Zuckerberg’s meta reality can’t escape the problems of our real world, only replicate them
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at MWC 2016. Not to be outdone, Zuckerberg unsurprisingly plans to extend this logic of surveillance to the nth degree. Photo: Facebook
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would henceforth be known as meta — and that its main focus would be the creation and integration of a virtual reality called the metaverse.
At first, the technology seemed sinister in the usual ways. It spoke of how a future metaverse will incorporate "sensors that map the world around you", hinting at the deepening architecture of surveillance that he and his employees tirelessly hammer away at. In 2019, Google's Nest home security device was revealed to be harbouring a secret microphone, presumably installed with the aim of harvesting voice data from households around the globe.
Not to be outdone, Zuckerberg unsurprisingly plans to extend this logic of surveillance to the nth degree. One can imagine the rich predictive data that would be gleaned from allowing sensors to map the entire topology of one's living spaces: does this person already have a 55 inch TV, or can we sell them one?
Netflix's documentary last year revealed the extent to which social media algorithms exploit our emotional weakness. If the meta sensors pick up clothes and dirty plates strewn around a user’s room, can they surmise the user is depressed?
It was only two years ago that Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s new mantra: “The future is private”. This was supposed to signal a move away from surveillance practices. Apparently, the future is now meta, instead.
And don’t be fooled: meta is just another euphemism for the tentacles of surveillance snaking their way into every crevice of our lives, mapping our fears more efficiently and totally than ever before.
On Tuesday, Facebook also announced it would shut down its facial recognition software and delete its user face data. Ostensibly, this is a step in the right direction — but it’s also just good strategy. Facial recognition software has attracted huge public scrutiny.
This made selling the data to third parties almost impossible without serious backlash, and possession of the data attracted hefty fines. By jettisoning this trove of data, which was so tainted, Facebook is able to give the impression of moving towards its promised future of privacy, while continuing to expand its powers of surveillance in other, less easily understood ways.
Say, through sensors that map the inside of your home, maybe? And why would meta need its face data, when it explicitly said in last week’s presentation that “your avatar will be able to reflect your facial expressions in real time”, another feature that will rely on sensors pulling biometric data from users?
This new technology might not be called ‘facial recognition’, but it may well just be a mutation of it.
But last week’s meta presentation was insulting, not just because it once again asked us to become human data generators, but because it sold a lie that we would be inhabiting some sort of magical utopia. Let’s pay careful attention to the design of the technology.
“Imagine, you put on your glasses or headset and you’re instantly in your homespace. It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually…”, Zuckerberg said.
Many people wondered how we would move through this world, simply by wearing a pair of VR glasses? Surely it would just be using the old-fashioned joystick or controller, while we sit wearing a headset — if so, the technology is not that impressive at all then, is it?
Then, when Zuckerberg babbled vaguely about holograms and sensors which map your home and your body, it became clear. The virtual world, in this imagined future, will be mapped onto the real one. If you want to make your avatar run forward in a beautiful virtual meadow, you'll have to have enough space to run forward yourself, in real life, your body augmented with wearable sensors.
Kids in the inner city without outdoor space to play — where will they make their avatar run? Sensors will map your real home and crudely paste a virtual, interactive layer over it to create your 'homespace' — while this layer might be shiny and full of digital goods (which you'll certainly be expected to pay for, and likely be manipulated algorithmically into buying), it will not fundamentally differ from your real home in dimensions or comfort.
If you want to play a holographic game of tennis with people from across the globe, you'll need enough outdoor space in real life to run and jump and swing your arms. The amount of freedom and joy that you can garner from virtual play will be utterly contingent on the amounts of freedom and joy available in your real-life surroundings.
The metaverse is not the creation of some beautiful, limitless other world — it is just a colourful clone of our real world and all its dismal material conditions. We are being asked to plug ourselves into a lie, become guinea pigs on a virtual wheel, constantly generating biometric and behavioural data. And all just for the reward of living in a Version 2.0 of our real world, faintly obscured by glossy digital textures.
Where will the average citizen of Dublin play with their future meta sets? Most likely squashed into cramped shared apartments, sitting down, using a good old-fashioned controller — because we certainly don’t have the public or private space to enjoy them.
The beautiful virtual reality of the metaverse requires the foundations of a beautiful real world most of us don’t have access to. It relies on massive improvements to our society if it is ever to come true for the average person. This is the irony at the core of the whole project.
Billionaires and corporations are increasingly being forced to confront their responsibility for the erosion of our social fabric. In San Francisco, Google has acknowledged its role in gentrification and house price inflation, and has promised one billion dollars for housing projects in the area.
In Dublin too, multinationals like Facebook have taken over swathes of the city, with luxury apartment buildings flying up to supposedly accommodate tech workers - but which end up lying vacant, sold on for capital gains by yet more billionaires investors in private equity funds. Workers on the median wage and below are displaced or compressed into what little space remains in the city, deprived of freedom to live and play.
The lesson the billionaire class should learn from Meta’s failure of imagination is that their only way forward is to redistribute wealth to alleviate the problems they have created in the real world — financialisation, housing scarcity and unaffordability, wage stagnation, climate crisis.
As they're gradually learning, those real problems are inescapable — even in an alternate reality.
