The Meatverse is out, the Metaverse is in. Or so Zuckerberg says. I think he's wrong, here's why.
Mark Zuckerberg had a meteoric rise in the decade between launching Facebook in 2006 to 2016 when Facebook was used by the infamous ‘Агентство интернет-исследований’ or ‘Internet Research Agency’ to spread disinformation and stoke divisions in America. The early years of the internet was an era of techno optimism or even techno utopianism where the information revolution was to lead to a fairer, more democratic world where everyone could make their voices heard. But around the mid 10’s the mood around social media started to shift. No one my age posted on Facebook anymore, it was taken over by parents and corporations so the kids migrated to Instagram and Vine. This trend has continued, Instagram isn’t fun like it used to be because it isn’t personal anymore; and while it has enabled meme culture to blossom and make fun of any- and everything, and have launched some influencers to global superstardom, the modern social media platforms aren’t built to be fun sites for users as much as good platforms for advertisers and influencers, and the algorithms which optimise user “engagement” also ends up wasting people’s time with “content” ranging from the banal like “5 min crafts” to the harmful which creates toxic ideals that disproportionately harm girls and young women’s mental health. Facebook has always been a step or two before the rest of the social media industry and the last six years have been the start of a slow but sure decline. Zuckerberg’s response? Going all in on ‘The Metaverse’.
The term ‘Metaverse’ was coined by Neil Stephenson in his 1992 Cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Cyberpunk as a subgenre of science fiction is famously the “combination of lowlife and high tech”, not traditionally what you’d want your fancy Tech company’s brand associated with but Mark Zuckerberg still pushes the ‘Metaverse’ relentlessly. In a way it should be unsurprising, the defence focused side of American tech has been using names from Lord of the Rings, like Palantir and Anduril, referencing magic seeing stones and Aragorn’s legendary sword respectively. In contrast to Tolkien’s magic artefacts the cyberpunk terms and names have rather poor connotations; I doubt there will ever be tech startups called Tessier-Ashpool, Tyrell Corp, or Arasaka. The Metaverse sounds kind of tacky to me, in the way that many early cyberpunk terms do, calling a hacker a ‘console cowboy’ was cool in ‘84 when Gibson wrote Neuromancer but now that reality has in some ways caught up with the fiction in terms of internet technology those terms sound strange. The idea that 18 year olds would unironically use the term ‘Metaverse’ were the tech to catch on strikes me as exceedingly unlikely. The main problem with the Metaverse though isn’t poor branding, it’s setting unrealistic goals.
The hour long video Meta, Facebook’s parent company, put out in October last year is a mission statement for the Metaverse, and includes sections on: social connection, entertainment, gaming, fitness, work, education, and commerce. In other words, Zuckerberg & co have grand ambitions. Changing human life to be more digital by making the internet immersive. Going from 2d to 3d. The question is why? Most of Silicon Valley’s follys stem from not asking why when designing the next great software. Why do we need non-fungible tokens to prove who owns a piece of art when we already have established systems for proving who owns what? Why have a smart watch when a regular watch tells the same time, has orders of magnitudes better battery life and can help you spend less time online? Why socialise in the Metaverse when you could meet up in real life? The prevailing view in the tech sector seems to be that history is a linear march from primitive to advanced technology; the model T Ford replaces the horse and cart, and the electric car replaces the combustion engine. The Metaverse isn’t the future because it enables people to communicate faster, work more effectively, or have more fun gaming, it’s the future because it’s a new technology, and higher tech is automatically better than lower tech. But that’s not how the world works. In the real world the electric guitar didn’t kill the acoustic guitar, both can coexist and the guitarist picks the instrument which best fits the style of music being played. Similarly, many technologies that should have been rendered obsolete are sticking around because they work and sometimes work better than the newer, fancier technologies.
The Metaverse will have to be better than what it seeks to replace to see widespread adoption. That’s a fact. The question remains if the Metaverse can be better than what it seeks to replace; and with Meta’s humble goal of revolutionising work, education, socialising, commerce, fitness, entertainment, and gaming (which is apparently distinct from entertainment) , saying that’s a tall order is a massive understatement. I won’t dwell on the looks of the Metaverse Meta presents in its presentation, that can always be changed, but the fact that it looks like a mobile game is hardly reassuring. I can’t fault Meta for being ambitious but I think they set their sights a bit too high with the Metaverse. The dream of a Metaverse isn’t new to Meta, MMORPG’s have been around since the 90’s, but I think it will forever remain a dream. As much as the internet and social media has changed our lives, it hasn’t changed the reasons why we do what we do, only how we do what we do. Over the course of the last two years I have been in situations where I have thought ‘I wish we met in real life instead of over zoom/facetime’ but I don’t think I’ve met a person in real life where I thought ‘I wish we had met over zoom instead’. Digital interactions can’t replace physically meeting someone, no matter how much Meta spends on developing the Metaverse.
As previously mentioned, Metaverse is a Cyberpunk term. In Neuromancer Case considers ‘cyberspace’ more real than ‘meatspace’, and it appears Zuckerberg & co want to create a world where cyberspace and meatspace are similarly blurred. But like Libra did before it, so too will the Metaverse fail. Facebook and its founder were behemoths of the mid aughts to the mid teens, but the Metaverse is an increasingly desperate attempt to arrest a very slow but undoubtedly steady decline into irrelevance.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about the war in Ukraine here, or why Facebook's Libra was doomed to fail here, or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by Harsch Shivam from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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