Metaverse

OPINION: Facebook’s “Metaverse” concept is fundamentally broken.

Facebook’s recent name change to “Meta” is part of a new marketing strategy for the company, one that revolves around a planned “Metaverse.” While the term “Metaverse” has been thrown around lately, it’s origins come from a fictional novel called “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephensen. Its plot revolves around a corrupted dystopian world, where its citizens have taken to a VR experience known as the Metaverse as a means to escape. The difference between our world and the world of Snow Crash is we won’t have an escape.

Virtual Reality is rapidly becoming more relevant than ever, changing from an expensive gimmick to a technology with the potential to disrupt the tech market. Virtual Reality has the potential to completely reshape and revolutionize our world, and the path we take now may change everything.

It’s potential can be compared to that of the cell phone or the internet, an expensive commodity at first, which quickly became institutionalized in everyday life. But just like the cellphone and the internet, artists have theorized the potential of such technology well before it was even possible to create.

In 1992, author Neal Stephenson published his dystopian sci-fi novel titled “Snow Crash”. The novel depicted a grotesquely similar future where everyday life is ruled by private enterprises and corrupt organizations. These corporations and entities have turned the world into a dismal, exploitative world where the average person suffers to make ends meet, and so they turn to the last form of free media they have left: the “Metaverse.” If this sounds familiar, it's because this book is the inspiration of almost every VR Sci-Fi story today.

In Snow Crash, The “Metaverse” is a VR world that is open-source and unrestrained. You can think of it like the internet. Companies provide you with the tools needed to access it, but no private company ‘owns’ the internet. This is not possible under Facebook's model because it is explicitly designed to create a monopoly in the VR market. In leaked documents in 2018, Facebook admitted that their plan for the “Metaverse” was to “keep them (Google & Apple) from being in the VR business in a meaningful way at all” (Rubin 2018). This quote has been refuted by Facebook as they have since stated that they no longer believe in those statements, a claim that has no true standing water.

Facebook’s track record shows that they have no real intention on fixing their business practices as was revealed by Frances Haugen, a recent whistleblower who appeared in congress last month to reveal that Facebook’s business model is designed to exacerbate mental health issues in younger generations. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Haugen referenced that in “Snow Crash,” “it (The Metaverse) was a thing that people used to numb themselves when their lives were horrible. So beyond the fact that these immersive environments are extremely addictive and they encourage people to unplug from the reality we actually live” (Haugen 2021). She also expressed her concern over privacy, “I’m also worried about it on the level of — the metaverse will require us to put many, many more sensors in our homes and our workplaces.”

These concerns have led to many accusing Facebook’s name change to be part of a remarketing strategy in the face of the many scandals attached to its name, an accusation Facebook fervently denies. So considering the immense risk Facebook is taking by putting all their eggs in the same basket, Why do it?

The answer may lie in what Facebook’s competition has and that Facebook, or Meta, sorely lacks. This component is stability. Apple and Google already have servers and markets that they monopolize and aren’t at risk of losing anytime soon. Fearing that virtual reality could make their social media platform obsolete, they are attempting to get ahead of the curve - far ahead. VR is still far from a commodity, especially in an unstable market that has pushed the middle class to the brink of collapse. So instead of becoming more relevant, Facebook has, in an ironic twist, distanced itself even further from the public. They have reignited controversies, created an online tool meant to stifle competition, and promoted a new approach that at its core is fundamentally broken.

By: Brendan Rice