Your meta-concept cannot change the truth, Mr Zuckerberg
Let’s play a round of AITA. For those unfamiliar with Reddit.com (wise folks) the acronym stands for Am I The A...hole. Reddit describes AITA threads, deliciously, as ‘‘a catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us’’. One of Reddit’s most popular features, the basics are thus: You outline events in your life which are giving you grief, and the audience gives you advice and a thumbs-up (NTA) or a thumbs-down (YATA). A bunch of NTAs (Not The A...hole) presumably means you can happily go about your day with a clear conscience.
AITA, and Reddit as a whole, is extraordinarily addictive – I lost a full couple of hours down that rabbithole while I was supposed to be filing this column. But I digress, and that’s something the internet will make you do regularly.
Who are we playing AITA with today? That would be Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, the granddaddy of addictive internet products. This might be a short game.
Zuckerberg came out of his burrow on Friday to announce his company’s latest play – changing its name to Meta, to herald the dawn of its (latest world domination) plan – for the metaverse. Zuck’s over-enunciated walk-and-talk contained the following phrase, which although not calculated to do so I’m sure, was nevertheless enough to make your blood run cold: ‘‘The metaverse is the next frontier, just like social media was when we got started.’’
Eek.
The metaverse is not Zuckerberg’s idea (although he does claim to have dreamt it up while skiving off in his middle school maths class), there are others, including the creators of the Fortnite game, who’re also working on the concept.
There’s no easy way to fully describe it, so I’ll use the words of tech writer Casey Newson, who is in turn paraphrasing venture capitalist Matthew Ball: It has to span the physical and virtual worlds; contain a fully fledged economy; and offer ‘‘unprecedented interoperability’’ – users have to be able to take their avatars and goods from one place in the metaverse to another, no matter who runs that particular part of it.
Critically, no one company will run the metaverse – it will be an ‘‘embodied internet’’, Zuckerberg said, operated by many different players in a decentralised way.
In an interview with Newson, Zuckerberg himself painted this picture: ‘‘If you want to talk to someone, you’re working through a problem, instead of just calling them on the phone, they can teleport in, and then they can see all the context that you have. They can see your five monitors, or whatever it is, and the documents or all the windows of code that you have, or a 3D model that you’re working on. And they can stand next to you and interact, and then in a blink they can teleport back to where they were and kind of be in a separate place.’’
It sounds amazing. Who wouldn’t want even just a little bit of that?
Not everyone, it seems. Writing in The Atlantic this weekend, Brian Merchant expressed his doubts like this: ‘‘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’.’’
Interestingly, Merchant thinks the rebranding is happening now because Facebook is ‘‘boring’’; but he admits there might be enough interest to ‘‘bring this clumsy fantasy framework clattering to life’’. Zuckerberg has had his failures, but he’s also managed to develop a stunningly successful suite of products to which billions of people are hopelessly addicted. His plans for the metaverse can’t be written off.
The problem really is, do we trust Zuckerberg and his crew at Facebook (now Meta) to handle this well? To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, do you feel lucky, punk?
This column (and every piece of news writing) is a tiny part of that old adage that news is just the first rough draft of history. It’s impossible to predict the future, but also hard to escape the feeling that Facebook’s fortunes are on the turn.
The dramatic outage on October 4 that took all its products (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Mapillary, Oculus) offline for seven hours and reportedly cost Zuckerberg US$6 billion in personal wealth, was simply a headline-grabbing event in a longer slide. The real guts of the Facebook story lies in the company’s failure to keep its almost-three-billion users safe.
Zuckerberg’s Meta-announcement has come at a crucial juncture, with whistleblowers who’ve seen Facebook’s failedor-barely-existent safety measures first-hand, making deeply evidenced allegations about the way the company has put profit before humanity.
One day before she was due to appear before a US Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, product safety, and data security, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen gave a television interview and said this: ‘‘The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money.’’
And this: ‘‘The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.’’
The ‘‘Facebook Papers’’ released by Haugen, and verified by 17 news organisations working in concert, cover the company’s practices for audience growth, how its platforms might be harming children, how it could have stopped the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, and what its role in inciting political violence might be. Some of the most chilling stuff dates from January 6, 2021, when large numbers of Facebook employees pleaded with their bosses to do something, anything, about the attack on the US Capitol, and to admit its part in allowing it to happen.
Zuckerberg says they’re BS. It’s hard to escape the feeling that if ever he needed a distraction tactic, it’s right now. But instead of the hype and hoopla of a late 2010s iPhone launch, his ‘‘soft launch’’ of the metaverse this week has been received not with excitement, but with everything from suspicion to ridicule.
It’s starting to look like an undeniable truth – Zuckerberg is indeed the a..hole in this very dangerous game.
It’s impossible to predict the future, but also hard to escape the feeling that Facebook’s fortunes are on the turn.