- Last Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg gave a meandering tour of the metaverse—the as-yet-hypothetical next phase of the Internet, a unified space that mingles digital and physical reality.
- The metaverse, which Zuckerberg has previously touted in earnings calls, will be “an embodied Internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” he said, as he paced through a series of palatial interiors, ambiguously real or rendered.
- Zuckerberg appears to be willing to abandon all of his company’s nagging problems as if they were relics of a bygone era.
Mark Zuckerberg gave a meandering tour of the metaverse—the as-yet-hypothetical next phase of the Internet, a unified space that mingles digital and physical reality—in a video presentation for the Facebook Connect 2021 event last Thursday, the same day that Facebook’s parent company rebranded under the new name Meta as reported by The New Yorker.
Multiple layers of reality
As he strode through a series of palatial interiors, ambiguously real or created, Zuckerberg described the metaverse, which he has previously extolled in earnings calls, as “an embodied Internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.”
Users would be able to converse and navigate “across multiple layers of reality,” he stated, such as attending a concert in virtual reality with a friend or collaborating with a colleague’s hologram across a desk.
According to the Facebook Papers, Facebook has long been aware of the harm that its social networks create, from how Instagram exacerbates teenagers’ body image issues to how Facebook’s algorithmic News Feed accelerates disinformation and ideological extremism.
He’s focused on a newer, better world, one in which Facebook’s pernicious flaws are solved with a simple solution: more Facebook—sorry, Meta—in every part of our lives.
A new world
Zuckerberg’s film, which is tightly constructed and robotically written, seems more like a cultic prophecy than a product presentation.
Zuckerberg, dressed in a typical dark long-sleeved shirt and slacks, his waxen skin and glazed eyes, and appears little more human than the replicant avatar he uses to promote immersive 3-D experiences.
He goes on to say that the metaverse will be “more natural and colourful.” “You’ll feel like you’re right there in a new world with each other, rather than alone at your computer.”
A single mention of “immersive all-day experiences” shows that, rather than assisting us in escaping mediating technology, Zuckerberg expects us to spend many hours immersed in it.
Work, pleasure, socializing, and even education are all metaverse fodder.
Second life
In terms of substance, Meta’s virtual reality resembles a beefed-up version of Second Life, the online collaborative world-building game that has been around since 2003.
It’s an uncanny, lifeless, and mundane dream universe that seems a lot like three-dimensional Netflix.
The avatars resemble Pixar figures in that they are ageless and devoid of personality, polished into homogeneity.
Will such enticements persuade us to don virtual reality headsets?
Despite this, Meta—named after the object itself—seems to be planning to build the tools and infrastructure that will underpin it all.
According to Zuckerberg, the company will create the devices that allow us to interact with the metaverse, the software that allows developers to create experiences for it, and the marketplaces where creators can sell their virtual creations and users can buy them, possibly in the form of non-fungible tokens, which he mentions several times.
Is it inescapable?
Some experiences will occur in actual life, the plain old physical world, when you are living within Meta’s projected “layers of reality.”
The difficulty is that anything developed on top of those platforms, or by the same stakeholders, will almost certainly suffer from the same issues that we’ve come to expect—in particular, a concentration of power in the hands of people like Zuckerberg.
Who among us would want to live in a world he created?
He sits in a leather chair in front of a fireplace at one point in the video, as if addressing the nation.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the Facebook Connect movie is design fiction—not a depiction of existing technology, but a rendering of what might exist in the future.
A Zuckerberg-style future isn’t as inescapable as he makes it out to be.
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Source: The New Yorker
