That Mark Zuckerberg is not clean wheat is a proven matter: the reputational crisis of his technology empire is due to such serious issues as disrupting democratic processes, inciting hatred or causing depression to its users. The young Zuckerberg has prioritized his economic interests over democratic rights, has withheld information and made illegal use of what he had in his possession. His malpractices threaten his empire legally, economically and ethically. And although it is true that the law is avoiding it and that money still works in its favor, the truth is that the reputation crisis it is going through could be the beginning of its end. And as Zuckerberg knows, he has decided to remove a huge white rabbit from his digital top hat, to amaze us with his magic and get us to stop holding him accountable for his illicit past. The bunny in question is called Meta, which is short for metaverse and has two important characteristics. The first is that he has not yet been born and the second is that Zuckerberg will not be his father.
Meta is not a word that Zuckerberg invented but was used for the first time in the novel Snow crash by Neal Stephenson (1992) and today it is the term with which visionaries and experts of the digital world name the technology that will succeed the internet. In other words, metaverse is the construction of a virtual future that does not yet exist. Today, technology does not allow us to expand our world into a science fiction reality, no matter how much Zuckerberg has developed a campaign of marketing to sell once again what is not yours. First he profited from our data and now he intends to get a slice of everyone’s digital future. Because with this magic game, Zuckerberg has decided that the complex technological ecosystem that we will use in the future – the metaverse that many experts have been talking about for months – will bear the name of his company (Meta), it will integrate its users (1.8 billion per now) and will incorporate its rules by the way. Metaverse is the future, explain experts like Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games. Then Meta is and will be mine, responds Zuckerberg with his new infinity-shaped logo. However, he is lying. There are many things that we do not know about the virtual future, but we know for sure that Zuckerberg will not be its owner, just as Facebook does not own the internet, although it does not stop trying.
But what would a possible metaverse look like? Zuckerberg has presented it to us as a kind of virtual reality with a certain air of futuristic dystopia where our lives will take place in unreal environments, like a kind of video game where we will all buy cars and houses made of pixels and change our identity for a sophisticated avatar. However, a possible metaverse would not be a second division parallel reality – something that we already knew in 2007 with the game Second life– but a real extension of one’s life and identity. It seems complicated but the truth is that to understand metaverse you do not need to be a digital guru, or even have Oculus glasses: it is enough to be a post-pandemic worker and have a bit of imagination to apply its possibilities to the work environment, to focus on a possible example.
Thus, if a metaverse existed, we could have efficient virtual work spaces instead of exhausting Teams or Zoom sessions, companies could build virtual headquarters to access from anywhere in the world. We could attend a talk on the other side of the planet without taking a plane and maintaining a real-time and direct interaction with the different people that we were meeting. Because one of the keys to metaverse is that unlimited simultaneous user experiences can be carried out, something that is still impossible on the internet. Because we are not talking about a streaming massive but to be able to really go to virtual spaces, where we can interact without intermediaries with any of the thousands or millions of people who live there. We are not talking about a chat or a video, but about an immersive experience that takes place in real time and that never stops. That is why experts define it as a persistent virtual universe, which is precisely what differentiates it from a common video game and means that if you buy a venue to hold your company’s virtual meetings, it will be there every time you get hooked again or a company member wants to use it.
If this were the case, many of the companies we travel to in infinite traffic jams would build (and pay for) virtual spaces for meeting and production, and these new spaces would in turn modify the meaning and value of cities. Thus, with an efficiently built metaverse, the location would lose its current value when calculating the price of the house and it is possible that a much more efficient energy model would be consolidated. If there were a labor metaverse, the very idea of the State associated with the right to work would have to be reinvented and hundreds of professions and needs would appear completely delocalized. What is clear is that metaverse will not be a toy for gamers not a second division reality but an economic, social, political and hopefully ethical revolution as well. And although current technology does not yet allow to build it, the time has come to think about it and do it for everyone. We are talking about decades, not centuries. Metaverse is not there, but it is expected.
And if metaverse is going to be something more like a city than a social network, it is evident that its only owners will have to be its citizens. It is important to understand that we are not talking about a new economic or entertainment model but about coexistence. And to be effective it will require that its inhabitants have something like a unified virtual identity, exactly as it happens in any city. This would mean no longer having a million keys and passwords for the different ecommerces, social networks, email accounts and apps that we have downloaded on our mobile and unify in a single efficient and transversal identity to the entire new metaverse. Something like that Gmail and Instagram will identify us with the same password. This means that its construction could become really complex and that there will be many interests to reconcile along the way. Among them are the millions of users of social networks who want our identity to belong exclusively to us.
But, if not Zuckerberg, who will own metaverse? To outline an answer, it is enough to ask the same question about a reality that we all know better. Whose internet is it? Today we could say that its technological infrastructures are the result of the work and development of many (it is a public space with millions of altruistic donations in its development). That the rules must be everyone’s, that is, that there must be a legal and political order that exceeds the rules of the companies or companies with greater digital power, no matter how much this stings the technological giants. And that the contents must be owned by whoever creates or produces them, whether they are large companies or individuals. However, Zuckerberg continues to force us to sign that everything we upload to their networks is no longer ours. And that everything that is marketed (our data or content) belongs to him.
Today it does not take an expert to understand that a future technological leap, a possible metaverse, should be solidly built not only technologically, but also ethically, politically and legally. This is known to ordinary users thanks, among other things, to the grievances caused by Mark Zuckerberg and his illicit empire of sale of identities and content produced in his territory. Zuckerberg’s internet is not the one we want, that’s what the reputation crisis he’s going through says. And that is why he should not be the one to explain the metaverse that is to come. Meta cannot be yours because it will belong to everyone. And in the future Zuckerberg must not gain power but lose it, because that will make the world (real and virtual) better than it is today. And fortunately, it does not depend on their will but on ours.
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