Facebook announced this week that it would be hiring 10,000 people — in the EU specifically — to “help build the metaverse”.
The announcement came from the social giant’s newsroom webpage, and could be read partially as an attempt to shift the focus from its many scandals and failures of late. I say “partially” because the metaverse has been a big focus of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s of late, predating the latest leaks and whistle-blower brouhaha.
The company has already arguably conquered social. Yes, there are competing social networks, but with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp under one roof, they are far-and-away the dominant player. The metaverse, then, is their next big platform play, a strategy to own the next space where people will congregate and while away the hours.
But what is the metaverse? Well, for starters, like all the best tech (to my mind, at least) the term has its roots in science fiction or speculative fiction, coined by writer Neal Stephenson. Like metadata is data about data, the metaverse is a universe of universes, or an overarching universe of connected digital worlds. This could get very cerebral if I’m not careful, so in broad strokes, it’s an imagined space where people will do a bunch of things including gaming, socialising, and working — using a virtual environment as the backdrop for everything.
The key word here, though, is “imagined”. We do have some incredibly extensive virtual worlds you can already venture into, like Fortnite. Second Life is probably the closest thing we have right now, while something like Roblox is a candidate for the title because its users can create games in the environment and invite other players into them.
But we haven’t got the persistent, immersive, interactive and ubiquitous computer-generated environment that the books and movies portray — yet. And that’s what company’s like Facebook are betting on: it’s a grand idea of “what’s next” for the internet. And that’s why they’ll be hiring thousands of engineers over the next five years — to stay ahead, to be a “natural choice” when we start to take that step.
My favourite explanation so far comes from a piece in The Verge earlier in October, which sums up the metaverse as “one part definition, one part aspiration, one part hype”. I’ve said it before, but it always bears repeating that in tech spheres in particular, beware the hype.
For starters, there are many ideas — competing and sometimes contradictory ideas — of what the metaverse will be. Generally speaking, though, the dominant estimations of this are big on virtual reality (VR). Slip on a VR headset, maybe a haptic glove or full suit, and disappear into the “skin” of your digital avatar that allows you to work, play and interact in the metaverse.
Another key theme is the interoperability or overlap of digital worlds. So maybe your avatar attends classes in an environment made by an education service provider, wearing clothes they bought in the virtual shop of another provider, and then goes to chat with mates over in Facebook’s corner.
The prevailing “play” elements that come from metaverse proponents seem to be less about combat and more about existing, but likely there will be arenas where you can bring your Street Fighter moves against someone else’s Tekken or Mortal Kombat ones. However, having a persistent avatar that can move from world to world is probably among the toughest technical challenges a metaverse will have to overcome, assuming that it develops in that direction in the first place.
We can also assume that versions of some current cutting-edge tech will appear in any future metaverse. Things like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have already made it feasible to own unique digital goods. Cryptocurrencies — being decentralised as they are — would perhaps be an ideal payment tool for someone navigating multiple platforms that run into and over one another.
In the fictional versions of these, like Ernest Cline’s 2011 Ready Player One, the multiverse is an escape from a nasty-sounding real world that is over-populated and polluted to extremes. Horrifyingly, that sounds a lot less speculative these days. The creator of Cline’s version of the metaverse (called Oasis) is the fictional James Halliday, a troubled tech genius who wants to leave a legacy and essentially live on in the event of his death, as well as create a cool digital world for commercial and gaming reasons.
The book creates a dichotomy between this imaginary utopia and a profit-driven machine that tends towards inequality hellscape, and the hero is essentially tasked with preserving the integrity of Halliday’s vision. The bad guys are corporate flunkies and masterminds, naturally.
Cline’s problem is ours too, I believe. The Oasis is not anti-capitalism; it’s built on pop culture franchise and product placement. If anything, it’s anti-concentration of corporate power. Yikes, once again I’m not loving how close to home that’s hitting. We are arguably standing at a point in relation to the metaverse as our 1990s counterparts were to apps, smartphones and broadband. We can’t really know who or what will emerge victorious, but whatever the “what next” looks like, decisions made now will contribute to shaping it.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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