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Hey, everyone. Sci-fi god William Gibson once called cyberspace a “consensual hallucination.” Does that mean the metaverse is a non-consensual one?
On January 23, 2014, Mark Zuckerberg commandeered Sheryl Sandberg’s conference room for a demo. His own sanctum, nicknamed the Aquarium because of its glass walls, wasn’t private enough for this top-secret test of a small hardware company’s technology. The company was Oculus, and the technology was virtual reality. Transporting himself to a virtual world, Zuckerberg was stunned by the possibilities—not as a game experience, as was Oculus’s focus, but as the next great computing platform. Within weeks, he bought the company for $2 billion.
The decisiveness of his move came because, just months earlier, Facebook had barely survived an existential crisis. Zuckerberg had always dreamed of making Facebook into an operating system based on social connections, and his first major effort, Facebook Platform, had fizzled because outside developers discovered that writing apps for Apple iOS or Android made a lot more sense than creating apps that ran on Facebook. Then Facebook was slow to focus its own operations on the mobile world. But Zuckerberg’s biggest worry was that Facebook would be dependent on the goodwill of the companies controlling the big mobile platforms. At one point, Facebook even supported an expensive internal project to develop its own phone and operating system. As I describe in my book, the project was headed by the company’s growth guru, Chamath Palihapitiya, who dubbed the project GFK, after the kung fu villain Ghost Faced Killer and the Wu Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah, who adopted that moniker. Presumably it would be a “Killah” of Apple and Android. But Zuckerberg ultimately concluded that it was too late to topple the dug-in lords of mobile and ended the project. He would thereafter suffer from platform envy.
That’s why he was so excited about Oculus. While outsiders considered the purchase of a VR company a drain on Facebook’s finances, Zuckerberg never lost his enthusiasm for alternate realities. So much so that he has now renamed his company Meta.
Does this mean that The Company Formerly Known as Facebook wants to control the metaverse? Heavens, no, says the Meta crew. This week, speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Meta product head Chris Cox said, “We’re not building the metaverse alone.” And in Zuckerberg’s keynote speech at the Connect Conference last week, the Facebook founder insisted that Meta’s artificial world would be interoperable with the efforts of other companies. This sentiment is echoed by Meta’s vice president, metaverse, Vishal Shah. “For people to truly be successful in the metaverse, interoperability will be key, where you can set agreed-upon standards across digital space,” he says in an email. “We want to move away from the mobile model that we’re in today, where if you buy digital goods in one app or in one website, you're limited to that one experience.”
In a technical sense, such a feat is possible. I had an email exchange this week with Rony Abovitz, founder of the pioneering AR firm Magic Leap, and the CEO and founder of a studio called Sun and Thunder. As you might expect, Abovitz is a big fan of the metaverse concept, though he prefers to use the term Xverse. He believes that many companies will participate in making literally millions of Xverses. The vast majority of those digital universes will be long-tail experiences, populated by relatively few. While he doesn’t believe a single company will rule, he assumes that most of us will frolic in worlds made by one of the tech giants of the metaverse, just as two companies basically rule the mobile domain. Ideally, it won’t matter which we choose because we will be able to take our avatars and digital goods with us.
“Basic Interoperability (like we have on today's web) is very possible and needed,” he says. “That is what customers will want—an easily shared reality with standards that allow users with different devices to largely work together.”
But that dream will only happen if trillion-dollar companies play nice with each other. In the case of Meta, it means that Zuckerberg—who once ended company meetings by shouting “Domination!”—will refrain from pressing his advantages in the way that mobile behemoths do today. (Note that despite promises, it is still practically impossible to move one’s Facebook persona to a rival network.) “When we see friction in interoperability, it is because different players see that as a strategic advantage,” says Abovitz. “There is also a lack of trust amongst players because they also may see standards as a way for one major player to control others. What we need is trust amongst players, global standards open to all, and the reduction of friction for the benefit of a customer/user/consumer.”
There’s the rub: The open metaverse we deserve will only happen if the mega-corporations that build it trust each other enough to allow for the deep interoperability Abovitz describes. The alternative is “an old-fashioned commercial land grab where [competitors] are using their dominant position in one of the leading operating systems to tilt the scales in their favor.”
That was a quote from Meta’s senior vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, this week. He was not referring to a metaverse issue, but to Apple’s behavior in the mobile space. That's the space that currently hosts the bulk of our activities—and will continue to do so, at least until we transport ourselves into alternate realities.
Does Meta see the coming reality paradigm as a land grab of its own, or can it be trusted to make its offering interoperable in a way it hasn’t done in almost 20 years of social networking? History is not reassuring.
In early 2013, I spoke to Mark Zuckerberg about a product he was about to launch called Facebook Home, basically a software takeover of an Android phone that put Facebook front and center, beginning with the lock screen. It was a flop. During our interview, Zuckerberg repeatedly emphasized the idea that Facebook did not intend to make its own operating system. He did not mention that just a year earlier the company had secretly planned to do just that, with its own phone and OS. Here’s an excerpt from the unpublished transcript of our conversation.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook occupies this interesting space where we’re not an operating system—we’re not executing apps, even though a lot of apps are tied into Facebook, and I don't really think we’re just an app. I mean, on iOS and Android we are technically an app, but we are an app that people spend way more time with than any other app. It’s like almost an order of magnitude more time is spent on Facebook.
Steven Levy: And you’re also a platform.
Yes. But we’re not an operating system. So all the chatter has been, are we going to build a phone or are we going to build an operating system? I’ve always been very clear that I don't think that’s the right strategy. We’re really this community of a billion-plus people. The best-selling phones can sell 10, 20 million, if you’re not iPhone, and so let’s say we did that. We’d reach 1 or 2 percent of our people. That doesn’t really do anything awesome for us, so we’ve never wanted to build the Facebook phone. Because we don’t think we’re just an app, either, we want to build as deep of a thing as possible, and we want to make it so that we can turn as many phones as possible into Facebook phones.
The product is called Home. Facebook Home, because it’s the home of your experience. That’s a completely new step. No one has built anything like that. Even the companies that have built operating systems that have home screens don’t look anything like this. This is something that we’re going to build on for years.
Adam asks, “We hear a lot about how the mRNA vaccines are more effective than the J&J vaccine at preventing hospitalization or disease. I wonder if there is good data about which vaccine is most effective at preventing you from passing Covid on to other people?”
Thanks for asking, Adam. I share your frustration at how difficult it is to find answers to vitally relevant questions regarding Covid. Aggravating the problem is that the Centers for Disease Control has been pretty much a shambles when it comes to providing crisp answers to people who just want basic information on how to navigate a pandemic. But solving the problem isn’t so easy. Covid-19 is a novel coronavirus, meaning we haven’t seen it before, and it turns out to be a tricky little bugger. Finding answers in real time is difficult. There are oodles of studies, but so many factors—which vaccine, which variant, which population is tested—that we can’t get simple answers. Often, we see results of studies before peer review, which calls into question their veracity.
I don’t know if anyone has done a definitive comparative study on which vaccine can best prevent you from passing on a Covid infection. But last month, Nature reported on a UK study indicating that recently vaccinated people who had breakthrough infections were less likely to pass on the disease to unvaccinated people. When it came to the dominant Delta variant, the risk of passing on the virus was higher than with the original Alpha, but still less significant. But three months after being vaccinated, this effect wasn’t as strong. They tested both the AstraZeneca vaccine (which we don’t see in the US) and the mRNA Pfizer vaccine (which we do use here), and found that the former was a bit more effective in preventing transmission. (The other mRNA vaccine, Moderna, was not tested.) The study has not been peer-reviewed yet, so who knows how seriously to take this result?
Bottom line: Be careful, whether you are vaccinated or not.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
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Cecilia D'Anastasio digs deeper into the question of metaverse interoperability and concludes that Big Tech is out for itself, not for users.
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Special notice! Next week, November 9 and 10, is our RE:WIRED conference. We’re doing it virtually, or should I say metaverse-ally, and you can register here. Guests include Jony Ive, Cowboy BeBop, Beeple, Kai-Fu Lee, Yoky Matsuoka, Timnit Gebru, and many others you’re dying to hear from. On Tuesday, I will be hosting a session called “Internet of Lies,” with Renee DiResta of Stanford; Rashad Robinson of Color of Change; and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and cofounder of Archewell. All are welcome, and it’s free!
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