We Already Live in Facebook’s Metaverse

Last Thursday, the same day that Facebook’s parent company rebranded under the new name Meta, Mark Zuckerberg gave a meandering tour of the metaverse—the as-yet-hypothetical next phase of the Internet, a unified space that mingles digital and physical reality—in a video presentation for the Facebook Connect 2021 event. The metaverse, which Zuckerberg has previously touted in earnings calls, will be “an embodied Internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” he said, as he paced through a series of palatial interiors, ambiguously real or rendered. Users will be able to communicate and navigate “across different layers of reality,” he continued, watching a concert with a friend in virtual reality or collaborating with the hologram of a colleague across a desk.

Zuckerberg’s optimistic tone, as he toured this fantasy world, stood in stark contrast to all that his company was going through in the real one. According to the leaked files known as the Facebook Papers, Facebook has long been aware of the damage that its social networks cause, from the way Instagram intensifies teen-agers’ body-image problems to how Facebook accelerates disinformation and ideological extremism via its algorithmic News Feed. Zuckerberg’s pivot to the metaverse is a useful distraction from an unflattering press cycle, of course, but it signals a much longer-term strategy, as well. Zuckerberg seems ready to leave all of his company’s pesky issues behind, like relics of an already distant and irrelevant history. He is focussed on a newer, better world, a world in which the insidious problems caused by Facebook are remedied with a simple solution: even more Facebook—sorry, Meta—in every aspect of our lives.

Tightly composed and robotically scripted, Zuckerberg’s video sounds more like a cultic prophecy than a product announcement. With waxen skin and glazed eyes, clothed in a signature dark long-sleeved shirt and jeans, Zuckerberg seems little more human than the replicant avatar he uses to demonstrate immersive 3-D experiences. The metaverse will be less obtrusive and more organic than the current version of the Internet, he explains, in the relentlessly sunny tone of a pharmaceutical sales rep. “Your devices won’t be the focal point of your attention anymore,” he says, never mind the fact that Facebook and Instagram are some of the addictive targets of our attention on our devices. The metaverse will be “more natural and vivid,” he continues. “You’ll feel like you’re right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by yourself.”

Throughout the presentation, Zuckerberg is fixated on the notions of “presence” and “shared sense of space,” as if the metaverse could somehow provide us with a way of logging off the Internet rather than sucking us deeper in. Watching his video inspires an intensifying sense of cognitive dissonance: very little technology is pictured in the renderings of spacious metaverse homes and offices—in fact, the C.G.I. interiors appear quite analog, with pleasurable glimpses of plants, natural light through wide windows, and textured wood furniture that might have been designed by Charles and Ray Eames. What goes barely acknowledged is the fact that accessing this hypothetical world would require sitting on your couch strapped into a V.R. headset and wearing motion-tracking gloves—not a particularly “natural” state. A single reference to “immersive all-day experiences” suggests that Zuckerberg, far from helping us escape mediating technology, expects that we will be engaging in it for many hours straight. Work, entertainment, socializing, even education—all are fodder for the metaverse. In language eerily similar to how he once spoke about Facebook, Zuckerberg emphasizes that the metaverse would facilitate “the most important experience of all: connecting with people.”

In substance, Meta’s virtual reality resembles less a radical leap into the future than a souped-up version of Second Life, the online collective world-building game that has existed since 2003. In the Times, Amanda Hess described the atmosphere within Zuckerberg’s demo as “a virtual retirement community where isolated millennials can live out their final days.” For an act of unbounded imagination, where anything is theoretically possible, Zuckerberg’s metaverse is strikingly absent of any sense of taste. Uncanny, flat, and banal, it is a dream universe that feels not unlike watching Netflix in three dimensions. The avatars resemble Pixar characters—ageless and characterless, smoothed into uniformity. The possible activities presented, too, are more or less childlike: playing cards in a virtual space station with all your friends, while inhabiting robot avatars; hosting a surprise party on an enormous cake landscape; exploring a virtual solar system projected into the sky via augmented-reality glasses; and visiting a heavenly mansion designed by a makeup influencer to reflect her personal brand. Will such offerings really entice us to put on V.R. headsets?

Zuckerberg takes pains to acknowledge that the metaverse is not yet technologically feasible, and that any execution of it must be open, a collaboration between different companies and platforms. And yet Meta—named for the thing itself—seems to be planning to create the tools and infrastructure underlying all of it. In Zuckerberg’s description, the company will build the devices through which we experience the metaverse, the software for developers to design experiences for it, and the marketplaces where creators will sell their virtual productions and users will buy them, perhaps in the form of non-fungible tokens, which Zuckerberg repeatedly mentions. No matter their degree of openness or interoperability in the metaverse (the ability to use the same digital goods across platforms), such offerings would presumably allow Meta to profit from every transaction. It’s not hard to detect in Zuckerberg’s video a message to shareholders: he will dominate this new space just as he did the twenty-tens version of social networking.

When you are living within Meta’s predicted “layers of reality,” some experiences will happen in real life, the boring old physical world. Others will happen in a mixed zone, with digital content overlaying our perceptions of the physical, and still others in the digital sphere entirely. What Zuckerberg’s presentation ignores is that we already inhabit a world where the digital and the physical commingle, as we have for more than a decade now. Algorithmic digital platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, and Amazon—influence how we socialize, receive news, consume culture, find jobs, perform labor, and spend money. No matter if we’re only interacting in the physical world, we do all of these things with the added awareness that they are also happening online, with consequences that echo across physical and digital space. One need only look to the mania for GameStop stock, the anxiety of being “cancelled” for posting the wrong thing on social media, or TikTok’s acceleration of the campaign to emancipate Britney Spears to see that the layers of reality aren’t so separate after all.

What Zuckerberg’s version of the metaverse offers, ultimately, is a way to visualize the mixed-reality world that digital platforms have already created. The problem is that anything built on top of those platforms, or by the same stakeholders, is likely to suffer from the same problems that we are now so familiar with—in particular, a centralization of power in the hands of people like Zuckerberg. Who among us wants to live in another world of his creation? At one point in the video, he perches on a leather chair in front of a fireplace, like a President addressing the nation. “We have years until the metaverse we envision is fully realized,” he says. It’s a message of reassurance: by the time average users have to deal with the metaverse—which is posed as an inevitability—Meta will have figured it out for them and built the most palatable version. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that what is shown in the Facebook Connect video is design fiction—not a depiction of actual technology but a rendering of what might possibly one day exist. A Zuckerbergian future isn’t as inevitable as he makes it seem. In the end, it’s not corporations but users, by dint of their engagement, who will decide whether his vision becomes a reality.