Zuckerberg’s announced intention to build a more maximalist version of Facebook, spanning social presence, office work, and entertainment, comes at a time when the US government is attempting to break his current company up. Watching Zuckerberg’s presentation, I couldn’t decide which was more audacious: his vision itself or his timing. Critically, no one company will run the metaverse - it will be an “embodied internet,” Zuckerberg said, operated by many different players in a decentralized way. Among them: it has to span the physical and virtual worlds contain a fully fledged economy and offer “unprecedented interoperability” - users have to be able to take their avatars and goods from one place in the metaverse to another, no matter who runs that particular part of it.
In January 2020, an influential essay by the venture capitalist Matthew Ball set out to identify key characteristics of a metaverse. “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” (Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been discussing his desire to contribute to a metaverse for many months now.) Earlier this month, The New York Times explored how companies and products including Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox, and even Animal Crossing: New Horizons increasingly had metaverse-like elements. Coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.” “What I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,” Zuckerberg said.
The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision, he said in a remote address to employees. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi - a world known as the metaverse.
The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative.
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