What the metaverse pessimists are missing

Meta's grand vision is already well on its way

Today, let’s talk about the reaction to Facebook’s rebranding as Meta last week and the attendant conversation around the metaverse. Specifically, I want to better understand the sudden outpouring of metaverse pessimism, and explore the risks of dismissing it too soon.

Part of the challenge is that Facebook’s enthusiastic championing of the metaverse concept, which it did not invent, immediately became a referendum on Facebook itself. If you think Facebook is too irresponsible to be trusted with the future, or if using Facebook makes you feel bad, a Facebook-centric metaverse is a nonstarter. It can feel as if the company is not transforming here so much as it is putting on a disguise. The vision of the future that Meta presented is largely borrowed from others; the descendant of dystopian fiction; and heavily dependent on technology that has yet to be invented.

This is the part of metaverse pessimism that I find relatively easy to understand. It’s the idea that if someone is going to build a three-dimensional embodied internet in which the majority of digital human activity transpires, Meta should not be the company that builds it. Or put another way: If people had really wanted to see Facebook build the metaverse, the company might still be called Facebook today.

But these reactions we would have been able to predict even before Meta made its announcement on Thursday. More interesting to me — if, perhaps, about as predictable — is the idea that the metaverse will fail altogether.

“I have no interest in becoming part of a ‘metaverse,’” wrote Charles M. Blow in the New York Times, in a representative complaint. “That sounds absolutely ridiculous. And terrible.”

In the Atlantic, Ethan Zuckerman noted that his earlier attempt to build a metaverse with a small group of friends had ended in ruin. This was 27 years ago, and seems to have represented a total investment of a few hundred dollars, but Zuckerman says it’s still a bad idea:

The problem is that it’s boring. The futures it imagines have been imagined a thousand times before, and usually better. Two old men chat over a chessboard, one in Barcelona, one in New York, much as they did on Minitel in the 1980s. There’s virtual Ping-Pong and surfing, you know, like on a Wii. You can watch David Attenborough nature documentaries, like you do on Netflix. You can videoconference with your workmates … you know, like you do every single day.

Gene Park picks up on this it’s-all-been-done-before theme in the the Washington Post, describing how various components of Meta’s vision have already been built by others: persistent avatars in Roblox, social experiences in VRChat, digital goods in Fortnite, and so on. But where most critics are calling Meta’s vision vaporware, Park suggests the company has already lost the game: “Zuckerberg and Co. are catching up to the concept of the metaverse,” he writes. “They just happen to be a little late in hopping on board.”

So to sum up: Meta’s vision for the metaverse is ridiculous and terrible; but it’s also extremely boring; but also it’s vaporware; but also it has already been built by video game companies and Facebook is late to the game.

No offense to these writers, but I know a collective grasping at straws when I see it. And it’s a kind of straw-grasping that feels familiar from Facebook’s early days.

It’s commonplace now to assert that tech writers never really criticized Facebook until 2016. In fact, tech writers criticized it all the time — but on a dimension that has long since been forgotten. Now that the newly rebranded Meta is one of the biggest companies in the world, its dominance is taken for granted. But before and especially during and after its initial public offering, it was widely assumed that Facebook could fail. Reasons varied: it was a fad; its valuation was too high; it wouldn’t navigate the transition from the web to mobile devices.

This skepticism wasn’t unique to Facebook. For half a decade after I arrived in San Francisco, a leading topic of conversation around town was whether we had found ourselves in another dot-com bubble. And then it turned out that mostly these were real businesses with solid fundamentals, and a lot of people got rich and we basically stopped talking about it.

Virtual reality has had its own version of the dot-com crash: a series of boom-and-bust cycles dating back to the 1990s that left the industry with little to show for it but the scar tissue of failed investments. More recent failures, such as the near-collapse of much-hyped unicorn Magic Leap, have offered additional reason for doubt.

Moreover, skepticism is the primary mode of journalism. When we see something new — particularly these days — we immediately begin gaming out how it could fail or be abused. This is as it should be; it’s now quite clear that people like me were mostly asking the wrong questions about Facebook in the early 2010s. But I also think this mode can leave us with blind spots.

Particularly when it comes to something like VR, which will be the center of any future metaverse, and which today is the province of only the nerdiest early adopters. At the same time, as I noted here in June, VR might be Facebook’s fastest-growing business. Last week, the company said that its non-advertising revenue — which includes all its hardware products — was up 195 percent year over year.

Put simply, the certainty that Meta’s metaverse will fail is incompatible with a world in which Oculus’ business is doubling every year.

And while some critics complained that the Facebook Connect keynote was just a bunch of talk, a very different picture is being painted by the company’s actions. Actions like promising to invest $10 billion in the project next year, or hiring 10,000 people in the European Union to work on it. Or by extending its uncontested run of buying up the most popular VR studios in the world — most recently including Within, maker of the popular subscription VR fitness app Supernatural, which the company bought on Friday.

I write all this not to sell the idea that Meta’s victory is guaranteed, but rather that its ambitions ought to be taken seriously. If you assume the company’s vision will fail, it’s easy to give yourself permission to stop paying attention — just as too many of us did around the Facebook IPO. If, on the other hand, you assume Meta might succeed, I think you’ll ask much sharper questions.

Questions like: how is Meta going to moderate the metaverse? How will it distribute those moderation resources? What data will it collect, and how will it be used? Look at every unsolved problem from the current era of social networks. What confidence do we have that they can be solved in an even more immersive world?

The answers will take years to arrive. But in the meantime, for a company so big the government wants to break it up, Meta has turned out to be surprisingly easy to underestimate here. The final product remains a long ways away, and will almost certainly look different than the blue-sky vision we all watched Thursday. But pessimists are strangely blind to the fact that the metaverse is already very much under construction.

Elsewhere: A 2018 internal presentation on Facebook’s metaverse mission. An interview with incoming Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. And did the Facebook Papers flop?

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The Ratio

Today in news that could change public perception of the big tech companies.

⬇️ Trending down: Roblox went down for the better part of two full days. The company eventually issued an explanation, but was mostly silent beyond a handful of “stay tuned!” tweets. (Zack Zwiezen / Kotaku)

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Governing

The US government sustained Microsoft’s protest of a $10 billion defense contract awarded to Amazon, saying that both bids should be reconsidered. The cloud computing contract was awarded to Amazon in July. (Frank Konkel / Nextgov)

Politicians and academics offer their thoughts on how to fix social networks. Ideas include making them smaller; introducing virality “circuit breakers”; and promoting competition; (Wall Street Journal)

Vietnam jailed five journalists for criticizing the state in Facebook posts. Awful: “Truong Chau Huu Danh, a former reporter and the leader of the group, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison while the other defendants were given jail terms of between two and three years.” (Al Jazeera)

How a public relations firm called Wish Win created a network of sites to spread disinformation ahead of this month’s elections in Honduras. The latest apparent effort from a ruling party to discredit its opposition. (Leo Schwartz / Rest of World)

A study of 12,000 children ages 9 to 10 found that several hours of screen time per day does not appear to be harmful. Moreover: “Greater amounts of screen time were associated with stronger peer relationships for both boys and girls – both have more male and female friends.” (Katie Paulich / The Conversation)

Two employees at the heart of the Dave Chappelle controversy at Netflix filed unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board. B. Pagels-Minor and Terra Field say the company retaliated against them after they spoke out. (Zoe Schiffer / The Verge)

A look at Andreessen Horowitz’s lobbying on crypto issues. The firm is massively exposed to a variety of legal gray areas; it makes sense they would seek to shape any regulation. (Eric Lipton, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Ephrat Livni / New York Times)

Should Stripe ban tarot card readers? Hard call: for some, it’s harmless fun; for others, it could be a gateway to scams. (Meg Jones Wall / Wired)

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Industry

Facebook is working to give robots a sense of touch. The technology “will provide a source of rich contact data that could be helpful in advancing AI in a wide range of touch-based tasks including object classification, proprioception, and robotic grasping,” the company said. (Andrew Tarantola / Engadget)

Microsoft acquired Two Hat, a content moderation provider that keeps bad stuff off of Xbox. The firms already had a partnership; Two Hat “uses AI to classify and filter billions of human interactions across messages, images, usernames, videos, and more.” (Tom Warren / The Verge)

And: Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable company. For now! (Samantha Subin / CNBC)

Twitter added replays for its Spaces audio chats. The most-requested feature for the product so far; Twitter continues to ship product at an impressive clip. (Tom Warren / The Verge)

ByteDance mandated 9-hour days. The industry standard is 12; the company says anyone who wants to work longer needs to get permission. (Zheping Huang / Bloomberg)

TikTok is testing direct tips for creators. Currently open to people with 100,000 or more followers; TikTok already accepts tips in its live streaming product. (Aisha Malik / TechCrunch)

Pinterest added a shoppable daily live “TV show” inside its app. It debuts November 8 and will be hosted by popular creators on the platform. QVC lives! (Emma Roth / The Verge)

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Those good tweets

broti gupta @BrotiGupta

choosing one very special trick-or-treater to come inside and have a salmon dinner with me and my family

jean rollin by limp bizkit @negaversace

Kieran Culkin is what happens when you stop yearning for height and embrace your power as a hot little maniac, a primordial creature of the earth, one of God’s true rascals

Corey Jacobs @coreytimes

My mom just won her company’s Halloween costume contest as “Fifty Shades of Gray” 💀💀

Optimistic Radiologist @responsibleMDs

An anti-faxxer

pokalope @pokalope

Terrifying. #halloween2021

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Talk to me

Send me tips, comments, questions, and metaverse optimism: casey@platformer.news.