Stopping Facebook in its virtual reality tracks

Social media giant eyes more revenue — and control — with ‘metaverse’

I imagine working at Facebook must produce a mess of mixed feelings — and, one would at least hope, no small amount of guilt.

Consider: This week, Facebook posted an astounding quarterly revenue of $29 billion with a profit of $10 billion. Just a week or so earlier, however, the president of the United States said that misinformation on Facebook is killing people. It was followed by a protest in which body bags were laid outside the company’s headquarters.

Such are the contradictions of the world’s largest social network: It is wildly successful and profitable, and at the same time, continues to be a scourge on society, becoming a vector for misinformation, conspiracy theories and at least what feels like an increasingly polarized world.

Facebook’s impressive results are a product of an accelerating economy as the effects of the pandemic begin to ease. The company saw its active user base increase to a mind-boggling 2.9 billion users — a figure that represents well over a third of the entire global population.

Yet shares also dropped as Facebook warned growth would slow as the recovery starts to flatten out — or indeed, with the spectre of variants, that the pandemic worsens once more.

So Facebook needs something new — and what’s new for Facebook is “the metaverse.” Given Facebook’s already less-thanstellar job at being the steward for much of the world’s internet, this is cause for profound worry.

The metaverse is Silicon Valley’s latest buzzword. It’s a term from the 1992 Neal Stephenson novel “Snow Crash” and, according to tech site the Verge, is “a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space.”

Put another way, it’s a social network that is inescapable — in virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses and links to the web through the physical world.

Essentially, imagine if everything was like a video game: business meetings, shopping, education, all taking place within a virtual world.

It sounds far-fetched, but Facebook is all in on the idea. In its post-earnings call, the word “metaverse” appeared 20 times. More significantly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is investing billions, and is pivoting to becoming a metaverse.

Whether this is in fact a smart move for Facebook is up for debate; colour me skeptical. But whether this is good for us, Facebook’s users, seems more clear. The metaverse is an attempt by Facebook to ingratiate itself even deeper into our lives, with more control, and making the company even harder to avoid.

The dream of a virtual world has been with us for decades. Perhaps most famous among the attempts was “Second Life,” the sometimes-bizarre virtual arena that attracted the likes of IBM.

Like other such ventures, it mostly fell flat, for a simple reason: Meeting, shopping and doing most things in a virtual world is cumbersome and silly. It is far more work to log on to “the metaverse” and talk to your colleagues using cartoonish avatars than it is to simply make a Zoom call.

Still, Facebook’s sheer size and scope means that even dubious-sounding ideas might still have significant impact. Facebook is building out both the hardware for its metaverse dreams and the software, and when a company that size throws its weight behind a new initiative, unexpected things can happen.

It already owns the Oculus virtual reality headset. And CEO Zuckerberg has said its next hardware product will be a pair of RayBan sunglasses that will plug in to its metaverse (though without an actual display).

Facebook’s intentions are thus clear. In social networking, Facebook has become the default for billions. When it comes to a place to post thoughts, connect with friends and family, discover things in one’s local area and more, Facebook utterly dominates.

The metaverse is an insidious attempt to replicate that kind of current ubiquity in an even more pervasive technology. While it’s unlikely that we’ll all don virtual reality headsets to get on Facebook, some other mix of technologies — think glasses that display digital information atop of the real world — might in fact prove popular.

This is Facebook, after all. If you’re not on it, you’re missing out.

What Facebook wants is not just another revenue stream. It wants more control, to embed itself more deeply in our lives, and more firmly tie its method of making profit to the day-today practices of our lives: socializing, conducting commerce and communicating.

In response to the accusations from U.S. President Joe Biden that Facebook kills people, Facebook responded by pointing to how it’s gotten better at tackling misinformation. And fine, it has.

But the missing in that overly simplistic reaction is a defence of the necessity of Facebook at all — that is, why we should simply accept that Facebook should be the way we have chosen to include the new phenomenon of social media in our lives.

We could have a world with a better, more open, less intrusive way to communicate and inform ourselves. But we have ceded the internet to Facebook, and we can’t rely on a company who is raking in billions to give it back. Facebook is guilty of looking after its own interests; it is up to us — and the politicians who represent us — to look after ours.