Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the tech giant will transition from a social media company to a “metaverse company,” running on an “embodied Internet” that combines the real and virtual worlds more than ever.
So what is “the metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires say to grab headlines, like Tesla boss Elon Musk spreading "pizza restaurants" on Mars. However, given that nearly three billion people use Facebook every month, Zuckerberg's suggestion of a change in direction deserves some attention.
The term “metaverse” is not new, but it has recently seen a surge in popularity and speculation about what it all might mean in practice.
The idea of the metaverse is a useful one and will likely stay with us for some time. It's a concept worth understanding, even if, like me, you are critical of the future suggested by its proponents.
Content
- The metaverse: a name whose time has come?
- Who benefits from the metaverse?
- A family story
- Beyond the single world
The metaverse: a name whose time has come?
Humans have developed many technologies to trick our senses, from speakers and televisions to interactive video games and virtual reality, and in the future we may develop tools to trick our other senses, such as touch and smell. We have many words for these technologies, but still no popular word that refers to the entire mix of old-fashioned reality (the physical world) and our manufactured extensions to reality (the virtual world).
Words like “internet” and “cyberspace” have become associated with places we access through screens. They don't exactly capture the Internet's constant intertwining with virtual realities (like 3D game worlds or virtual cities) and augmented reality (like navigation overlays or Pokémon GO).
Equally important is the fact that the old names do not capture the new social relationships, sensory experiences and economic behaviors that are emerging along with these extensions to the virtual. For example, it combines a virtual reflection of our world with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and real estate markets.
Facebook's announcement speaks to its attempts to imagine what social media would look like within the metaverse.
It also helps that “metaverse” is a poetic term. Academics have been writing about a similar idea under the name “extended reality” for years, but it's a rather boring name.
“Metaverse,” coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” has a much more romantic appeal. Writers have a habit of recognizing trends that need to be named: “Cyberspace” comes from a 1982 book by William Gibson; “robot” is from a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.
Recent neologisms such as “the cloud” or “Internet of Things” have stuck with us precisely because they are practical ways of referring to technologies that were becoming increasingly important. The metaverse falls into this same category.
Who benefits from the metaverse?
If you spend a lot of time reading about big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, you might end up feeling like advances in technology (like the rise of the metaverse) are inevitable. It's hard not to start thinking about as These new technologies will shape our society, politics and culture, and how we fit into that future.
This idea is called “technological determinism”: the notion that advances in technology shape our social relations, power relations and culture, with us as mere passengers. Leave aside the fact that in a democratic society we have a say in how this all plays out.
For Facebook and other large corporations, determined to embrace the “next big thing” before their competitors, the metaverse is exciting because it presents an opportunity for new markets, new types of social networks, new consumer electronics and new patents.
What's not so clear is why you or I would be excited about all this.
A family story
In the mundane world, most of us face things like a pandemic, a climate emergency, and human-induced mass extinction of species. We're struggling to understand what a good life looks like with the technology we've already embraced (mobile devices, social media, and global connectivity are linked to many unwanted effects like anxiety and stress).
So why would we be excited about tech companies investing billions in new ways to distract us from the everyday world that gives us air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink?
Metaverse-style ideas can help us organize our societies in more productive ways. Shared standards and protocols that bring together disparate virtual worlds and augmented realities into a single, open metaverse could help people work together and reduce duplication of efforts.
In South Korea, for example, a “metaverse alliance” is working to persuade companies and the government to work together to develop a national open VR platform. A big part of this is finding ways to combine smartphones, 5G networks, augmented reality, virtual currencies and social networks to solve problems for society (and, more cynically, make profits).
Similar claims of sharing and collaboration were made in the early days of the Internet. But over time, the initial promise was sidelined by the dominance of big platforms and surveillance capitalism.
The Internet has been highly successful in connecting people from all over the world to each other and functioning as a kind of modern Library of Alexandria to house vast stores of knowledge. However, it has also increased the privatization of public spaces, invited advertising into every corner of our lives, tied us to a handful of giant companies more powerful than many countries, and led to the virtual world consuming the physical world through of environmental damage.
Beyond the single world
The metaverse's deepest problems concern the type of worldview it would represent.
In one worldview, we can think of ourselves as passengers within a singular reality that is like a container for our lives. This view is probably familiar to most readers, and it also describes what you see in something like Facebook: a “platform” that exists independently of any of its users.
In another view of the world, which sociologists suggest is common in indigenous cultures, each of us creates the reality we live in through what we do. Practices like work and rituals connect people, land, life and spirituality and together create reality.
A fundamental problem with the first vision is that it leads to a “single world”: a reality that does not allow for other realities. This is what we already see on existing platforms.
The current version of Facebook can increase your ability to connect with other people and communities. But at the same time, it limits the way You connect with them: Features like six predefined “reactions” to posts and content chosen by invisible algorithms shape the entire experience. Likewise, a game like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (with over 100 million active users) allows unlimited possibilities for how a game can be played – but defines the rules by which the game can be played.
The idea of a metaverse, by further transferring our lives to a universal platform, extends this problem to a deeper level. It offers us unlimited possibilities to overcome the restrictions of the physical world; yet in doing so it only replaces them with restrictions imposed by what the metaverse will allow.
