There’s been a rather cynical reaction to Facebook renaming its company Meta and announcing the Metaverse.
Technology commentator Mark Pesce joins Kathryn to talk through the announcement and what exactly the metaverse is and why Facebook is going through a rebrand.
It’s something he knows quite a bit about as the founder of one of the first virtual reality companies.
Photo: Facebook
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“I have been working on the metaverse for 30 years and there’s nothing in any of what was announced last week that represents even more than a wish. People are comparing it to taking Facebook, which has a working economic model, and pivoting the entire company to face something that is effectively science-fiction.”
Pesce says the roots of the metaverse come from novels like Neuromancer by William Gibson, a novel called Snowcrash by Neil Stevenson, where the metaverse term is actually coined, and a novel called Ready Player One.
“Mark Zuckerberg famously gives a copy of that dystopian novel to every person who comes on board his metaverse project. We’re really talking about something that’s a science-fiction project.”
A way of understanding the term metaverse is to look at video games. Pesce explains that online games open-world games with a bunch of people playing simultaneously are essentially metaverses.
“You can pretty much do what you like, and these are very big worlds – that’s kind of what the metaverse is. But the metaverse isn’t a game, it’s everything. It’s all of the people in the world, all of the stuff in the world and it’s all one big united universe.
“You could think of it as a really scaled up version of the kinds of games that your average 19-year-old likes to play.”
To back up a bit, when Apple last year allowed users to stop apps from tracking their phone usage, Facebook, which relies on the technology for advertising, took a $10 billion hit.
“Part of the transition to meta is Mark Zuckerberg frantically waving his hands at people and saying ‘look at this thing over here and don’t look at the fact that Apple has crippled our business model’.”
Along with that, there’s been a bunch of bad press coming out from various whistleblowers at the company , including news that Facebook is looking at going after the six-year-old market.
“This was dumped at a time to get people talking about something other than Facebook collapsing.”
And most people aren’t buying it.
“There’s folks like me who’ve been in this for 30 years, seen all sorts of attempts, and don’t see anything fundamentally new. There’s no game changer. Building these vast virtual worlds, we can do that, but getting people to sit in them for hour after hour – and we’re not talking about a computer screen – we’re talking about a fully immersive virtual world which is really hard for people to maintain for more than an hour.
“The more you look at this, the more it seems like gambling the company on literal science-fiction. It’s not that it will never happen, but it’s boiling the ocean, it will take a long time and it’s not clear that they will do it well.”
Mark Pesce is an author, researcher, engineer, futurist and teacher.