“From now on, we're going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first”. Mark Zuckerberg in the keynote at Facebook Connect 2021, the annual AR/VR conference held on October 28, 2021. Below we publish, in Italian translation, one of the best and most balanced speeches we have read on the transition of Facebook from the mobile web, where it is now, to the metaverse where it will be. It is a transition not from nothing and for this reason also accompanied by a change of denomination. From now on it will be called Meta with a logo that is a graphic variant of the mathematical infinity symbol.
Kevin Rose, who holds the Shift column on the "New York Times", with a speech entitled The Metaverse Is Mark Zuckerberg's Escape Hatch thus commented on the METAmorphosis of "once upon a time there was Facebook".
Connected & happy
When Mark Zuckerberg made his screen appearance at Facebook's Connect virtual conference, smiling and relaxed, walking from one room to another modernly furnished and aseptic room of his residence (I think the real one), he seemed a person free from all worries.
Whistle blower? Cheeee? Yet, is there a years-long cascading crisis of confidence with angry regulators, outgoing employees, and lawmakers comparing Facebook to tobacco giants? Hmm, no alarm?
It just seems not. Zuckerberg and his lieutenants convincingly illustrated their vision of the so-called metaverse, the immersive virtual environment that Facebook — which in the meantime has been renamed Meta, even though everyone, except a few financial journalists, will probably continue to call it Facebook — is trying to put up.
As with most of Facebook's strategic breakthroughs, the rebranding formalized a change that has been underway for years.
10 thousand brains on the metaverse
The company already has more than 10 people working on augmented and virtual reality projects in its Reality Labs division. That's twice the staff at Twitter. Zuckerberg said he expects to hire another 10 soon in Europe. Earlier this week, the company announced it would invest $10 billion in the metaverse as early as this year. To this end, it has acquired VR startups that could be instrumental in building the metaverse. There are all sorts of questions one could ask about this metaverse strategy. The first, and most basic is: What is the metaverse, and what will the version of facebook be like?
The metaverse for Facebook
This question was answered, at least partially, in the presentation to Connect. Zuckerberg painted a picture of the metaverse as a crisp and bright virtual world. A universe, accessible with virtual reality hardware and augmented reality in the first phase and with more advanced body sensors later, in which people can perform many virtual activities, such as playing games, attending virtual concerts, shopping for virtual goods, collecting art virtual, relate to the virtual avatars of other inhabitants of the metaverse and take part in virtual business meetings.
This vision of an immersive digital realm isn't new — it was sketched nearly 30 years ago by science fiction author Neal Stephenson — but Zuckerberg is reworking it to be the future of Facebook in a bet that it will become real, as he believes that the metaverse will be the “successor to the mobile web”.
Will the metaverse work?
Another obvious question is: “Will it work? It's impossible to say for sure, of course, although I'm personally skeptical that Facebook — with a cumbersome bureaucracy whose biggest innovations over the past decade have come mostly from buying competing apps or copying their features, rather than through their own ideas — can really give way to an immersive digital universe that people actually want to spend time in.
But the more interesting question, in my opinion, is: Why is Zuckerberg doing all this? After all, it's not a prelude to a major corporate reorganization or a sign of a CEO wanting to lighten up on his job, as was the case with Google when it became Alphabet in 2015 and Larry Page handed day-to-day control of Google to Sundar Pichai.
And while some have speculated that the Meta rebrand is meant to distract from the most recent round of scandals involving Facebook, it's naïve to think that the announcement of such a radical plan to reinvent the digital world can make critics more benevolent towards society.
To understand why Zuckerberg is going at breakneck speed in this direction, consider that a metaverse success could help solve at least four big, thorny problems facing Facebook on Earth.
The aging of the core business
The first is what I was talking about above, which is the aging of the core business of social media like Facebook. Younger users are abandoning its applications in favor of TikTok, Snapchat and other coolest environments.
The exodus of young people from Facebook hasn't hurt the business financially yet, but ad revenue is lagging behind actual trends, and there are plenty of signs that even Instagram — the supposedly healthy app in Facebook's portfolio — is rapidly losing momentum. attention of adolescents and twenties.
The bleakest prospect of what could happen to Facebook in the next few years, if current trends hold, is that of a baby boomer-dominated “quagmire” full of cute pet videos and extra-party garbage.
This is clearly not the kind of stuff the company wants as its flagship product. Zuckerberg explicitly laid out a youth-focused strategy, saying the company's new goal is to attract and retain youth.
The metaverse could help the company's demographic crunch if it encourages young people to don Oculus and hang out with Horizon — Facebook's social app for VR — instead of watching TikTok videos on their phones.
Platform risk
Another problem Facebook's metaverse strategy could help solve, if it works, is so-called platform risk. For years, Zuckerberg has been concerned with the situation that because Facebook's mobile apps run on iOS and Android, their success is highly dependent on Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), e Google, two companies whose priorities are often diametrically opposed to his.
This year's changes on the “app tracking transparency” from Apple, for example, have dealt a blow to Facebook's advertising business, making it more difficult for the company to collect data on users' mobile activity. And if smartphones remain the dominant mode of online interaction, Facebook will never truly control its business.
Perhaps this is why Zuckerberg has been talking about the metaverse strategy since 2015, when he wrote to his lieutenants: "We need to be able to build a large platform with key applications to improve our strategic position on the next platform (i.e. the metaverse)."
A metaverse strategy, if it works, could finally get Facebook out of the grip of Apple and Google, directing users directly to Facebook-owned platforms such as Oculus, where there is no worry of being deleted from the App store for having tracked user activity or aided in the illegal trafficking of domestic workers.
It would also free up the business: if Facebook wanted to sell, say, virtual clothing within one of its metaverse apps, it could do so without paying a 30 percent fee to a rival. Still during Connect, Zuckerberg indirectly criticized Apple and Google, saying their control of the mobile app ecosystem
"It's stifling innovation, keeping people from building new things, and shutting down the entire internet economy."
The regulatory risk
The third problem is regulatory risk. Facebook isn't exactly on the cusp of hotpot, but regulators are making enough fuss to limit its growth (by establishing new privacy laws or preventing it from acquiring the next Instagram, for example).
This situation makes it a reasonable strategy to bet on new areas, such as VR and AR, which are less likely to be regulated in the short term.
Furthermore, since many of Facebook's regulatory problems stem from the way its applications are used in political discourse, the metaverse could allow it to operate in a kinder, more mellow social universe not yet co-opted by political partisanship. One group that was not seen around the Connect conference is precisely that of politicians.
The reputation
The fourth problem, of course, concerns the reputational damage due to his many mistakes and scandals over the years. For years, everything Facebook has done — including projects that have nothing to do with social networking, like introducing a cryptocurrency wallet — has been caught up in this downward spiral.
And given that a bevy of media outlets are still scrutinizing the so-called Facebook papers, the company's public image is likely to get worse rather than better. Zuckerberg, whose new public persona is something akin to "futuristic above all else," says the motivation for renaming Facebook to Meta isn't a desire to escape a bad reputation. But the toxicity associated with Facebook's brand has had real consequences. It has demoralized its workforce and made it harder for Facebook to attract and keep talented people.
It scuttled partnerships, alarmed advertisers, and turned Zuckerberg — who, despite the ambivalence of his actions, wants to be remembered as a visionary technologist rather than a destroyer of democracy — into a world-historical villain.
A decisive bet
Building the metaverse isn't going to solve any of these problems overnight. It likely won't fix them at all, and may, in fact, spur new kinds of scrutiny that Facebook wouldn't have attracted if it had simply spent the next few years focusing all of its attention on fixing the problems of the existing situation.
But it would be wrong to dismiss Facebook's metaverse as a mere marketing gimmick or strategic ploy intended to give the company more leverage over its rivals.
If it works, Zuckerberg's metaverse will usher in a new era of dominance, one that will extend Facebook's influence into new kinds of culture, communication, and commerce. If it fails, however, it will be remembered as a desperate and costly attempt to give a geriatric social network a futuristic facelift with the sole purpose of diverting attention from more pressing social problems. Both possibilities are to be taken seriously.
Regardless, this strategy is not a sob of Zuckerberg vanity. In the metaverse, he saw what could be an escape route, that is, a way to subtract himself and Facebook from a messy and problematic present and open a new pristine frontier. No wonder he looks so happy.
