Network column: Metaverse, the current vision of the tech industry – culture


It’s not as if Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg just doesn’t have enough to do with the present. For example, there are more and more voices saying that his company is complicit in the many corona deaths. Because of the outrageous disinformation about vaccinations and the pandemic, which seem to be rampant on the social network without hindrance. During a protest last Wednesday, activists spread body bags on the sidewalk outside the Facebook Washington DC office.

Instead of tackling the problems of the present, Zuckerberg prefers to think publicly about what his company will look like over the next five years. Billions of dollars will be taken to turn today’s social network into a “Metaverse company”.

Metaverse is currently the favorite term of self-proclaimed technology thinkers and venture capitalists. The catchphrase is hard to escape. Almost every large company is working on its own version or, better still, a vision, because what they all have in common is that the specific ideas are still very vague. Metaverse, as described by early science fiction authors such as Neal Stephenson or, more contemporary, Ernest Cline in his bestseller “Ready Player One”, initially means that instead of navigating flat websites as is the case today, you are in one three-dimensional space is located. Depending on the reading of technological progress, it either sounds like a utopia or a dystopia.

Software developer and author Wendy Liu calls it “virtual reality but with advertising that cannot be clicked away”

“The metaverse can also be imagined as an embodied Internet in which you not only look at content, but put it into it,” says Zuckerberg. It is a fundamentally different access to the network than it is today. After all, you spend most of your time conveying your life and various communications through these small, glowing rectangles. “I don’t think people are really made to interact,” says Zuckerberg. Many of these companies want you to wear their augmented reality glasses at some point in order to literally see the exact version of reality that suits them best. Or as software developer and author Wendy Liu puts it on Twitter: “Virtual Reality but with advertising that cannot be clicked away.”

It is interesting that when such visions are spun down, the status quo is downplayed at the same time. The internet is already a sphere from which one cannot simply log out. People no longer have the option, or even the choice, of limiting its effects to whatever state is called “online”. You cannot ignore how it has already reshaped physical space or how the presupposed connectivity affects your ability to act in almost every moment.

The problem is that work is still only being done to make these structures even more overwhelming, without questioning the underlying politics of the networks. If you don’t manage to design a two-dimensional space safely without constantly wafting through fake news that is detrimental to society, how can you guarantee that in a much more extensive framework? To put it another way: Does this metaverse suggested by Zuckerberg shatter our perception of a common reality even more than it already has? And: Is there anyone who would be less suited to building such a reality than he is?

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