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The Metaverse, or the twilight of social media ?

• 2021-11-28
• Maciej Szczerba

Since Mark Zuckerberg announced at the end of October 2021 that he has changed the name of Facebook to Meta and outlined his vision of an immersive virtual world where people would want to spend their time, a number of companies have come forward with similar plans to create virtual worlds.

Facebook alone plans to hire, in Europe alone, 10,000 employees dedicated to working on virtual worlds. At the same time, Nike has filled a number of patent applications for brand trademarks used in 3D virtual worlds. Epic Games, the company that created Fortnite, one of the world's most popular computer games, also has plans to create a similar space. A few months earlier, in April 2021, the head of Nvidia, an American producer of chip and graphics processing units, spoke about similar plans. The word "metaverse" has appeared in the mainstream media for good. 

So is the metaverse the Next Big Thing of Silicon Valley? 

Is it just a buzzword, cleverly introduced and propagated by marketing specialists, or is it a breakthrough in technological development, the beginning of a new era of the Internet, already referred to as Internet 3.0? 

 Certainly the moment Facebook announced its intention to create a platform based on virtual reality coincides with the crisis of the company. For over a decade, Facebook has operated in an actually uncontrolled manner. Recently, the U.S. government began to look more closely at the hands of the technology giant. The voices of whistleblowers, who for years have been informing about massive abuses related to the sharing of user data, profiling and influencing electoral decisions (as occurred in the case of Facebook's cooperation with Cambridge Analytica), began to reach into the public space. Irregularities in the activities of the technology giant were also described by the Wall Street Journal, in a series of articles from September 2021 based on leaked internal information of the company. They suggest that the company, in a deliberate way, with use of an appropriate algorithm, promoted harmful content polarizing users in order to provoke aggression, reactions and comments of users. The company was also fully aware of, how harmful Instagram's influence on teenagers' perception of their own physicality was. Despite this, it did not take steps to change this. 

From a business perspective, however, these facts have little impact on Facebook's financial performance. 

There is no denying, that Mark Zuckerberg, who is brilliant at trend prediction, seems to be worried about a completely different phenomenon. Facebook is getting older, the youngest generation does not want to use the platform associated with Boomers. This generation certainly won't be able to get into the same entertainment, news or interaction patterns that their parents' generation "bought" so well. The metaverse is the company's response to the needs of new internet users.

The functioning of virtual worlds, which at the moment may seem to be an exotic, niche undertaking, in 10 years may be something as natural as the current domination of social media. This is, after all, how the world is changing as a result of exponential technologies, that is, growing at an exponential rate. And certainly a company with such powerful resources and access to over 2 billion active user profiles as Facebook, can create fashion on virtual worlds. Moreover, by naming the company Meta, Zuckerberg has made it clear that he wants to create a comprehensive environment where virtual worlds are connected and other companies depend on his platform.

At this point, alarming questions arise in my mind:

Who will own the metaverse? What monetary value will virtual worlds have? How will virtual worlds be managed? How will their owners make money from them? Will the metaverse be harmful to children? What the other risks and benefits may occur? Should we be afraid of virtual worlds, or should they be avoided or banned?

But let's start from the beginning. What exactly is the metaverse? The word is a combination of two terms: meta (beyond) and universum (world). It was invented nearly 30 years ago by science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson. The metaverse first appeared in the novel "Snow Crash" in 1992. The novel's main character, Hiro Protagonist, a pizza delivery man, spends most of his time in a virtual world where people interact with each other as avatars.

In Stephenson's vision, this virtual world is a persistent and interactive space, accessible to everyone through special glasses. In this space people can meet, talk, create, attend concerts, and make money. It is a world that mirrors the real world, but is beyond anyone's control, independent and always available. 

The vision of a virtual 3D world has been adapted in the gaming industry. On this concept is based the game Fortnite (let's mention live concerts of Travis Scott, which could be have been watched in the game world or a collection of Balenciaga clothes, which can be bought for avatars), Minecraft or Roblox. It has also been used for a long time in the training industry (e.g. for medical training) or in engineering industries (e.g. for vehicle prototyping).

In the context of the popularization of virtual worlds, the gaming industry is gaining importance and even has a chance to enter the group of Big-Tech companies. The reason for that is primarily the technology and the use of gaming industry experience in the creation of powerful engines that will be essential in the creation of virtual reality. An example is Unreal Engine, a product of Epic Games, which can be used to create not only the world of Fornite game. Epic Games made acquisitions of companies whose business focuses on creating virtual environments (for example Quixel or Capturing Reality). 

There is also a lot to learn from the game industry, not only in the area strictly related to technology, but also in relation to the mechanisms of attracting users and making them interested so that they stay in the virtual world for a long time. The metaverse is now spoken of as the successor to the internet 2.0, a network of interconnected virtual worlds, just as the internet once linked individual websites. 

From a business perspective, it is a huge marketplace and a powerful marketing tool that will exist alongside the real world marketplace. The alarming fact is that this market will be available, at least initially, only to wealthy companies that can afford to invest in expensive technology. It is also alarming that the metaverse will be shaped by a limited number of players, as is now the case of the internet. Just as now, our vision of the world on the internet is suggested by an algorithm, which is in the hands of Big-Tech companies, virtual worlds will be shaped in the same way. Such worlds, fully controlled by companies, can cease to exist in an instant, as is the case with Facebook, which disables users' business and private accounts from time to time. 

We have to look at the metaverse also from a psychological and social perspective. We have to consider the possible consequences of being in virtual reality for long periods of time, in which a human becomes immersed and the brain and body react as if they were responding to stimuli in the real world. In addition to VR, there is also mixed reality (MR), in which the digital world is superimposed on the real world. However, the brain is unable to see two separate worlds at the same moment, it combines them and succumbs to the illusion that it is registering a single reality. These experiences are fascinating, but also tiring to the senses. Already, many people are struggling with an excess of stimuli. The metaverse will provide even more of them. 

I will be following the development of VR technology and business. I hope that the topic will be discussed in the media more than once, so that we can use virtual reality in a conscious way, knowing the pros and cons and the price to be paid for such experience.