Mark Zuckerberg wants to be the hero of the metaverse because he knows Facebook is boring.
About the author: Brian Merchant is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He’s the author of Th e One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and the forthcoming Blood in the Machine, a book about the Luddite uprisings and the impact of automation. Meta—the company formerly known as Facebook—desperately wants you to believe that it is going to put the future on your face. That was the gist of Mark Zuckerberg’s hour-and-a-half announcement today that the largest social-media company in history was officially rebranding, and reorienting itself to focus on “the metaverse.” The news was jarring, but hardly surprising. For Facebook,2021 has been the Year of Trying to Make the Metaverse Happen. First, there was the splashy announcement in The Verge, courtesy of Zuckerberg himself, that Facebook would no longer be a social-media company. Instead, it would transition into “a metaverse company.” In Zuckerberg’s words, this means building out “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content—you are in it.” In short order, Zuck dropped by a CBS morning show to demonstrate Horizon Workrooms, where users would be embodied in sub-Sims-quality avatars—not just viewing a dull virtual conference room, but in it. Then Facebook launched its partnership with Ray-Ban to sell a pair of privacy-challenged augmented-reality sunglasses. Then came the news that Facebook was hiring 10,000 people in Europe to work on building the metaverse. Then, finally, word came last week that Facebook would rebrand itself with a moniker that reflects its newfangled metaverse aspirations. That name, we now know, is Meta. Rarely has such a successful company so vigorously tried to sell a vision for a product—or more specifically, a framework for future products—that is so abstract and wanting, so flimsy. When Google said it wanted to organize the world’s information, it could at least point to a functioning search engine. Despite the lengthy presentation, it is still not really clear to anyone what Facebook’s version of the metaverse would actually look like in practice, other than a linked collection of virtual-reality programs like Workrooms and existing Oculus apps in a nebulous 3-D space. And neither is it clear who would want to spend their time there. There is not a single person in existence who has scanned Facebook’s News Feed and said: Yes, immerse me in this reality. I want to feel my uncle’s meme about Hot Pockets on my face. But “the metaverse” could generate enough momentum, enough knock-on interest, that it could bring this clumsy fantasy framework clattering to life. Which is exactly why this half-real, Big Tech–led effort to erect the metaverse is worth both laughing down and taking seriously. Set aside the fact that the metaverse has always been an explicitly dystopian idea, one lifted directly from a hyper-violent cyberpunk novel, and that it’s highly dubious whether this is a framework worth pursuing at all. Facebook is serious enough about the metaverse business to make a heavy investment in hiring and product development—it’s spending $10 billion on metaverse projects just this year —and it’s also far from alone in pursuing the concept. So it’s worth untangling why, exactly, that is. There are at least three driving forces motivating Facebook and Co. to pursue the metaverse, and pursue it to the extent that one of our largest tech giants is willing to rename itself in its honor: Public-relations strategy, founder ego, and a growing, industry-wide business imperative. The first reason is all about perception —these blue-sky big swings are coming at a time when Facebook sees its already-battered reputation being trampled by a parade of whistleblowers, damning reports, congressional hearings, and, now, the Facebook Papers. If 2021 has been Facebook’s year of trying to make the metaverse happen, it has been overshadowed by a year chock-full of scandals—so far,2021 has happened to Facebook, not the other way around.
