Please Like This Future
Organisation | University of Salzburg, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, UCLA California
My Role | Researcher, Author
What does the metaverse say about the future, and what does that tell us about the metaverse?
This is an overview. Download the complete study here.
Note: The end-to-end research for this project was carried out as part of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Digital Communication Leadership (delivered by the University of Salzburg, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & UCLA California). An abridged dissemination of these findings is currently in pre-print at a peer-reviewed academic journal.
One of the glaring ironies in the evolution of social media corporations such as Facebook is the deep chasm between its founder Mark Zuckerberg's omniscient access into our lives and ideas, versus our very limited access into Big Tech luminaries such as his. What if we could reverse the script, and access a record of everything Zuckerberg has ever publicly said in his capacity as Chairman and CEO of Facebook (now Meta)? This is where The Zuckerberg Files comes into play. Curated and run by Prof. Michael Zimmer, an internet and data ethics scholar, and hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, The Zuckerberg Files serves as an ongoing digital repository of the entirety of Mark Zuckerberg’s public utterances since the inception of Facebook (2004) to this day. The archive is composed of a wide array of documents of different types, such as media interviews, podcast appearances, editorials, social media posts, founder’s letters, letters to investors and earnings calls, as well as transcripts of keynote speeches, product presentations, conference talks, and other public talks.
The hype around the idea of the metaverse skyrocketed in 2021, primarily prompted by Facebook’s decision to rebrand itself as Meta Platforms, Inc. — Meta for short — and dedicate its focus over the next decade towards building the metaverse, thus supercharging tens of billions of dollars in new investments and planting industry-wide predictions that the metaverse is the future of the internet. Although the metaverse is at a nascent stage of development in terms of its technology ecosystem and market-readiness, Zuckerberg’s discourse surrounding Meta’s metaverse presents a critical opportunity to examine its attendant futures and the ambiguity of the phenomenon via an in-depth analysis.
These public statements are purposeful and strategic, and the language used by these influential creators of technology has an impact on how we understand that technology.
Background.
Subject.
The thesis examines the Metaverse imaginary: the narrative produced by Meta’s Chairman & CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, about the metaverse as the next frontier of the internet where the virtual world would be a seamless continuation of how we live our lives.
Methods.
The study aims to present a sustained, empirically-informed analysis of the metaverse as a sociotechnical imaginary through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Zuckerberg’s public language surrounding the subject, focussing on the period between Connect 2021, where he officially announced the decision to rebrand Facebook as Meta and thereby pivot the company’s focus over the next decade towards building the metaverse, right up to Zuckerberg’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Podcast, his final public conversation on the topic of the metaverse leading up to Connect 2022.
Findings.
The analysis yields the following core attributes of the metaverse imaginary as discursively constructed by Mark Zuckerberg:
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The metaverse is the next frontier of the internet in terms of how we connect with each other; the journey from text to photo to video to immersion are logical steps in the continuum of human progress.
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The metaverse is a living experience that exists concurrently for everyone and in real-time; the embodied internet will allow every user to feel present with other people in a way that is much closer to physical world interactions than it is to the experience of using a mobile app or website.
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The metaverse is an industry-spanning entity that will be built by multiple companies based on interoperable standards and protocols.
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The metaverse will be designed around people and interactions, not apps; the products become less of a medium than a vehicle to stabilise the metaverse experience as a persistent interface between digital and physical environments:
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The metaverse is not just about social experiences but also about work, play, commerce, creativity, and several other use-cases held together by interoperable standards that allow people to bring their virtual assets across different environments seamlessly.
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The metaverse will not only delimit innovation but also transfer more power to its users, creators and developers by virtue of a self-contained creator economy.
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Safety, privacy and inclusion will be built into the metaverse from the ground up; the metaverse will also empower people to live anywhere in the world and teleport on a moment's notice to another place, and thus help address fundamental problems of our society such as climate change.
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The metaverse is a work in progress and a lot of the technology stack that underpins its vision is yet to be built; these future technologies are prerequisites for next-generation social experiences.
While the eight discursive frames identified and analysed in this thesis are not meant to be exhaustive, they offer a comprehensive view of how future imaginaries by a single actor are performed, substantiated, and solidified within society over a period.
The analysis shows that Zuckerberg’s discourse on the metaverse gives rise to explicitly corporate sociotechnical imaginaries that project specific visions of desirable futures, what forms of sociality and power relations are embedded in them, and what technological ecosystems need to be invented to materialise this future.
Meta-mediated vision of the future.
In setting the language and expectations for what the next frontier of social connection ought to look like, Zuckerberg aims to control the narrative of technological advancement in the direction that best favours a Meta-mediated vision of the future. Thus, by guiding the shape of things and services to come, Zuckerberg’s discursive construction of the metaverse imaginary also co-produces the very future it envisions.
The primary value of this narrative around future imaginaries, I conclude, is to build a solid base of users, creators, and developers, and then turn them into active evangelists of the metaverse as a visionary force.
Recommendations.
One could investigate Zuckerberg’s discourse from a variety of critical lenses and frameworks that exceed the limitations of this study.
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Future research may adopt a platform economics lens, for example, to provide a focused interrogation of how interoperability in the metaverse enacts new forms of monopoly and concentration.
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Queer and feminist lenses could uncover how Meta’s language on virtual reality reinforces ableism by presupposing a socially constructed, ideal image of the body as normal.
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One might also explore how the metaverse imaginary is perceived and internalised by different audiences, for example, by creators working in the metaverse or people in public spaces who may be included in the visual field of a VR device’s outward-facing camera that collects both data about the user and the outside world without informed consent.
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Finally, this thesis aims to encourage critical empirical studies of not only the degrees to which mixed-reality systems such as the metaverse intends to take over one’s perceptual environment, but also what it would mean to actively resist a future colonised by Meta.
Conclusions.
I conclude that if Zuckerberg is willing to frame this texture-less, far-from-complete version of the metaverse as an inevitable future, there could only be one reason: for the moment, the metaverse is a sandbox for the company to learn about what users are most interested in and are willing to pay for, and then capitalise on them. If Meta succeeds in enclosing the internet as their own proprietary space within the metaverse under the pretext of a better future, we might be contending with a new internet, and if left unchecked, a new kind of concentration of power.