The Green Fairy
[ These are some rough ideas I yet have to edit into a more comprehensive story. ]
In 2003 I logged into Second Life. It was an awkward experience. Second Life was to be the evolution of the internet: a 3D virtual space on a 2D screen. Even banks used marketing budget to establish a virtual bank branch in Second Life. Those places were deserted. Why spent time in a virtual ABN Amro bank? Just because you can is not a good answer. Dance floors would be packed though. I remember being able to score a green fairy while hanging out on a dance floor, a little avatar of a green fairy which would hover around you. Other than that Second Life was pretty boring and soon forgotten. Second Life still exists but the number of users has declined since its peak in the years after 2003.
The evolution of the internet in the first two decades of the 21st century would not be VR but social media on mobile devies with Facebook gaining the most users. In 2008 Facebook surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media platform. In 2012 Facebook prioritized mobile and found its way to people’s mobile phones instead of desktop. I’m not sure if there is a correlation but the more time I spent on Facebook the less time I spent seeing friends face-to-face. Almost two years of isolation during the pandemic was a tipping point when it came to seeing friends. For this reason I am weary of Metaverse. I don’t want my avatar to meet friends’ avatars in VR while living this life alone. I will take the red pill and disappear into the forest.
Facebook is all about marketing data, user’s data, your data. This became a problem when Facebook started to market data to political interest groups. This contributed to the Brexit vote in 2016 and the election of Donald Trump in the same year.
In 2014 Facebook acquired virtual reality headset maker Oculus for 3 bililon USD. This acquisition would become important in the future strategy of Facebook.
By 2020 Facebook had become a dumpster fire. Mark Zuckerberg was refusing to safeguard its users from disinformation in targeted political advertisements. Journalist Carole Cadwalladr on Twitter: “It’s no longer possible to hold free & fair elections. But we can’t even acknowledge this.” Instead of repairing the existing Facebook platform Zuckerberg has double downed and announced a name change to Meta, ignoring the past and gave a glimpse of the future in an 1:17 hours presentation: The Metaverse and How We'll Build It Together.
The Metaverse merges 3D virtual reality with the current internet. This means part of our lives will be lived as avatars in virtual spaces. This set off images of the movie The Matrix (1999). Zuckerberg could have been announcing vaporware in the presentation and maybe, like Second Life, Metaverse will never take off. But maybe it will.
If it will, Metaverse will be an ad-supported space, dressing your avatar will likely cost money and if you want to hang virtual art in your Metaverse living room, you will likely have to pay for it, maybe with cryptocurrency. Zuckerberg left no misunderstanding that market places will be build into Metaverse. All the while your data will be exploited by Meta for profit.
Image from The matrix (1999). Do we need to be extracted from Metaverse?
Star Trek the next generation. The holodeck on board the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D), year 2363 - 2371. Real people in a virtual reality space.
Metaverse at this point is a loose collection of ideas, part of it will be augmented reality (AR) instead of virtual reality (VR). Both are fundamentally different but could supplement each other if the AR experience carries over in VR seamlessly connected by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Current VR headsets can also do AR.
Algorithms are already shaping our experience on Facebook and Instagram. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie has exposed how the company harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters in 2014 without authorisaztion. Personal information was used to target voters during the 2016 US election with personalized political advertisements. In 2015 Facebook was alerted to this breach but did little to recover the data. Cambridge Analytica was owned by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon.
Wylie, Christopher (October 2019). Mindf*ck: inside Cambridge Analytica's plot to break the world. London, United Kingdom: Profile Books.
I don’t want to be blind to the positive aspects of Facebook and social media in general. It does connect people and families who sometimes live oceans apart. Dave Winer has an excellent point to make.
Further reading:
Facebook almost missed the mobile revolution. It can’t afford to miss the next big thing.