Zuck’s Metaverse Play is Bold, but Not Visionary.

Facebook, whether by carefully following the cultural zeitgeist or in a relentless battle to find more ad inventory have decided to become a Metaverse company, not only in PR but in name and vision.

Meta will apparently be rallying talented tech troops by the 10’s of thousands to the cause, looking to build a digital environment in which you can not only engage with content but actually act & be ‘within’ the content.

Sounds ambitious, huh?

With a partnership with Coinbase announced, NFT integration on the horizon, re-brand completed and a bold new direction set, are we seeing Facebook’s strategic direction change based on the trends in gaming, crypto and AR/VR… or are we witnessing the most cynical move that a tech company have ever made towards centralising decentralised innovation?

The answer is probably both. Let’s find out why the move is forthright and bold, but not exactly visionary.

WHAT IS THE METAVERSE?

In simple terms, the metaverse is an internet enabled, connected digital environment that you can engage with in parallel to your everyday physical life. A world, so to speak, where you might meet a community… work, play, shop or explore.

Now most people immediately think of ‘The Matrix’ when they hear this, but in reality it is less adrenaline charged and more about moving from the 10 face rectangles from a zoom call into a VR boardroom, walking around a digital art gallery and playing games with your friends.

WHY IS THE METAVERSE IMPORTANT?

We are becoming a digital-first species. Not only has the pandemic moved our shopping habits online (at the visible detriment to most high streets), but now our work, our leisure time and our social lives have moved onto our sensor-rich, internet-enabled devices.

The advent of 5G could be the catalyst that takes computing power heavy experiences that would have once simply had to be tethered into the cable-free realm, and with that decoupling, comes an opportunity for lighter, quicker, better hardware with more innovative and seamless software delivering inspiring experiences.

The metaverse moves us from click, tap, swipe, voice command…into a digital environment within which we have agency (albeit as an avatar).

WHY THE METAVERSE FOR FACEBOOK?

Well, it could be due to the reputational damage that the little blue app has incurred over the last 5–10 years. Going from social network of choice to boomer-confusing, election-rigging demon of the ad revenue internet business model.

Or it could be, that as Apple doubles down on hardware and privacy, and as Google start to develop their own chips and distribute AI locally onto our devices… then Facebook needs a new purpose. They have been stealing features to keep Instagram relevant for a long time, but to stay relevant long term, they need somewhere new in which they can deploy the huge knowledge graph that they have accumulated.

Enter the metaverse.

To have a digital world in which you can engage outside of your ‘real life’ doesn’t mean you won’t still fall prey to similar wants and needs.

Facebook/Meta know this and think the emerging digital economy enabled by the metaverse is a really good place to put your chips.

As proven by in-game purchases, wearable NFT fashion, PFP avatars etc. regardless of the fact that you are ‘playing’ within a digital world, people still want to demonstrate sign value. Fortnite alone has already sold well over $1 billion of digital items, which pricks up the ears of any large corporation whose reach has got so large that their opportunities to grow shareholder value may be restricted to mergers and acquisitions rather than organic growth.

So think about what happens when immersive gaming meets the world of digital finance head-on… And you can see why Facebook have been gleefully rubbing their hands.

You have to have been living under a rock to not have heard about crypto-currencies, smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs and decentralised governance over the last 5 years. And within this decentralised, hive mind of innovation, 20 years worth of disruption has occurred in 2.

If crypto twitter is right and we are still early in the adoption cycle for crypto, DeFi and the transformative use cases for smart contracts & NFTs, then guess what? As the Metaverse grows, it will need to be established alongside an economic model and an internet-native set of currencies, value streams and disruptive financial methodologies.

You just know that the business strategists around Zuck know the crypto world intimately and have needled the numbers to understand the size of the prize within the metaverse… and guess what, it’s considerable.

IS META A CYNICAL PLOY TO CENTRALISE POWER?

In the traditional markets information asymmetry is key. Centralisation is the driver of shareholder value.

The problem (in some people’s eyes) with Facebook’s move into the Metaverse (and crypto) is that they are taking a decentralised vision of what a brave new world might look like, and using their purchasing power to try and jump the gun with their ‘internet everywhere’, ‘browser of the third world’ type strategy to centralise it before the decentralised versions see the network effect hit their adoption.

This is a common move in Facebook’s history. In that, they have very irregularly been first, so they have bought fast and followed faster… and applied their scale to nullify competitive advantages & threat.

The next logical question that you should ask yourself, if any of this metaverse chat tickles you fancy, is…

Would you rather engage with a DAO metaverse, where you own your own data, you understand the remit of the platform, you hold a governance token and have a say in where it goes next… or would you rather submit yourself to the surveillance and expansion of the (in my opinion) broken revenue model of the internet?

IN CONCLUSION.

If someone had asked me 6 months ago, I would have said that DIEM was dead in the water and Facebook’s crypto dream was over.

If that same person asked me what I thought Facebook’s big next move would be, I would have said hardware….following along the lines of Apple and Google, so there is no doubt that this is a huge and bold step for Meta.

However, it is important to reflect on the priorities of big tech with a healthy distrust, as they have shown themselves many times to be more interested in profit rather than people.

And with that healthy distrust filter’s opacity up nice and high, you can see that the business strategy is looking to follow the money… and that current trail of dollars leads Meta back to gaming and cryptocurrencies.

More broadly, I wrote this article to point out that Metaverse’s big (https://decentraland.org/) and small (https://chain.art/ — a hybrid real world/metaverse art installation) have been (and continue to be) developed without the glare of omni-present, silicon valley, tech oligarchy and are being developed with creative, community-oriented visions of the future.

These metaverse projects serve as a really useful introduction to a world which is going to become mainstream sooner than we all thought, so check in with yourself and ask the question: Would you rather your internet adjacent second life was governed by a bunch of merry pranksters or by Zuck and his silicon valley cronies?

I guess we’ll soon find out.