Making Meta Beta Feta Data

I put down a few thoughts on Facebooks' "Metaverse" project back when it was announced, but given that they're really going all-in on this lately, I think I'll jot down a few more. For this, I watched the keynote speech by developer John Carmack at Facebook Connect and read a transcript (because I honestly can't stand the sight of his ugly head) of an interview with Zuckerberg.

I'm at least as conflicted about this as I am about billionaires funding space travel. Human space fight is an intrinsically and highly valuable experience and I'm convinced we should be supporting this as much as possible, over and above robotic probes. The recent race for re-usable rockets has done more for this than any government projects since the Apollo era, the hopelessly expensive Shuttle project notwithstanding. All the same, this doesn't mean that the leading proponents of this aren't generally a bunch of self-entitled, exploitative, profit-mongering jerks. It is a great and bitter shame to me that these people have tainted what should be an inspirational and unifying human endeavour, something that we should see as a goal of improving life for all of us on Earth, not to allow some elitist twats to try and escape it.

Facebook's VR project is even worse. The company is, simply put, a bag of dicks, and Mark Zuckerbot has all the empathic awareness of a mad robot hell bent - literally - on world domination. Yet I love their Oculus products and use my Quest headset on an almost daily basis. I am... conflicted.

Let's start with the practical aspects. The "metaverse" is not a great name, but it is adequate. It appears to refer to this blending of multiple realities : the ordinary real world, the purely virtual world, and the use of augmented reality to combine the two. The idea appears to be that these new, virtual worlds would become as integral to daily life as the conventional world of flesh and stone. So I'm fine with the name, despite the inevitable deluge of hilarious memes.

Even Facebook is not so ambitious as to think it could dominate every aspect of this metaverse, and is even proclaiming that it doesn't want anything like a walled garden - but it does want to become a key player in it. Still, is this goal even achievable, or desirable ? The timing of Facebook's announcements is certainly more than coincidence given recent scrutiny, but this does not mean it's a doomed gimmick - not by a long shot.

I like very much Carmack's analogy of mobile phones. He made this comparison for two reasons. First, that practically, mobile phones have become highly successful and replaced a slew of different devices. Access to a metaverse could potentially offer similarly staggeringly profitable benefits, but I'll get back to that in a moment. Second, he notes that there are plenty of lapsed VR users, who bought a headset but rarely or never used it - a phenomenon not seen in phones*. So to some users, the device effectively has negative value : they already have it, they paid money for it, but they're actively choosing not to use it. Clearly that has to change for a metaverse to become feasible.

* Carmack is worth listening to, I think - he's quite honest about the practical problems, even if he does seem to buy into the "only connect !" mantra.

I think mobile phones are an excellent analogy for another reason : thresholds of convenience. We had mobile phones back in the 1980s, but hardly anyone had one. They were large, cumbersome, expensive, silly executive toys. I don't doubt they added value to their users, but that came with such high non-financial costs that their eventual explosion as a market wasn't at all obvious or inevitable.

An anecdote may help illustrate this further. When I was ~12 I remember reading a technology magazine that boldly predicted we'd eventually all have mobile phones. The magazine depicted them, rather oddly, as pendants we would wear everywhere, though we might have to move in range of antennas in order to make an actual call : outside of this they'd be no more than pagers. And I remember thinking that the magazine's depiction of someone making a phone call on the beach was very silly - who in the world would want a call on the beach ? Ridiculous ! Likewise, no-one seemed to predict the success of text messaging : why would anyone prefer this to an actual conversation ?

So I'm wary of claims the metaverse will add the necessary value Facebook thinks it will. It might just be a silly gimmick, this is entirely possible. All the same, it might succeed. It would be foolish to dismiss this possibility based on the limitations of current headsets or past 3D flops like cinematic movies (in particular, the latter are a qualitatively different experience than true VR).

Hence, thresholds are key. Carmack notes that once the Oculus dropped its price by $100, sales spiked. Likewise I think this applies to convenience too, more than it is about actual functionality. If you could immerse yourself in a 3D world, or augment the real world with 3D, lifelike imagery, as easily as you can currently say, "Hey Google", why wouldn't you ? If wearing the necessary device was no more burdensome than a pair of ordinary spectacles, if you could do this comfortably for the entire day so that its features were available when you needed and could instantly be dismissed when not, why would you choose not to have this ? Why would you choose not to opt in to this larger, enriched world ? To allow both your existing 2D content and a new world of 3D content together however you wished ? It would be like denying yourself access to the entire internet or every public library. Sure, some parts of the internet are best avoided, as are (presumably) some libraries. And some people do indeed choose to avoid both, but their numbers are negligible. The vast majority to not deliberately deprive and disadvantage themselves in such a way.

(Carmack leans toward the software aspect of the VR as being more important for increasing value than hardware. I have some sympathy for this : for myself, the iDaVIE app is almost to the point where I would use VR routinely for work. But for truly mainstream use, I think we're still at the point where hardware needs to improve before developers will be interested in writing programs to use it.)

Of course, these thresholds gloss over a wealth of practicalities : how to make the glasses visually appealing, how to have a long battery life, how to deliver high-end performance, what level of graphical fidelity would be acceptable as a minimum standard, etc. My point is that if you could create such a device, it's hard to see why any ordinary person wouldn't want it. So I do think the metaverse in principle has every shot of going mainstream. We all use smartphones to the extent that making them even more convenient and powerful definitely would add a great deal of additional value, not least in having far more engrossing conversations and fostering more productive collaborations than in primitive Zoom calls. 

I could spell out a rosy vision of an augmented reality lifestyle, where one routinely has 3D calls with distant relatives and gets to experience distant places without the high-energy demands to actually visit them; where one replaces phones, computers and screens in general with a pair of lenses. I could wax lyrical on the utopian possibilities... I think it not outrageous that a metaverse, using data, could even help us making better feta cheese (hence the silly title), or other ordinary activities where the internet doesn't normally come into play. 

In short, just imagine an activity, and try and imagine how augmenting this could help - what you could do if your imagination was as clear as day, and accessible to anyone you chose to share it with. Most activities have possibilities in such a case, I think. Not all by any means, but a hell of a lot.

But alas, this is Facebook, so we all know such grand utopian visions aren't worth dwelling on. I only mention them to point out that there are potentially enormous positive aspects, just as there are with Facebook itself. It would be foolish indeed to pretend there aren't : Facebook wouldn't have so many users were it not doing at least something right. So burying one's head in the sand isn't going to help. Furthermore, while I doubt this sort of system is going mainstream in the next five years, Facebook seems quite determined to plough billions of dollars into this. Even - especially! - if you don't buy in to the benefits, it's worth being at least concerned about the possible next big crisis in social media.

We all know by now that Facebook is horrendous, so I trust I don't need to spell this out for anyone. I do not believe Zuckerberg at all when he claims he's so passionate about social media or fostering connections between people - his company seems to have a single overriding goal in all things, and enriching human existence isn't it*. But at long last it seems the great political blocs have realised that having such huge profiteering being driven and governed by anger-inducing manipulative news feeds isn't a way towards a utopian dream, and have stirred themselves away from the trivial question of whether regulation needs to be employed towards the much more difficult questions of what, how, and how much.

* While interesting, I do not much agree with this piece on how social media doesn't lead to echo chambers or polarisation : yes, by getting people of conflicting views together it does expose that conflict, but it does exactly nothing to help and often clearly makes things worse.

Questions about whether social media companies should be treated as publishers remain difficult, in my opinion. I think of social media as something wholly new, possessing attributes of all sorts of older media together with something radically different. It is neither like someone organising a town hall meeting nor like a postal service delivering a latter. It has aspects of both, coupled with the extraordinary capability of reach fantastically large audiences in an interactive way that is simply impossible elsewise. 

Rather than wondering whether they are publishers or not, we need entirely new terminology - and new regulations to go along with it. Social media has given rise to memes and deepfakes, and this sort of art as communication is only going to get orders of magnitude more common in a metaverse.

Similarly, painting Facebook as a villain, though - and I can't stress this enough - is very, very easy, it may not be all that helpful. Just saying, "don't use it" clearly doesn't work. Profiteering is a fundamentally amoral, not immoral, activity. For this reason the actual metaverse is more likely to be closer to dystopian than utopian (think DRM problems writ large), but that doesn't mean to won't be desirable enough for people not to want it - or indeed to make its use a practical necessity for everyone else. The threshold of quality standards needed to make a profit is not the same as the threshold to ensure everyone has a wonderful time, which appears to be the foundational myth of the free market.

So is the metaverse coming or not ? I lean towards "probably, but not yet". Maybe in five years we might have a high-end device capable of the sort of features needed, but it won't be affordable. My suspicion is that VR will remain something of a niche activity for several more years, though it may well go to console-scale mainstream when it comes to gaming. Among my friends, this is almost the case already (and I've never even interacted with any of them in VR).

Unfortunately this means it's going to have to continue to put up with the usual sort of idiots who criticise anything they themselves can't see the immediate and instantaneous value of. And if VR can't make good on the convenience criteria, then it may well eventually go the way of 3D televisions - the doubters do have a point. But against this, the immersion of VR is just too much fun, the potential for education too great. The doubters aren't so much wrong as they are very narrow-minded. And if we do reach a full metaverse, it won't - most assuredly - just be because the likes of that twit Mark Zuckerberg told us to : it will because we deemed the costs to be worth the genuine value offered. We should be prepared for a much more sophisticated response to this than simple Luddite rejectionism : if it works, we won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle.