Back in October, Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg put on his smartest t-shirt and gave us the five buck tour of the Metaverse, and said we would all be joining him there within 5 years. He said it was the future, many said it was a shiny attempt to avoid a bunch of bad press from a Facebook insider who blew the whistle suggesting that the social network was putting profit before the wellbeing of its users. No real surprises there then. A good rule of thumb when using anything on the internet is, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, you are the product.
The next day the parent company changed its name to ‘Meta’ and put its logo all over its stable of brands, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp among others, you have probably seen the branding on your phone.
For those of us who struggle to keep up with the supersonic speed with which the tech world moves, you might wonder what he’s going on about. In simple terms, it’s a virtual reality accessed using headsets, or glasses that will allow you to exist, and interact with a virtual world, augmenting what you see with your eyes with overlays of info. To put it even more simply, it’s a different, more immersive way of accessing the internet. If it happens, it’s going to be a gamechanger, even if you liked the game just how it was.
For years, Facebook has been investing in VR, it bought headset manufacturer Oculus in 2014, Google has made aborted attempts to kick start a VR revolution with it’s stillborn Google Glass but so far nothing has stuck. Why? Perhaps people don’t like wearing headsets, perhaps it’s an idea ahead of it’s time. We used to feel self conscious about talking on the phone in public, but now we are all having Zoom meetings in the cafe.
The pandemic, for all of its ills, has planted a seed in fertile ground when it comes to remote working. Forced into it by lockdowns, we all got the hang of virtual meetings, set up office in the spare room, and while it has many downsides, it has, by and large, worked just fine. Is it really a massive leap to join a Zoom meeting using a pair of glasses, rather than staring at a screen? Probably not. Can we see ourselves putting on a headset to walk around a virtual Amazon superstore selecting our purchases rather than a click of a mouse, or swipe of a screen? Probably yes.
Should we be worried about it? Yes probably. Facebook, Amazon, Google and a small handful of big players are likely to be the masters of the Metaverse as they are going to be the architects of most of it. Their record with regard to ethics is chequered at best, and something is going to change with the way they are regulated and held to account for them not to abuse this potential next level monopoly. The dominance they enjoy and the data they hold on each and every one of us is already staggering, and it’s a reasonable assumption that if the Metaverse does catch on we are going to be spending even more time with them, and sending even more data to their server farms for crunching.
Do we really need it? No, not really, but how many things are we currently reliant upon that we had no idea we needed until we were shown it. Did you need a mobile phone?, a microwave oven? Did your grandparents actually need a car? Aeroplanes? Electricity?. No. People have by and large got on with life just fine since the stone age. The history of humans is the history of technology, and mostly the history of stuff you never really actually needed, but it has, incrementally, in the main, improved life for many at each step. I can’t see that changing any time soon.
Can you ignore it? Well probably not. You don’t have to be decrepit to remember a time when businesses got by fine without a website, now there are plenty of businesses that don’t have anything else. Really only a handful of years ago how many businesses had a presence on social media? Now it’s all but essential for most. 25 years ago a job title like ‘web designer’ would have drawn blank looks, how many thousands around the world have jobs called, ‘head of digital strategy’, ‘social media manager’. Like them or loathe them, but some of the most powerful and wealthy celebrities are ‘Influencers’, or ‘Youtubers’.
Is the Metaverse going to be a reality in five years? Quite probably, but if it isn’t the chances are that something radically different will be, ideas that currently live only as a spark in the minds of a small number of unknowns will no doubt be indispensable to modern life in the twinkling of an eye.
They say that change is the only constant, it’s more true now than ever. It’s coming at us at full speed with its horn blaring, and you can’t get out of its way.
By Phill McCoffers – The Islander’s Economics CorrespondentÂ
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