’The Illusion of Sight’

What’s happening in the metaverse? Siva Vaidhyanathan on the stakes of Meta’s plans to finish what Facebook started. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ World-Building What’s happening in the metaverse? Siva Vaidhyanathan on the stakes of Meta’s plans to finish what Facebook started. Jezael Melgoza The Reality Labs division of Meta Platforms, the multinational tech conglomerate formerly known as Facebook, lost US$4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022—bringing total losses for the year to $13.7 billion—according to an earnings report posted on Wednesday, February 1. The purpose of Reality Labs, and the meaning of the company’s rebranding as Meta, is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as his “holy grail”: technology that will allow users to meet, socialize, work, and play games in an immersive “metaverse” of augmented and virtual reality. Meta will, Zuckerberg says, create “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” and where the defining quality of the experience is a “feeling of presence.” So far, there’s very limited evidence of consumer demand for this technology. Meanwhile, the company laid off 11,000 employees in November. And yet Meta remains committed to the course. Where’s it headed? Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia—and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Vaidhyanathan sees Zuckerberg’s investment in the metaverse as an extension of his original vision for Facebook—and ultimately, an expression of his belief that virtual and augmented reality can realize that vision without Facebook’s social and psychological downsides. Meta’s losses and layoffs, Vaidhyanathan notes, stem mostly from transitional business issues; its bet on the metaverse is still open. But the question, he says, isn’t just whether the metaverse is something consumers will want; it’s whether it’s something human beings will be willing to sustain deeper into the century—any more than they were able to sustain totalizing, collectivist visions of human consciousness in the last. Vyse: Facebook was one of the biggest companies in the world when it reoriented itself around the idea of the metaverse. How do you understand the transition? Vaidhyanathan: Like any company, Facebook was looking at emerging challenges to its business and considering its strategic options for the long term. But fundamentally, the metaverse represents Mark Zuckerberg’s fullest vision of the future—and what he sees as his company’s opportunity to shape it. There’s actually a lot of continuity between how Zuckerberg saw Facebook from the beginning and how he sees Meta now. He started Facebook with the idea that it could engineer a digital environment where people anywhere could connect—whether to engage in hobbies, share music, support sports teams; to forge different kinds of communities together; even to find the love of our life. At the outset, he wouldn’t have anticipated some of the more negative things people ended up doing through Facebook—like propagating false information, spreading anger and hatred, and driving political polarization—which have ended up in turn defining a lot of its legacy in the world. Zuckerberg seems to have earnestly believed that the more we’d live through Facebook, the better off we’d all be. And despite all the negative things people ended up doing through Facebook, he has the same idea about Meta: that he and his teams can design an environment that will allow human beings to flourish—to be better educated, to be better entertained, to treat each other better. Facebook’s mission was initially, “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”—eventually, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” That’s Meta’s mission statement today. Vyse: So, how did the idea of a “metaverse” come into the center of this vision? Advertisement Vaidhyanathan: Somewhat infamously, the idea comes from science fiction—originally, from a book by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash. For Stephenson, and for other writers who’ve built on the idea, the metaverse is something that blurs and ultimately erases the lines between what’s virtual and what’s real. Notably, it was almost always a dystopian, anti-humanistic idea—with deep social and psychological costs for the world. That’s certainly been striking to people who understand the source of the idea. In Meta’s interpretation, of course, the metaverse represents a future that promises a massive realization of human potential. To begin with, that means a focus on investments in consumer-level virtual-reality platforms, for social or professional purposes—that enable people to be in the same room at the same time, where they might now just be chatting on Slack or meeting on Zoom—or for gaming. The company is also investing in augmented-reality technologies, which incorporate the virtual into our experience of the non-virtual world. That might mean words and images projected into our eyeglasses—so that as I walk around, I’ll see, say, street names or historical markers in my field of vision. But what Zuckerberg ultimately wants is to fuse the augmented and the virtual, so the lines between them aren’t entirely clear—so we can engage with the world in an augmented way and then easily move into a fully virtual environment. That might start with a headset and eventually shrink to eyeglasses. For people who are sightless or sight-impaired, it might involve implants or the sort of mental-simulation technology that creates the illusion of sight. Which could be miraculous or shades of Stephenson’s metaverse, or both. Richard Horvath More from Siva Vaidhyanathan at The Signal: “This is a shift away from being an algorithmically driven social-media platform, reliant on advertising revenue, to a company that will have multiple revenue sources: the sale and lease of hardware and software, plus subscription services, along with advertising—as they roll out these virtual-reality and augmented-reality systems … which, in the end, consumers might or might not ever really want.” “The ambition of the metaverse … isn’t unlike the ambitions of the modernist architects of the mid-to-late 20th century, who thought they could design whole cities—like Brasília in Brazil or Chandigarh in India—in ways that would transform the people who lived in them. The idea was that the buildings in these cities would be so unadorned, so stark, so caustic, that we’d have to create lives and connections together that would be the basis for a better society. None of that worked—or really came close to working—and yet here we are again, with a lot of very well-funded engineers and designers doing the same thing with electronic technologies and digital environments..” “Could some technological components of the metaverse end up being humane? Yes, if they’re developed incrementally, deliberately, and carefully as tools we can use in discrete ways to make our lives better. If your goal is to make tools that humans can use, rather than virtual or augmented worlds that absorb them—tools they can use maybe to enhance schooling, maybe to enhance creativity, maybe to support a better quality of life and human flourishing in other ways—that could be positive. If you’re not trying to revolutionize everything, then you might actually succeed; you might actually make our lives a little better. 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