At first, I thought I was going to write about Facebook doing a complete rebrand as a company and their transformation into "Meta". On Oct 28th, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company Facebook was more than just the platform Facebook and that the company name no longer encapsulated everything the company was trying to do. And just as Google in 2015 had a restructure into parent company Alphabet, Facebook (the company) is now Meta. But as I did more research on what that entailed, I realized it's not really Facebook (from here on out Meta by the way) that I care about. Meta is just one small piece of this mess. Because, and call me cynical, I am one of the many who believe that Mark is just trying to move past all of the large pitfalls his company has recently encountered. I mean everything from large Instagram and Facebook outages to the recent whistleblower and the "Facebook Papers" cannot be good for the company name. I mean since really the beginning of September this year, the company stock price has seen a relatively downward trend. And then, after dipping to 312.22 USD on Oct 27, the stock has been going up in the past few days. And while a lot of people are still trying to bring up the numerous issues Meta has as a company, this move has taken some heat of them in those aspects.
Instead, the heat is on Meta and the idea of the metaverse. And by the heat is on, I mean during my research I realized I had some bones to pick. Now when Mark went in on this topic, you may have found yourself wondering what exactly is the metaverse. It seems to be heating up, now that Mark is in on it, there's talk of NFTs being used in the metaverse, gaming, Netflix, all of that stuff. Well, the metaverse is a science-fiction term coined in 1992 by writer Neal Stephenson for his book Snow Crash. A popular depiction of the metaverse is in the popular book and its movie adaptation, Ready Player One. In current entertainment, one might think of a gaming platform like Roblox or even Fortnite, where players have 3D avatars that jump between worlds and can participate in in-game shopping, gaming, and even concerts. Here's the catch though; the metaverse does not exist currently. It's a term that a lot of tech companies and figures use to talk about the future of information technology and how users will interact online. While there isn't one agreed-upon definition for a metaverse, they are usually talking about a platform consisting of sites that may overlap, usage of personalized 3D avatars, personal interactions between users that is more conventional and less game-based, user-created virtual items, or links to an outside real-world economic system. There is talk that a metaverse would use cryptocurrency linked to the real world (think Ethereum) and NFTs to mark ownership over digital items (remember an NFT isn't necessarily art, it just symbolizes ownership over a digital work which can include in-game items). Tim Sweeney claimed it to be a replacement for the internet, saying it was "a kind of online playground where users could join friends to play a multiplayer game one moment and watch a movie together on Netflix the next". According to Fortune, Facebook reported that its spending would erase $10 billion from its 2021 profits, although Mark claims that in the next decade the metaverse will be host to hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce.
That above paragraph, for me at least, answered nothing. I know I wrote it, I did the research for it, took notes for it, all that. Nothing. I still can't tell you what the metaverse is. One of the benefits is supposed to be "presence". Hey, what does that mean? The example I read mentioned that in the metaverse you could be present at a meeting around a table which would be better than a meeting with pinned faces on Zoom. But is that it? Is that the only difference between the metaverse and the internet? 3D avatars? Because from what I found that does seem to be the case. There were more arguments that the metaverse would be great for shopping because people could try the clothes on virtually. First of all, are you then saying that my personalized avatar has to look like me? Because unless it does, trying the clothes on my avatar does nothing for seeing how they would look on me. Second, if you are just saying the clothes will be shown over my body, that's just augmented reality. I don't need a metaverse for that, just make it a separate option for amazon (it already is for some clothes and furniture btw). And look, I know I'm really honing in on this clothes thing but this can be applied broadly. I'm going to skip over food. Entertainment? If I want to watch Netflix with friends I can get onto Teleparty and do so. If I want to then play Fortnite immediately after with those same friends, I can do so. It won't be any harder or take any longer to close Netflix and open up Discord and the Epic Games launcher on my computer than if I was in the metaverse. And are you telling me, that in the metaverse, all skins and items are transferable from platform to platform? Like the way I look while playing Minecraft will translate to me walking into a virtual department store? I doubt that, because who is going to go through that effort. Not just the effort of creating those transferable avatars and making them smooth, but the effort of working out legal deals to allow reproduction rights and that jazz too.
I wanted to make one or two last points here about the metaverse. One point is the theoretical use of cryptocurrency and NFTs in the metaverse to sustain the economy. What people say will happen is that cryptocurrency will be used to buy items in-game, and through that can be exchanged into local currency in the real world. But hold up here. First, we have to decide what cryptocurrency will be used, and don't be quick to say Ethereum. Thar, or Bitcoin, may seem like the most obvious answers but Solana Ventures recently (patterned with two other major companies) claimed they would be putting $100 million into gaming ventures centered around the use of crypto. They would assumably be using Solana's own crypto coin, Sol. But if the proposed metaverse only uses Ethereum for example, does that mean all of those games aren't going to be accessible in the metaverse. Is this going to be an Apple app store scenario where it's their way or the highway? And let's not even think about price fluctuations. Will the local economy account for inflation and deflation and the day-to-day changes in crypto value? What if Bitcoin falls back down to $30,000 a coin. Or Ethereum doubles to $10,000 a coin. How will any of this be accounted for? On top of that, what about processing fees for buying crypto in the first place? Wouldn't it be cheaper to go on the regular internet, go through with a micro-transaction with USD, and then use that item in the metaverse? Or will that not be allowed either. Will the only items allowed in the metaverse, usable or aesthetic, be only the ones you purchase there and have that NFT for. And who is responsible for this, is there a Treasury Department for the metaverse, maybe one that makes its crypto coin solely for the metaverse. Then I could both pay for my Netflix subscription and for the newest VR game in that crypto. But then what if the crypto is like any other coin and the price fluctuates all the time? One month I'm paying 2 hypothetical coins for Netflix and the next the value of the coin has gone down and I have to give 5 coins. Then the value goes back up and I lose out on my money? There is just so much that isn't being explained by the tech industry in my opinion. I always hear about the future is the metaverse and how cool it is, and how it will change our online interaction. And I agree, it could be cool. But, there is a long way to go and a lot of questions to answer.
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