Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Already Sucks
The Zuckerverse is coming. Just over a week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, in a long interview with the Verge, that his social network is readying itself to become “a metaverse company.”
First floated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the metaverse is an idealized immersive successor of the internet—a virtual space where billions of users will move, interact, and operate across myriad different but interoperable worlds and situations, always retaining their avatar identities, virtual possessions, and digital currencies. It is hard to pin the metaverse down (more on this later), but the shape one can make out amid the cyberpunk mist is some version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One meets Fortnite meets virtual reality meets blockchain. A game-y galaxy that seamlessly fuses with the meatspace. What matters is that metaverse is now the buzzword du jour and that Facebook wants a piece of it. The bad news is that Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions sound boring as hell.
Time and again during the interview, Zuckerberg dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the metaverse’s ability to increase “focus time and individual productivity.” He coined the dreary formula “infinite office,” a supposedly desirable scenario in which metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros. Zuck was “excit[ed]” (!) about the metaverse’s potential for organizing VR office meetings.
