“Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended,” Zuckerberg said in a recent staff email. Remote working, video calling and e-commerce had suddenly become the norm. “Get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create …”Īt the time we were just coming out of the pandemic. “You’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine,” said Zuckerberg in his intro video last year. The “why” is a particularly good question when it comes to Meta. He has to explain it less and less, he says: “A year ago, it was mostly ‘what is the metaverse?’ Questions now are a lot more practical: what will be here? When? For whom? How, and why?” Matthew Ball, tech investor and author of The Metaverse: How It Will Revolutionise Everything, defines the metaverse as “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds”, with individual presence and continuity of data. Rather than our current 2D, screen-based internet, in other words, the metaverse will be a 3D virtual space, accessed by either a VR headset or AR (augmented reality) glasses, which superimpose a layer of digital information on top of the visible world. Zuckerberg explained it as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”. If nothing else, Zuckerberg has popularised the term “metaverse”, even if he didn’t invent it, and definitions of what it means vary. Zuckerberg and pals playing poker in the metaverse. Comments on the latest lay-offs in an anonymous employee survey included, “the metaverse will be our slow death” and “Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the metaverse”. But the markets seem to be saying “count us out”, and according to reports, just 58% of Meta’s own employees said they understood the company’s metaverse vision. It could also represent an attempted second act, for both the 38-year-old and his somewhat tarnished Facebook brand. Zuckerberg’s newfound metaverse obsession could be seen as a preemptive virtual land grab for what is generally agreed to be the future of the internet. Meanwhile, Meta has invested a staggering $100bn on metaverse research and development to date, $15bn in the past year alone – with apparently little to show for it. Apple’s changes to data privacy last year also decimated revenues – its introduction of an “ask not to track” option on iPhones has effectively starved Facebook of the lucrative data it uses to target ads. Moneyspinners Facebook and Instagram are losing market share and Gen Z users to fresher rivals like TikTok and Snapchat. Meta’s share price has fallen by more than 70% this year. Photograph: Facebook/ReutersĪfter decades of spectacular “move fast and break things” growth, Zuckerberg’s empire is now looking a little fragile. Mark Zuckerberg speaking to his digital self. It wasn’t all bad news, though: Zuckerberg announced last month that Meta avatars would at last be getting legs. Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse division, had lost $3.7bn in the past three months, with worse expected to come. Poor third-quarter results had seen Meta’s share price drop by 25%, wiping $80bn off the company’s value. “This was ultimately my call and it was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company.” Meta was laying off 11,000 people – 13% of its workforce. This month, we saw a more subdued Zuckerberg on display: “I wanna say upfront that I take full responsibility for this decision,” he told employees morosely. Zuckerberg was so all-in on the metaverse, he even rechristened his company Meta. “I want to share what we imagine is possible.” Transitioning almost seamlessly from his real self into a computer-generated avatar, Zuckerberg guided us through his vision for the virtual-reality future: playing poker in space with your buddies sharing cool stuff having work meetings and birthday parties with people on the other side of the world customising your avatar (the avatars had no legs, which was weird). “Today, we’re going to talk about the metaverse,” he enthused in a slick video presentation. Last October, Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg could barely wait to show the world what he was up to.
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