So Facebook has died, and long live Meta which I think marks a huge historical milestone for humanity. The day social media died. Facebook is now going to try to morph itself into "The Metaverse" which is some sort of 3d virtual playground where nobody hates Mark Zuckerberg anymore? Honestly I can't make heads or tails of what the Metaverse is supposed to actually be beyond what has already come before as a persistent virtual reality social game. Just pick one and that's the "Metaverse": Second Life, Roblox, Minecraft, every MMOG game invited in the 21st century, practically. So why is Meta going to revolutionize this space? Because they have lots of money and an image to save? What furtile ground is actually left with this idea? And do you really want to live in a virtual reality based internet?
The "Metaverse" is basically trying to deliver on a promise as old as the internet. Most people cite Neil Stephenson's "Snowcrash" as the genesis of this idea, but it's probably only the most popular one. There had been attempts before to create it or something that could be possibly considered it. But, persistent social based VR based worlds or communities have been built before: most noteable Second Life. In fact I'd argue Second Life came closest to this idea because it wasn't trying to be anything beyond a excessively flexible virtual world. It also had the vision of being literally a 2nd life where you designed a new image of yourself within it. The economy of Second Life was larger than the GDP of Russia. I think it was the 27th largest economy of the world. It was quite popular for a time, but eventually it faded from the zeitgeist of the internet. While it failed, it did approximate this Metaverse vision. No matter how crude Second Life was it ultimately failed as an idea and that could be the precursor to fate waiting for "The Metaverse". I have serious doubts that a Facebook powered "Metaverse" is going to be radically different and transformative to make the concept stick.
I bet most Metaverse proponents would disagree with my comparison, and bristle at the fact that their project can be boiled down to a 4-5 year period in the mid 2000s that has been long forgotten. But there were many other attempts to bring about the "Metaverse" or technology that would support it. VRML was a promising idea that could democratize 3D worlds using a standards based approach, but it flamed out before it could even get going. Most promponents chalked up that failure to lacking implementations and compabilities, but there has been no real attempt to reboot that failure either. Mostly because the concept of the web as a 3D world was just not what people wanted. While we have better platforms like Unity or Unreal I don't think the crudeness of these inventions were really the problem.
Sure Mark Zukerberg and John Carmack can debate over whether the technology is ready or not, or if new technology will somehow improve the experience. However, the technology isn't really that much better than it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Maybe we have nicer graphics or higher resolutions, or even cheap VR headsets, but it hasn't really made VR more desirable. It's only really found a following inside a small pocket of gamers. Most of the time 2D monitors are the preferred method of expierence for gamers. And that really points to the fact of 3D expierences, which unless you are trying to build immersive gaming type worlds, most of us would rather just use 2D. We don't need to consume our instagrams and TikToks in 3D to get the point. Never have. That's why these 3D world platforms never last. VR interfaces are the video phone from the 1950s. Sounds really cool and sci-fi, but not a practical use case.
For a world that just spent roughly 18 months in doors and isolated with our only social outlet is zoom happy hours and conducting business over zoom calls I think what most people want right now is less computer time and more face time in the real life or what ever is left of it. That's what makes this pathetic attempt to revitalize a company's image by showcasing some bright new vision of the future as a transparent attempt to distract rather than deliver. It feels like the "Metaverse" is just some sort of fantasy escapism for Zuckerberg to run away from the problems he created because of his belief in excessively permissive 1st ammendment rights.
Modern social media is almost completely unregulated or moderated. Sure Facebook has standards of conduct and employs armies of people to moderate Facebok and Instagram, but it falls way short of effectively policing it. It took the almost overthrowing of the US government to force it to deplatform a President which shows every other bad actor on Facebook, Twitter, etc where the lines is which is very far away for almost all of them. These problems haven't gone away with a new platform and besides what army will moderate the "Metaverse"? Misinformation and hate speech is abound on the platform every minute of the day, and whatever Facebook is doing hasn't even come close to being a solution to the problem. Bot armies reign supreme ready to defame and spew nonsense 24-7 8 days a week. And it's largely those unchecked forces that spoiled Facebook and Twitter in the first place. Cyberbullying at scale runs rampant smear campaigns by a vocal minority and your neighbor believes in all sorts of pyschotic conspiracy theories that you are a liberal nazi who must be assinated.
The problem is that while Facebook is home for the cesspool of humanity so will it be in the "Metaverse". While we shake our finger at Mark Zuckerberg and his abomination of a creation he is only partly to blame because we're the ones at the end of the like and reshare button. And we'll be the exact same customer occupying "the Metaverse" if that becomes a thing. We're the ones that believe rumors, innuendos, and out right bat shit crazy conspiracy theories than pander to human's worst inner believes and fears. We are the ones that like and reshare content from the cesspool afraid to look away from the computer for fear we might miss something. In a way we are the ones that destroyed social media just as much as Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. The only real sin they committed was continuing to hold fast to their "no censorship" is a laudable goal. And that letting us "be our true selves" was a good idea. It wasn't. We're horrible people. In a way if the world was an ideal place inhabitted by rational and logical people you quite possibly could hold very open permissive 1st ammendment beliefs, but reality is we aren't rational nor ideal. And we don't deserve unfettered 1st amendment rights. We are quite easily manipulated by the dumbest schemes. Those faults require that public spaces censor out the ones that will pollute it, see also Paradox of Tolerance. And that hasn't really changed by peddling "The Metaverse".
This is all happening at just the time when globally we are waking up to how horrible we've been, and how awful Mark and other technofiles have been mismanaging their platforms. Now Mark Zuckerberg is trying to save what little he has left of his companies' credibility. It reminds me of the early 2000s when another company's image was falling apart because of rampant security issues. Microsoft. After Windows XP an inordinate storm of security vulnerabilities were threatening Micrsoft, and they couldn't patch it fast enough. The DOJ had slapped Microsoft down for violating Java's EULA with its "embrace and extend" philosophy, and basically was the all around 1 million lb. bad guy of tech. Then comes the promises of Vista. A new OS done right with a new language at its heart that would fix all of these pesky security issues in one fell swoop, and deliver us into a new world of discoverable services, the .NET platform, and nirvana. SQL database reimagined, hard disks and file systems were going to be "rethought" for "today's computing". Meanwhile the world moved on from Microsoft dominance, and old MS totally and completely missed the rise of web 2.0 and modern browsers. We began to break way from Internet Explorer 6.0 and softare as a service really started to become a reality like never before. Apple introduced it's OS 10, and people started to filter out into other operating systems away from the intel MS hegemony. Vista turned out to be a major failure, and it took a decade for MS to realize their mistake. And while that was happening they were moved out of the way. Vista distracted Microsoft and completely enveloped them into a world unto their own making. And the rest of computing just drove right past that exit to a happier and more exiciting industry.
I think "The Metaverse" will be Facebook's Vista. A new vision created when a company has reached a critical failure in its product. "The Metaverse" will be a project unto itself that Facebook will dedicate untold effort towards. A project that will become so big and all consuming Facebook will struggle to explain what it's doing and why. It will become the project that no one actually wants and will end up leading them to take their eye off the ball. Just like Microsoft did. They'll become less important in the fabric of the web economy, and will fade. They won't dissappear unless governments regulate them out of existence, but they will become less important in our lives. After all there still is a Myspace floating out there, and Facebook has enough gravity to float around too. A little more relevant than Myspace, but less relevant than now.
There are definite limits to any institutions we create even software based ones. We can never really perfect them or continue to build them ever larger. At some point the Tower of Babel always falls apart. Will Facebook have a 2nd act? Is Meta that second act or just the rebound girlfriend/boyfriend? I'm betting on the later.
