Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse already sucks

GIAN M. VOLPICELLICULTURE02.08.2021 06:00 AM

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse already sucks

Facebook’s Metaverse ambitions reveal an alarming lack of imagination and a less alarming love of tech buzzwords

GRAEME JENNINGS - POOL/GETTY IMAGES

The Zuckerverse is coming. Just over a week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, in a long interview with The Verge, that his social network is readying itself to become “a Metaverse company”.

First floated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the Metaverse is an idealised immersive successor of the internet – a virtual space where billions of users will move, interact, and operate across myriad different but interoperable worlds and situations, always retaining their avatar identities, virtual possessions, and digital currencies. It is hard to pin the Metaverse down (more on this later), but the shape one can make out amid the cyberpunk mist is some version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One meets Fortnite, meets virtual reality, meets blockchain. A game-y galaxy that seamlessly fuses with the Meatspace. What matters is that Metaverse is now the buzzword du jour, and that Facebook wants a piece of it. The bad news is that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ambitions sound boring as hell.

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Time and again over the interview, Zuckerberg dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the Metaverse’s ability to increase “f​​ocus time and individual productivity”. He coined the dreary formula “infinite office”, a supposedly desirable scenario in which Metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros. Zuck was “excit[ed]” (!) about the Metaverse’s potential for organising VR office meetings.

Metaverse evangelists and open-source advocates have been fretting about Big Tech’s invasion of the Metaverse, about how the usual suspects – Facebook, Google, etcetera – would consolidate their stranglehold on the digital world, harvesting our data and re-enacting the rote practices of surveillance capitalism and the attendant ills of misinformation, manipulation, and gatekeeping. But Big Tech’s incursion into the Metaverse might end up being much less of a super-villainous power grab, and simply make the Metaverse an uncool snoozefest – a hybrid between Heavy Rain’s goofy detective-work ARI glasses and a cringy rendering of an Accenture blogpost. When Microsoft starts talking about the endless opportunities of an “enterprise metaverse”, you know that there will be no fun to be had.

The idea of Metaverse was always liable to be captured by corporate squares, if anything because there is no clear-cut definition of what it is even supposed to be. The Metaverse’s ur-texts – Snow Crash and arguably Ready Player One – are sci-fi novels that cannot really form the base for rigorous research. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball has come closest to a systematic study of what makes a Metaverse, while leaving some room for interpretation of what we’ll eventually see when the thing comes through. It is only natural that Facebook and Microsoft decided to propose their vision for whatever the buzzword will transmogrify into, but it is also dispiriting that they were so unimaginative.

One crucial element that seems to be always spoken quietly in almost all analyses of the Metaverse is its nature as crisis technology. While most Meta-prophets expect this virtual universe to evolve almost naturally from technological progress and societal dynamics, they don’t really explain why someone would want to spend all this time there. In its fictional incarnations, however, the Metaverse is desirable because the alternative – i.e. Earth – is insufferably dark. In Snow Crash, people run amok in the Metaverse while the world is a violence-ridden anarchical mess dogged by mafia cartels and hyperinflation; in Ready Player One, a global underclass living in squalid shanty towns plug into the Oasis (Cline’s version of the Metaverse) for days on end in the hope of winning an in-game scavenger hunt.

While the Metaverse-as-nuclear-shelter narrative might be a tad too catastrophist, it is not by chance that the Metaverse really started entering the public discourse in 2020, as the pandemic was raging across the globe, forcing most people indoors and outlawing all but essential human contact. Of course you want to jump into the Metaverse when you’re idling away your days at home glued to a screen, and when a lot of the things you do – “researching” QAnon conspiracy theories, trading GameStonks on Robinhood, playing with Technoking Musk and his doggie memes – already look like mixed-reality games anyway. More to the point, of course you’ll want better meetings and better multitasking chops when you’re once again stuck indoors as the Omega variant circulates, in 2051.

Zuckerberg and Microsoft are nodding to that world, the forever virus world, when they envision their enterprise Metaverse of infinite offices and exciting meetings. But in the same breath they are erasing what’s exciting and even liberating about the Metaverse and what it could offer to the people seeking refuge from a crisis. Not only the fun and the experimentation with different identities and appearances – but the creation of entirely new professions, economic models and political communities. In his analysis, Ball posits the possibility to “create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of ‘work’ that produces ‘value’,” as one of the lynchpins of the Metaverse.

What exactly this work will look like is anybody’s guess at this stage; less of a guess is who will be doing that work. The thing is – there is another crisis apart from the pandemic that might encourage a lot of people to repair to the Metaverse, and it is essentially generational in its nature. In a world – mostly the Western world – dogged by gerontocracy, one where the levers of political and economic power are firmly in the hands of unmovable boomers, one where Donald Trump can realistically consider a 2024 run and where Alan Rusbridger can become an editor-in-chief again, younger generations might as well decide to up sticks, untether themselves from the world economy and build a new economy somewhere else – one where they can literally create the top positions they always aspired to, earn oodles of digital currency, and maybe buy a virtual house which looks almost as good as the brick-and-mortar one they struggled to afford. In a way, this is exactly what a lot of second-wave cryptocurrency projects, from DeFi to NFTs, claimed to be about. (Of course, that did not always pan out.)

The fashioning of an entirely new economy remains the most revolutionary promise of the Metaverse. Zuckerberg sort of hinted at that in his interview, claiming that the Metaverse he plans to contribute to building might be a boon for creators, content producers, and developers. But his general keynote – his infinite office spiel – is a red flag, one that looks alarmingly like productivity software kitted out with VR glitter. If that were to prevail, the real threat to the Metaverse will not come from the overbearing Zuckerverse – but from Zuckerberg’s lame Suckerverse.

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