What is the Metaverse?

Mark Zuckerberg has had a revelation. Apparently, human beings are not built to spend their lives staring at a small electronic screen. In an interview with the magazine ‘The Verge’, he shared the groundbreaking news that ‘people shouldn’t live through small, glowing rectangles.’ The inventor of the social network that played a formative role in making small, glowing rectangles essential to modern life continued, announcing ‘That’s not really how humans are made to interact.’ So what is Mark Zuckerberg’s solution following this revelation? Is it to resign immediately? Send a global-wide message imploring all people to put down their phones? To take a walk on our dying planet? Or to actually look at their friends and family face-to-face? Is it at least to change Facebook’s (sorry – ‘Meta’) addictive algorithm?

The idea of a Metaverse has been around long before Zuckerberg was bored during lockdown. The term itself was first coined in a dystopian novel by science-fiction writer Noel Stevenson. Named ‘Snow Crash’, it envisioned a new virtual world where uninhibited corporate greed dominates the avatars of real people that inhabit it (yes, the irony of adopting a term invented to satirise companies just like Facebook does seem to have been lost on Zuckerberg). Ever since Virtual Reality headsets were invented, there have been rumours flittering around Silicon Valley that a ‘Meta- universe’ of online platforms for people with VR headsets to come into and explore is just about to be created. The newly created Meta appears to be the first company to seriously attempt to actualize the concept.

No one seems quite sure on a definition of the ‘Metaverse’. The official dictionary gives a remarkably vague definition of ‘a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you’. This could mean anything from just a fancy VR Minecraft or Fortnite to a completely new virtual world where you can join in on a Netflix film, go to a school lesson and walk your VR dog, all while sat in bed.  Meta itself definitely adheres to the latter vision: it has already spent billions of dollars on hiring 10,000 people in Europe alone to spearhead the project, and its press releases insist that ‘At least a billion people will have joined the Metaverse by 2030.’ Zuckerberg has placed great emphasis on the fact that he wishes other companies to take part in Metaverse, but to every invitation there is a very strong imperialist hint. Google, Netflix, Amazon, may all have spaces in the Metaverse, but there can be no doubt that Meta is still the creator and sustainer – its name is on the box, after all.  

Will the Metaverse actually happen?

If the Metaverse does actually happen, it will likely be very different from the version Meta hints at in press releases. Take their latest YouTube video, for example. At one point, Zuckerberg and his friends float around in zero gravity playing cards. Apart from the fact their ‘spaceship’ surroundings do not look very ‘new world’ or sophisticated – the design of the whole video’s background had a tangible resemblance to Sims 1 – there is no way that any Virtual Reality headset would be able to accurately simulate the feeling of cards in your hands. It is possible that gloves designed to stimulate specific nerve reactors in your hands could, but they have yet to be created, and besides, Zuckerberg has repeatedly held that the Metaverse will be based off a headset without any additional equipment needed. More importantly (because it is very cool when you first watch the video, but rather devastating when you stop to think about it) we will not actually be floating in zero gravity with our friends. We will be sitting or standing in our bedrooms, alone, in Earth’s gravity of approx. 9.807 m/s2 that will feel very much like gravity of 9.807 m/s2. Sorry; we can’t fly yet.

Is anything about the Metaverse likely to actually happen?

There are certain technological advances that do seem possible in the next decade. One of the ideas which Zuckerberg floated in his press releases was that the Meta headset would be able to scan your home and map out the exact plan on a virtual world, so that you could theoretically hang out with people across the world in your own home, with your own possessions. The same device would be simultaneously scanning your hand and facial expressions and using that information to form as accurate an avatar as possible. Both digital scanners and VR models already exist, so it is very possible that Zuckerberg will be able to deliver a ‘Metaverse’ that looks like this in his proposed decade. On a basic consumer level, this could work as it could truly enrich communication for people with loved ones far away; though obviously it is still a poor substitute for the real world where you can actually feel the home and person you are. Genuinely accurate VR avatars will undoubtedly feel closer than a 2D face on a Facetime.

Given this is one of the few aspects of Zuckerberg’s incredibly ill-conceived vision of the Metaverse that is actually likely to appear in the near future, it is the potential implications of these Virtual Reality representations of ourselves and our homes which require the closest examination. To answer that, it is imperative to ask what Meta is gaining from this excursion into Virtual Reality. It would be nice to believe Zuckerberg’s insistent press releases, where he claims to further humankind, but given the billionaire took the time in his ‘Metaverse’ release to mention that ‘taxes are not productive’, forgive me if I’m sceptical about his aims.

So how will Meta profit from the Metaverse?

This realistic Metaverse - the one where our homes and expressions are scanned - would be extremely profitable for Zuckerberg and his company. Almost all of Facebook’s current profits are from advertising, and more precisely, data harvesting: they use cookies and algorithms to create an accurate representation of you – your likes, dislikes, what you buy online, what your friends and families like and buy – and then sell that information to advertisers who will target users who are likely to buy their products. This process benefits Facebook in two ways: they get money from advertisers who use their platform; and the more targeted the adverts and posts are to the user, the more time they are likely to spend on the platform, which means they can charge advertisers more for advertising. It’s an extremely efficient and profitable cycle that the ‘Metaverse’ has the potential to significantly up the ante on.

To use the Metaverse, we will be required to scan our homes and ourselves, so that our avatars and online spaces can reflect us accurately. Instead of Meta only being able to collect data on our online platforms, they will gather data that is far more detailed and complex. This will all be open to sell for advertisers. It is obviously concerning, but perhaps you don’t mind very much – they are selling things you are meant to be interested in after all.

It gets worse!

It is however not only companies that advertise, political organisations do too. Let’s say you are a Hong Kong citizen and have a ‘Free Hong Kong’ poster in your home. You have no control over who gets that information. How about an organisation owned by the Chinese government? Or maybe you are a teenage boy who spends a lot of his time in a dark bedroom. Radicalising far-right advertisers would be very interested in advertising to people just like you. 

There are many other potential problems with the Metaverse. How would the already widespread problems with body dysmorphia on the internet be affected by having an avatar that looks just like you but slightly… airbrushed? How will our connection with our climate be affected if we are spending all our time away from our real, beautiful, dying world in a fake universe? Are they planning on fixing their radicalisation algorithm before the ‘at least a billion’ people start using the Metaverse in the next ten years?

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is the perfect representation of our times: shockingly deluded, aggressively mediocre, and destructive in the most incompetent way possible. I would love to believe that Meta is too absurd with its reliance on non-existent technology to actually come to pass, but money is power and Meta has buckets and buckets of it. It is possible that after years of capitulating to Facebook’s dollars, the American government (or the United Nations) will gather the guts to regulate Meta and the Metaverse properly. Let’s hope so, because Facebook has already caused too much human damage. If governments continue their inertia to the Metaverse as well – which history suggests they will – the costs are only likely to multiply.

Welcome to 2022, and the most pathetic dystopia imaginable.