Facebook Pitches Virtual Reality As a Lifestyle, But There Are More Interesting Ways To Define The Metaverse
We must think long and hard about the businesses we allow to become dominant if connected virtual words are to become a way of life
“I thought I was supposed to be the robot.” joked Mark Zuckerberg as he logged into his virtual reality poker game to find his friend had chosen a big red robot avatar. This was the closest Facebook came to being self-aware during its grand rebranding event last week during which it showcased its vision for a new kind of lifestyle centred around virtual reality. One wonders if there has ever been a more ironic rebranding in US corporate history than ‘Meta’… Possibly not.
Much has been made of Zuckerberg’s social awkwardness which is a shame and, if we are honest with ourselves, mean spirited as it is suspected he has an autism spectrum disorder. He has never confirmed it so we may never know for sure. Social quirks aside there’s no getting away from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is a very very clever man. Turning a blind eye momentarily to the morality and ethics of the Facebook business to date, It takes a savvy mind to take a company public in your twenties at $108 billion and drive it to a $900 billion valuation less than ten years later. No matter what you think of Mark Zuckerberg he has achieved a lot. And so it concerns me that the worlds most successful people - the big thinkers of our time - are all trying to either physically leave Earth by way of a spaceship or virtually leave Earth by building and jacking into The Matrix. You’re not exactly inspiring confidence in humanity’s chances with the climate pickle, lads.
I’ve been a cheerleader for VR ever since I first tried a PlayStation VR headset at the CCP Games booth at Gamescom in 2016. One moment I was sitting in a basic chair in CCP’s business lounge, the next I found myself fully inside the cockpit of a small spaceship and was promptly launched through a tunnel at speed and thrust into a dog fight. The immersion was near total and instinctively I began to track enemy ships by physically turning and tilting my head in real space, peering up through the cockpit glass at all angles. Put simply, VR is really fucking cool. Today, I have both a PSVR (clunky, low res, tethered - clearly a first draft) and the Oculus Quest 2 (wireless, responsive, portable - a good upgrade) and I have loved playing around in both of them.
That said, we are rapidly approaching the edges of my comfort zone when it comes to how digital our lives are becoming. One of the things I like about VR is that it’s an escape. So few of my friends and family have a headset that I know that when I set aside a few hours to watch movies or play games in VR that I won’t be hassled. You know that feeling when your work email is piling up, your Slack is making noises and someone else starts trying to reach you on WhatsApp at the same time? In those moments I resent how accessible I am to everyone all of the time. Sometimes you just. Want. To. Be Left. Alone. For me, VR is a great example of a space I consider to be my own. The idea that in the future everyone else will already be there ready to flag me down and spam me requests and invites the moment I put the headset on is unappealing.
It’s entirely possible that the MetaVerse won’t end up being a string of connected VR experiences. Shaan Puri laid out a compelling illustration of what the Metaverse may end up actually being over on his Twitter where he posits that the Metaverse isn’t a place, it’s a moment in time…
The metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our phsyical life. This is not an overnight change. Or an invention by some steve jobs type. It's a gradual change that's been happening for 20 yrs. Every important part of life is going digital.
Work --> from factories to laptops. Boardrooms to zooms.
Friends --> from neighbors to followers. Where do you find like minded people? Twitter. Reddit. etc.
Games --> more kids play fortnite than basketball & football combined.
Identity --> filters are the new makeup. Stories are your personal billboard to broadcast who you are.
What matters more. What you look like in real life? or what you look like on instagram? Everything goes digital. Your friends, your job, your identity. And now with crypto, your assets are online too. Bored Apes are the new Rolex. Fortnite skins are the new skinny jeans. If everyone hangs out online all the time, then your flexes need to be digital. So if you play this forward another 10-20 years - we will cross into the metaverse The moment in time where digital matters more to us than physical.
This interpretation forms the blueprint for how I’m currently thinking about the Metaverse concept. If Shaan Puri is wrong and the Metaverse does end up being a place then we must think long and hard about the businesses we allow to become dominant. We already trusted Facebook with our data and that didn’t exactly work out particularly well for anyone (other than Facebook, of course). Do we want to trust them or any other tech giant with everything from our virtual homes, our assets, our workspaces and even concepts like how gravity works? Maybe not.
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