice: they effected a bloodless coup from above. It is a clash we will see time and time again: those old, “analogue” rights … like privacy … clashing with a society driven into the social relationships of a digital one-way mirror. The lesson is that privacy is public.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Which takes me to a few concluding points:
Virtual worlds are wonderful. You don’t have to deal with all the “real-world” regulations and gunk and political problems and all those sorts of things, and it’s very attractive because you can just build. I can’t help but notice that all of the big tech trends of the moment are steeped in avoidance of the real world. The metaverse takes us to hypnotically beautiful virtual spaces; crypto frees us from the shackles of fiat currency and financial regulations; billionaires are paving the way to space travel. On some level, all of these projects feel inevitable. But I can’t imagine they won’t have dramatic consequences for our democracy, if only by sapping so much attention away from them.
The ultimate reality? These platforms have simply grown too big for a relativity small bunch of people to manage, especially Facebook, an issue which was well-covered in this Financial Times piece from 2019.
And the regulators? Out of their element, their comfort zone. My central premise has always been this: the regulatory state must be examined through the lens of the reconstruction of the political economy, the ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one. Regulatory institutions will continue to struggle in the era of informational capitalism they simply cannot understand. Regulatory processes are befuddled by the regulatory issues and problems created by information markets and networked information and communications technologies.
As far as the EU, all it has are attempts at regulation. It’s absence in any element of the digital age’s data architecture is by choice, not necessity. The EU could have carved out a niche for itself. France and Germany still have some of the best mathematicians and engineers in the world. But politics intruded. Trying to be a global cop was much easier than trying to compete. But that needs another post.
In the U.S., many are pinning their hopes on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which has yet to say whether it will act on Frances Haugen’s concerns and pursue any investigations – the American data engineer and scientist, Facebook product manager, and whistleblower who filed her complaints with the SEC. She disclosed tens of thousands of Facebook’s internal documents to the SEC. Many think the closer the relationship between the whistleblower’s allegations and the company’s financial performance, the higher the probability that the agency will take action.
But that’s a slippery slope. There are many obstacles in the way of the Haugen argument, namely her frequent insistence that Facebook has put profits before public good. It’s a brilliant talking point that’s ripe for Congress – but less so to the SEC. The claim that a company prioritizes profits for its investors is not exactly a good fit for securities laws. Arguably that’s what a company should be doing. Howard Fischer, former senior trial counsel at the SEC, has been making the media rounds and he has noted:
1. It’s a mistake to view the SEC as an all-purpose watchdog for corporate misconduct. Its role instead is to police companies that are within its jurisdiction, violating specified statutes that the SEC has authority to enforce.
2. While it’s unlikely the SEC would bring enforcement action against Facebook in response to Haugen’s claims, that doesn’t mean the agency needs to stay silent on the matter either, particularly given the publicity surrounding it. One option would be to issue what’s called a “report of investigation”. That is not an enforcement action, but it says: ‘Here’s what our concerns are”.
3. And that would be something that Facebook and other companies could then use as a rough guide to govern future disclosures. All these companies that have platforms that otherwise enjoy certain First Amendment and other liability protections will revisit whether those disclosures are adequate. Many likely will find they’re satisfied with their existing disclosures.
Plus, other securities lawyers I spoke with for this post said they were wary the SEC would seek to broaden its mandate in this way, or any way, warning that tech companies could simply start watering down their disclosures with more expansive language and pausing the internal investigations that might lead to findings worth disclosing.
Investors, for now, are unperturbed; Facebook’s share price was up 2% on the week despite the deluge of news. The company’s pockets remain as deep as ever. It’s the smaller competitors are the ones who are going to get hurt.
Although one stock did well. Meta Materials Inc., a material-science company with the ticker symbol MMAT, surged 10% after the Facebook name change announcement. Bit of a stock symbol mix up, yes investors?
And there’s the thing. Facebook’s pockets remain as deep as ever. Facebook will be able to invest in technology … and lobbying … to get to where it needs to get to.
But we are also battling something else. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems: the atmosphere, the planet’s webs of life, our social milieu, etc. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf, or social media; its behavior follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.
And, no. None of this is predetermined and none of this stuff ever runs linear. So get out the 🍿.
👻 HAPPY HALLOWEEN 🎃
Another good piece. to add, a couple of observations as to the nature of the effort involved that may be misssed:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nec-to-build-worlds-highest-capacity-submarine-cable-for-facebook-shuttling-500tbps-from-us-to-europe/
A new high speed data transfer cable is being laid it seems, for FB in support of this “meta” lark which I tihnk will be necessary given the complexity of the whole metaverse thing as I understand it. For me, just the act of laying the cable (let alone building the associated data centre) begs the question of just what use is judgements like Schrems 2. it seems to me that it stops nothing. Nothing at all and is merely a hinderance.
That said, if people actually read the FB T&C (all of it, not just the first person singular bits), then they will find that FB plays, as best it can, the compliance game, I am not at all sure they sell data for example and they have certainly curtailed the ability of people to use the API’s post CA in respect of what the API’s can actually do.
For me, above all this meta lark is perhaps the greatest gamble of IT, anywhere, to date. I read somewhere that analysis of FB use indicates that the busiest pat of the platform is its “groups” feature. I have also read that the number of claimed users of it may be over egged a bit (they all do). FB do not own an operating system (and are therefore dependent on those who do), have been late into the device market. They have also lost out in the home to the likes of Amazon and its dominance of forward and reverse supply, nor do they have anything like the presence of MS on the business desktop.
Like I suggest, a bit of a gamble. But, as I have rraised quite frequently elsewhere, I wonder about just how they are going to control this piece of work when (if) it goes live. Mk1 human beings speaking in different dialects of different languages will always be a control challenge not lesat because there is no Babel Fish (yet).
So, a gamble. Interesting times.
Thank you for your commentary, Mr. Bufithis (and your team’s work as well!) The well-thought-out and -expressed, and deeply coherent, comments on these developments is head and shoulders above the wailing and hailing of most technical and social commentators, depending on which iceberg they currently reside. I agree with your stance that the “new” technologies bandied about by Zuckerberg are coming; while I don’t care for the too-common reaction of many in referring to or thinking of those who believe otherwise as simply “boomers”, even if many of those reactions are from the older segments of our population…naysayers exist in many forms and styles. The future of technology is of course changing…when hasn’t that been so? But there is validity, at least in the short term, in saying Zuckerberg is applying the old “lipstick on a pig” approach in some fashion, attempting very clumsily to draw attention away from his unethical and disgusting business plan and methods.
But those are obvious arguments; the real impact of your commentary comes in the last two paragraphs, where you answered my wishes so well by pointing out that all of this is in many ways irrelevant…irrelevant if the underlying rot that is Facebook in total is not addressed. The company and the foundational product are both premised on sucking out and expanding the lowest features of human nature…hatred and vileness, “us vs them” assaults, mental and physical, and especially the willingness and ability for irrational, or willfully ignorant, or usually a combination of each, people to not just air their false grievances but to promote and escalate them in ways never seen before. No amount of gadgetry, useful or playful, will change that underlying deviousness that is Zuckerberg as represented by his product. How it plays out – whether such a harmful product can continue to exist as never before – is not knowable; we are in new territory, at the moment very dangerous and potentially devastating territory. His survival does not lessen that danger.
Good article thanks. As one of those early idealists now on his 43rd years of learning and using software and writing a few games for my kids in the early eighties, then becoming a pretty good gamer myself to keep up with my son (he’s far beyond me now), I still think this can all work out and not lead to species extinction. But I have to say Z’s view of the metaverse is pretty lame. I’ve been to virtual worlds before, even with people you know, its lame. I got sick of it fast.
I for on will never walk around with glasses or give up the real world and I’ll try to prevent such a reality from taking hold. I want ,my grandkids to have a real world, a clean one, to live in. Not this bogus fun time: “hey I look like a robot.” So lame, even for me, a senior. Even more lame to my children, who stopped using FB in a meaningful way many years ago. So did I. Never missed it, but I have other family members who are addicts just like most everyone else in US these days.
I’m not opposed to enhanced cyber realities, but much more creative and what I’d call Hybrid. I like the version where holograms a projected onto the real, real world, and you can see them wo any gizmos. Who knows Microsoft may become relevant again. What happened to Z’s imagination, his vision? Too old and greedy I suppose. Einstein did his best work at age 26 too. Looks like the former hacker in chief is over the hill.
A.R. is a really hard problem. If you step back to the beginning, you’ve gotta build the display that goes on your face that doesn’t make you look ridiculous. You have to find a way to power it; you have to put a battery on your body somewhere; you’ve gotta find a computer that’s fast enough to look at the world around you and put stuff on top that’s also small enough to run off the battery. Very challenging. But that’s just the tech problem.
Once you build it, who is going to augment reality? Who is in charge of that project? If I’m standing at the United States Capitol and you’re standing there, and we’re both looking at the Capitol, what are we seeing—what is the label on that building? Is it the “home of democracy,” or is it “where Donald Trump got screwed”? We’ll actually live in different realities.
Facebook is trying to pivot away from its Facebook problems, which is a content-moderation-at-scale problem. It might well be unsolvable. Meanwhile, they are still racing toward the hardest content moderation at scale that will ever exist: that you and I will live in different realities because we’re wearing headsets on our faces that present to us different realities in the same moment, in the same physical space.
The big picture, though, is that these platforms are very busy just holding themselves together, but there’s all kinds of new ideas that, as we’ve seen, can collect capital very quickly, both cultural and actual capital. I think it’s the beginning of a reckoning with how being this connected affects us and affects our lives. But we simply do not have the social systems or the political hierarchies to deal with it. I think that has huge repercussions, especially in a country like the U.S. with a First Amendment like that and all of its analogue baggage. And the government surely DOES NOT have the tools it might need.
So I think this is the beginning of that: How connected should we be, and who should be the gatekeepers of that connection? How do we hold those gatekeepers in line? No one knows the answer. It is the central challenge of our time. The literal reckoning with the shape of society that absolute connection has brought us, is upon us. And it is nowhere close to the end.
And let’s be brutal. Zuckerberg’s metaverse is an ill-defined hodgepodge of virtual productivity tools and lame wearables. It’s in line with this broader feeling in Silicon Valley right now that if you jam together a conference call and a FitBit, somewhere in the middle there, you’ll end up with the metaverse.
Look, here’s the thing, the metaverse will probably happen at this point, but it won’t look like anything in Zuckerberg’s stupid Connect video. It will be weird and janky and people will use it to have sex with cartoon characters and hide video game achievements in parks and interact with their favorite influencers, who may or may not be real. The metaverse may have some VR flourishes, but more likely it will look like the way things look now — a mix of mobile internet technology, cameras, geodata, and streaming video. It will involve big events that simultaneously happen online and offline, which can be consumed live or as a data trail of clips and memes afterwards.
And there will, of course, be a lot of problems. There will be privacy issues. And geographic spaces will start to buckle under viral physical traffic — a world of pink Instagram walls, cronut lines, TikTok challenges, and GameStop pumps.
Big platforms will inevitably create products that will facilitate this, but they won’t be Facebook. They’ll be stranger and more specific. They’ll emphasize small localized networks and faster and more visual communication: A Discord-like messaging app that has a Snap Map functionality and seamless live video filters. Digital assets, whether they’re NFTs or just memes you save on your phone, will be displayed in jewelry or small picture frames. You’ll turn a corner on the street and see a group of people standing together, staring at their phones or watches, and you’ll have no idea that they’re seeing together. Maybe one of them airdrops you the piece of content they’re all looking at.
But just think about the internet right now and think about how far beyond Facebook is already. It is laughable to think Zuckerberg is capable of creating a brand new VR-based internet. He couldn’t even beat TikTok!
Facebook’s strategy over the last decade has been to rip off what smaller apps are doing or just buy them outright. But you can’t do that with the metaverse because it doesn’t exist yet. In fact, after Facebook lifted the Stories feature from Snapchat, Snap just pivoted into becoming an AR and wearables company, which means Facebook isn’t even an early adopter in that either.
Zuckerberg will still be working on his smart home screens, Habbo Hotel rip-off Zoom calls, and budget Apple Watches, while young people are busy actually building a new internet, haphazardly, out of protocols that are free, easy-to-use, and the most convenient — Bluetooth, WiFi, video calls, free messaging clients, open source maps, QR codes, and the blockchain. And we will interact with this new metaverse on devices that we already own for a while. Then, slowly, new features will be added to help us interface with it better. Wireless bluetooth earbuds, smart watches, and phones will become more seamlessly integrated. They’ll have longer batteries, faster charging, brighter screens, better cameras, more wellness tools, and maybe eventually small projectors. We will create new user behaviors that companies will have to adapt to and then facilitate.
And there is no version of that where Facebook, or Meta, will be a key player. It is simply too big for them to dominate and, more importantly, it is already happening on Twitch, on Discord, and on TikTok. Zuckerberg is right. The metaverse is here, but it is has already left Facebook behind.