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I am perpetually late to the party. andi (@mcc on cohost), who I sort of peripherally knew-of when she was on Twitter, posted an essay in the early bird-migration days at cohost, on the various ideas of the metaverse: Stephenson's original conception, Facebook's ambitions (largely jettisonned), and others.
Some Thoughts on "The Metaverse"
Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Buries the Metaverse
andi argues that right now we're in a situation akin to the early, pre-web online: we spend most of of our time in the equivalent of gated communities, taking what they offer us, and little more. The equivalence she draws is with CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy, although ironically, you could probably argue we're actually worse off than we were then:
In some sense we've reached feature parity, thirty years later. We've also got the same level of control over our own identities on the platform, which is to say, barely any at all; we can choose to use the platform or not, but if we go, that's it. We can't take our Instagram data and import it elsewhere, not in any meaningful sense. We're stuck with apps and no overarching protocol.
The Fediverse is a partial answer to that, allowing social verbs or ideas that work across a variety of platforms. But as you may have seen when trying to convince your mutuals to make the move to Mastodon, it comes with a tradeoff. It's not as instinctively simple as shitposting on Twitter. It requires people to think a little bit about their data and interactions. Most people don't want to do that, and so Mastodon won't take off until Twitter's last day. Maybe after that we'll start to see people other than idealistic free software types and disaffected tweeps in the Fediverse.
When the web took off, it obliterated the siloed services (as well as my beloved BBSs), allowing anyone to register a domain, or get hosted at one, and create an online space. The early days of the web weren't perfect, but they were open. People made pages, not profiles. They shared buttons and scripts and design elements, and what wasn't on offer, you could just steal.
The web, the old web, was revolutionary. It enabled or faciliated far more than the online services that preceeded it. So what's going to replace the web, or, to be more correct, the set of closed applications that communicate over open protocols such as HTTP(S)? andi argues that a distributed, virtual world is a difficult problem (it is), and that if we're to get anything like a true metaverse, rather than a bloodless, legless simulacrum a la Meta's Horizon Worlds, we need to figure out how to write distributed, floating applications. To allow ownership of identity, to relinquish ownership over spaces. People need the freedom to create: by default, the metaverse has to be open, not closed.
You can start to see why there are a lot of reasons why we haven't found our way there. Perhaps the first is that the problem is hard; next, it's in no company's interest to throw the barn doors open, to allow easy out-migration. Why work towards something that improves interoperability, that allows your users to more easily leave? From a capitalist company's perspective, it's madness. So everyone creates their own virtual community. They brand them metaverses (or just "the metaverse"). The press eats it up. The hype train gathers momentum. Companies offer no compelling reason to pick their own particular offering. They're shocked when uptake is poor. Meta loses $13.7B in 2022.
I first read Snow Crash around ten years ago. It's a fascinating and deeply dystopian novel, though Stephenson's vision of the metaverse, which is open and malleable/hackable, is a fascinating one. I'm still hopeful we'll see something like it in my lifetime, at least in terms of a visual, immersive offering. But while I'm hopeful, I'm not expectant. You could argue the web only succeeded because it was non-commercial, because it spread before corporate interests could finally figure out how to dominate it. And look at what happened once they did: data siloed; your interactions carefully tracked, dutifully sold; you remember that Google used to be be good, but can't remember exactly when it got so spectacularly bad.
(As an aside: it's a genuine miracle that we still have services such as email, which only exist in their current, useful state because their definition preceeded the corporate invasion of the online world.)
Meta lost $13.7 billion on Reality Labs in 2022 as Zuckerberg’s metaverse bet gets pricier
Meta lost more than $13B last year on its metaverse bullshit that nobody wanted. If you had told me in 2006 that Facebook couldn't sell an online experience, I wouldn't have believed you. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when Facebook felt genuinely interesting, and at least partially magical. Everyone you've ever met, that was the promise, an online social circle from elementary school to the workplace, your first crush, your old flames, your closest friends. That's a hell of a promise, and for a while, they delivered.
But somewhere along the line, after becoming one of the largest companies on the planet, Meta believed that their VR product would be infinitely more compelling than some alternative full of pirated music and furries (hello, VR Chat!), based on...well, because they said so. And it hasn't taken off. The idea of a corporate, VR-based metaverse hasn't gone anywhere. All the big tech companies are variations, as andi argues, on AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy. And every one of them is trying to brand "the metaverse" as a platform feature, an application under their strict control, even though, to properly realize the seismic shift of a Stephensonian metaverse, they need to be popularizing the equivalent of a distributed, ownerless web.