The real world, these days, is not kind to Mark Zuckerberg, father and master of Facebook: the story of the failures of the social network system accused before Congress by the former employee Frances Hagen not to fight hate and violence on the Net so as not to harm the business. And even in Europe there are difficult times: the presentation of two directives is imminent, the Digital Service Act and the Digital Markets Act, with the aim of regulating (and curbing) the activity of the social network, already in the crosshairs for the role played in presidential elections and the Brexit vote. But it takes much more to scare the creator of Facebook: we don't like reality? Let's think of another.
It is these days the news that Facebook intends to hire 10 people over the next five years to build "the IT platform of the future" or a "metaverse”. It's a concept introduced in 1992 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson for his Snow crash, cyberpunk novel in which the Americas were devoured by corporate franchises. And in which there is a parallel world, halfway between the internet and virtual reality, where people interact through avatars using virtual and augmented reality. A literary dream? No, after five years, Facebook will become a company, the first and strongest in this new world that will take the place of the Internet as we know it today.
But how? Let's go back to Stephenson's fantasies. The author conceives the metaverse as an immense black sphere of 65536 km (2 to the eighteenth power) in circumference, cut in two at the height of the equator, by a road that can also be traveled on a monorail with 256 stations, each at 256 km of distance. On this sphere, each person can create what they want in 3D: shops, offices and night clubs or other, all of which can potentially be visited by users. Let's leave aside, for now, the physical aspect of the infrastructure needed to experience this parallel life. But it is possible to imagine what Zuckerberg defines as "the incarnate Internet" in which users literally enter the content, not contenting themselves with scrolling through it on a piece of furniture or a PC.
Thanks to the metaverse it will be possible, for example, to dance by entering a virtual Tik Tok. A new world, with immense commercial possibilities but give it social and political developments almost unthinkable. Of course, titanic work is needed to get there: new tools are needed as well as new protocols and standards which the team led by the new chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, already in charge of research on augmented and virtual reality, is already working on. And already there are the first concrete applications, such as HorizonWorkrooms, a virtual environment to be accessed through eye the helmet made through billionaire investments that allows you, through your avatar, to participate in a 3D meeting with dozens of people or share a screen. They are part of the same family $300 glassesi that Facebook has created together with Ray-Ban, Luxottica team, which allow you to take photos or make live videos.
A dream (or nightmare) that is about to become reality. But there's a surprise. The great adventure will not continue in California, but in old Europe where Facebook, which today has 58 employees, will hire 10 people, mostly engineers and mathematicians. “Europe is the heart of our success,” says Vice President Nick Clegg. And we have long believed that the real talent needed to innovate resides there”. Naturally, however, new rules will be needed both on data ownership and on the possibility of being able to manage information flows between the various countries both within the EU and outside. And it won't be easy.
But, perhaps, a short-term goal is at hand: to create le premises for an agreement with the Antitrust of Brussels, promising the Old Continent to recover a portion of the lost ground on the Artificial Intelligence front, a field where, however, according to the head of the Pentagon, "China has already won the war". In short, we just have an Avatar.
