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The recent decision by Facebook – the company that controls the largest social network in the world and also Instagram, WhatsApp and other services – to change its company name to “Meta” has made it more familiar and present in conversations and on newspapers of many countries the word Meta represents an abbreviation and an explicit reference: the metaverse. Described by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a virtual 3D space in which it will be possible to work, play and interact with other people, the metaverse has already been the subject of an articulated and complex debate carried out by analysts, technology experts for some years now. and social media, investors and other insiders interested in the topic of the future evolution of the Internet.
The concept derives from the science fiction novel Snow Crash, written in 1992 by US author Neal Stephenson and published in Italian in the Cyberpunk anthology published by Mondadori. In the novel, the metaverse is a virtual reality – shared over a worldwide fiber optic network – in which people, fleeing the ruined real world, also access through public terminals and are represented by their own three-dimensional avatar. In the current debate, the metaverse is generally understood as a space that holds digital and physical reality together, which does not limit the number of users who can be present at the same time, and based on shared standards and protocols that guarantee a wide margin of interoperability for platforms. , organisms and technologies developed by different companies.
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Zuckerberg's presentation of Meta on the occasion of the announcement of the new company name on October 28th sparked a number of very different reactions, including an extensive and shared impression that the kind of virtual environment he described is currently a revival of models known since the early 2000s – through video games such as The Sims and virtual worlds such as Second Life – made more engaging and current by the expected integration of recent but still largely inapplicable technologies, millet and scarcely widespread. Technologies that involve, among other things, the use of virtual reality (VR) headsets, augmented reality (AR) glasses and other devices.
“The distinctive quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence, as if you were right there with another person, ”Zuckerberg wrote in a letter posted on the company's website. Meta, in the intentions of its CEO, will be one of the many distributors of platforms, software and services useful for living completely virtual experiences. In the future, he added, “you will be able to instantly teleport like a hologram to be in the office without having to travel, to a concert with friends or to your parents' living room to chat.”
From many judged to be excessively artificial, naive and utopian, Meta's presentation has been the subject of criticism, teasing and memes, partly linked to the optimism and apparent absurdity of some of Zuckerberg's predictions, and partly a reflection of the loss of credibility Facebook following the various scandals in which it has been involved over the past few years. Zuckerberg seemed “focused on a newer and better world, a world in which the insidious problems caused by Facebook are solved with a simple solution: even more Facebook – sorry, Meta – in every aspect of our life,” wrote Kyle Chayka. on the New Yorker.
In this sense, the timing of the choice to change the name appeared suspicious. It has been interpreted by many as a clumsy attempt to safeguard the company's reputation by diverting attention from the recent publication of the so-called “Facebook Papers”, internal documents provided by the whistleblower and former employee Frances Haugen who disclosed the company's failures. in containing disinformation and incitement to hatred and violence on Facebook, and the lack of interest in countering the psychological distress caused on adolescents by Instagram – inconveniences of which the company was aware – due to lack of technical means and not to limit the profits deriving from the activity of people on the platforms.
Honest to god thought this was satire. Honest to god. This is the kind of pseudonym they give tech companies in Hallmark movies because it's so ridiculously fake. https://t.co/AHgl3P04Bv
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) October 28, 2021
this is how a normal person answers the doorbell pic.twitter.com/ps2sv8BX50
— who is holidaykiss? (@holidaykiss_) October 28, 2021
Ridiculous aspects aside, Meta's presentation was the subject of several skeptical and alarmed reflections regarding the prospect that prediction of the future of the Internet formulated by Zuckerberg can become dominant and that – in the face of substantial specific investments, currently significantly higher than those of any other company – Meta can become the main company responsible for the ecosystem of the metaverse. And it is however relevant that, net of any analysts' mistrust regarding the Meta project, the company can count on a user base and investment potential that even highly successful companies in the virtual world such as Roblox or Epic Games, the company that produces the video game Fortnite, do not have.
According to the Financial Times, Meta plans to invest at least $ 10 billion in 2022 and double its workforce by hiring 10,000 people plus for its division dedicated to the metaverse (Facebook Reality Labs), in charge of creating hardware, software and content in AR and VR, considered fundamental for future online social experiences. “If Zuckerberg's grand plans are successful, the potential gains will not simply be billions of dollars in advertising revenue, but also a thriving online shopping business,” wrote the Financial Times, highlighting Meta's stated ambition to support an economy. digital alternative.
– Read also: Facebook's new name has a special meaning in Hebrew
Although Zuckerberg, alluding to rival companies, referred to the desire to avoid that a single company could limit the experience within the metaverse in the future and create profit by requiring the payment of commissions, according to many observers it is difficult to imagine that the same Meta does not he will have some form of control over his metaverse.
“My suspicion is that it will consist of owning the operating system of the future, and of Facebook's experience as an app on systems owned by others, its rivals. They don't want to be held captive on other people's platforms. They want others to be prisoners of their own, ”Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University's School of Law in Washington, DC, who specializes in regulating new technologies, told the New Scientist.
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A fairly shared impression is that Meta essentially wants to extend the model to the metaverse business of Facebook, based on the use of personal data to sell targeted advertising. “Advertisements will continue to be an important part of the strategy in the social media areas of what we do, and will likely be a significant part of the metaverse as well,” Zuckerberg said in a recent presentation of the company's earnings.
In the terms in which it was presented by Zuckerberg, the metaverse seemed in general a very unrealistic and not very credible scenario: “more a prophecy linked to a cult than the presentation of a product”, pronounced “with an inexorably sunny tone of a pharmaceutical representative “, wrote the New Yorker.
In a language judged” ominously similar to how he once spoke of Facebook “, continues the New Yorker, Zuckerberg stressed that” the metaverse would facilitate “The most important experience of all: connecting with people” ». He explained that devices will no longer be the focal point of people's attention, but he said it as if Facebook and Instagram weren't some of the major services responsible for people's dependence on their devices. And he talked about the metaverse as if it were something “able to disconnect us from the Internet, rather than suck us in even deeper.”
The videos shown by Meta, according to the New Yorker, also make sense of “profound cognitive dissonance”. In the graphic representations of domestic or work environments inhabited by holograms and avatars, for example, the interiors are equipped with very few technological tools and illuminated by natural light passing through large windows. What is hardly mentioned is that to access this hypothetical virtual world it is necessary to sit on the sofa and remain connected to a headset while wearing motion-sensing gloves: «not a particularly 'natural' condition».
Above all, argues the New Yorker, one wonders whether the more or less infantile activities possible within the metaverse presented by Zuckerberg will be sufficient to entice people to wear gloves and visors. Activities such as playing cards in a virtual space station with friends, visiting a mansion designed by an influencer, observing a virtual solar system projected into the sky through augmented reality glasses.
Various newspapers and sites in-depth analysis have expressed many doubts regarding the type of user imagined by Meta. “There is not a single person who, scrolling through the feed on Facebook, has said: 'Yes, immerse me in this reality, I want to touch my uncle's meme,” “wrote the Atlantic, adding that the ad campaign on the metaverse could still generate enough momentum and interest to lead to the realization of what at the moment appears to be just an awkward fantasy structure. “This is exactly why this investment to erect the metaverse, led by Big Tech, is funny but must also be taken seriously.”
The hypothesis proposed by Atlantic is that one of the reasons that would have prompted Facebook to change its name to Meta and invest in the metaverse, in addition to economic interests and the desire to improve its reputation, is a full awareness of the “boring” of the company's main platform. Facebook is “the place where people go to get updates from that guy they dated in high school, which he still posts there, and where a screamed news intersperses controversy about no vaxes and lowercase advertisements”.
– Read also: What's in the “Facebook Papers”
The haste and clumsiness of the metaverse version proposed by Meta, according to Atlantic, it would reveal in the current context how “all of Silicon Valley, not just Facebook, is desperate for a new great idea.” But the experiences and attempts made by other tech companies in recent years to develop new hardware, including those of the holding company that controls Google (Alphabet), suggest that this urgency is not in itself sufficient to guarantee success: “the dustbin of the technological past. is littered with failed virtual reality viewers “.
Journalist Amanda Hess wrote in the New York Times that” the aesthetics of the metaverse, with its horrible translucent holograms, evokes the specter of death And that the program of possible activities in the metaverse presented by Meta resembles “an advertisement for a virtual retirement community in which isolated millennials can live their last days”. In essence, the metaverse imagined by Zuckerberg is “a world without friction in which nothing unpredictable or non-monetizable ever happens”, inhabited by “cartoon characters, presumably sterilized, who converse by uttering phrases like” Yo! “,” Absurd ! ” and “Let's meet very quickly for a debriefing” “.
The insistence with which Zuckerberg used expressions such as” presence “and” sense of shared space “, has written the New Yorker, it also seems to ignore that we have now lived for over a decade in a world in which digital and physical reality are already deeply interconnected. The platforms developed by the big tech companies – including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, TikTok and Amazon – influence “the way we socialize, receive news, consume culture, find jobs, work and spend money”.
Regardless of whether or not we carry out these activities in the real world, we do all these things with the knowledge that they are also happening online and that the repercussions affect both one world and another. From this point of view, the version of metaverse proposed by Meta would be nothing more than a different way of «visualizing the world of mixed reality that digital platforms have already created». And it seems unlikely to many that anything built on those platforms, or by the responsible companies themselves, will not end up inheriting the same problems now known to so many people and largely related to the centralization of power by those companies.
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Some observers have expressed less pessimistic views but equally cautious about the ideas about the metaverse circulating after Meta's presentation. “A fully realized metaverse would dramatically intensify existing trends, open up new opportunities, and just as critically create a whole new set of problems,” wrote entertainment editor Steven Zeitchik in the Washington Post. But the risks associated with the development of this ecosystem do not mean that a possible great result should be ignored.
“After all, the idea of people making friends, making a fortune, losing a fortune or meeting their lifelong partner while staring at a piece of glass in their bedrooms would have seemed as unlikely to someone 35 years ago as the metaverse looks to us now. In the digital world, present implausibility is rarely an indicator of future feasibility “, wrote Zeitchik.
” The very idea of the “metaverse” means that an ever-growing part of our lives, of the work, leisure, shopping, wealth, happiness and relationships will take place within virtual worlds, rather than being prolonged or facilitated through digital devices and software, “US analyst Matthew Ball told the Washington Post. one of the most influential authors in the recent debate on the metaverse. Measuring the solidity of the future prospects of the metaverse on the basis of current knowledge could in this sense be a limit, because the transformations could go beyond our imagination.
– Read also: What it's like to work in virtual reality
Wondering how working in the metaverse will change, for example, might be the wrong question. “It's the economics of work itself that could change, and talking about it in terms of more immersive videoconferencing is like focusing on the wrench that fixes the subway engine instead of what the metaverse really is: the entire track system,” wrote Zeitchik. Great opportunities could emerge especially in the education sector. “Anyone in the last 20 months who has tried to secure one for 10-year-olds, from home and without distractions, wants a new model. Immersion in the metaverse would provide a teacher with more tools and less reasons for students to disconnect. “
Much skepticism also stems from the tendency to compare real-world experiences to those possible in a hypothetical virtual environment. In this sense, the metaverse would obviously inadequately simulate real life. “Sure, you can feel like you're at Thanksgiving from your couch, but you don't want to be able to taste the turkey?” Janet Murray, a Georgia Institute of Technology lecturer, expert in digital connectivity and long-term studies, told the Washington Post. researcher at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT.
The Meta project is also receiving criticism from scholars and experts concerned about possible privacy and security problems. In particular, the Financial Times wrote, it is not clear how the company will be able to moderate an open and interoperable system, nor whether users will be able to have only one virtual identity or more than one. The type of ecosystem outlined, in any case, should significantly increase the resources needed to ensure online safety, if it is possible to do so, and especially to defend younger users from harmful content and possible harassment.
Several questions, currently unanswered, concern the new types of user data that will be generated, if and how they will be connected to Meta's advertising tools and how they will possibly be protected. That data could include, for example, information gathered from tracking people's eyes and hands, or perhaps their biometric data for creating custom avatars.
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