Post by Morreion on Mar 20, 2023 12:34:03 GMT -5
Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse?
Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. (NY Magazine Intelligencer)
Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. (NY Magazine Intelligencer)
...The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their f*cking legs?
Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!
It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”
I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.
“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.
He has a point: The headset is decidedly antisocial. Once the Meta Quest is strapped on, it’s adios to the real world, so much so that the headset prompts you to demarcate a “play area” by spraying a virtual boundary line on the ground. This is to stop me from crashing into real-world furniture, walls, spouse, etc., when I’m in the middle of my VR adventures.
Henceforth, whenever I’m close to the edge of my boundary, the real world appears “through” the virtual one in a gritty, low-resolution black-and-white version of itself, like found footage in a ’90s horror movie. It’s hard not to suspect that this is how Meta wants you to think of analog reality.
Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!
It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”
I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.
“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.
He has a point: The headset is decidedly antisocial. Once the Meta Quest is strapped on, it’s adios to the real world, so much so that the headset prompts you to demarcate a “play area” by spraying a virtual boundary line on the ground. This is to stop me from crashing into real-world furniture, walls, spouse, etc., when I’m in the middle of my VR adventures.
Henceforth, whenever I’m close to the edge of my boundary, the real world appears “through” the virtual one in a gritty, low-resolution black-and-white version of itself, like found footage in a ’90s horror movie. It’s hard not to suspect that this is how Meta wants you to think of analog reality.
...Indeed, Facebook’s rebrand as Meta seems to signal Mark Zuckerberg’s conviction that reality as a whole is going to fall out of favor. The metaverse wasn’t his idea — the name comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash — but his company has reportedly spent some $36 billion developing it. In Zuckerberg’s vision, the metaverse will be nothing less than the internet’s next iteration, one for which he will control both the hardware (Facebook bought headset maker Oculus in 2014) and the software (Meta has been snapping up companies even tangentially related to VR).
Once we’re plugged in, Meta will have unparalleled access to users’ lives, even the parts the company is not now surveilling. Giving a presentation, meeting your buddies, sitting around watching TV — all of it will be coming through your headset. It’s a hypermonopoly, a metamonopoly. Zuckerberg doesn’t just want a lock on online experience; he’s planning to move all of experience online.
So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold — nowhere close to his goal of a billion users. On March 14, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was laying off around 10,000 workers, joining the 11,000 laid off four months earlier.
On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be lining up to join the misfits still populating it. Now that I’m away from my social network, though, I realize how much heavy lifting was being done by the brief, bantering, checking-in conversations I used to have with my friends and neighbors. So I’m determined to find the metaverse’s true believers, those left behind when the rest of fickle reality has moved on. They may not be able to lend me a spatula, but I’ve decided that, for now at least, these will be my people.
Once we’re plugged in, Meta will have unparalleled access to users’ lives, even the parts the company is not now surveilling. Giving a presentation, meeting your buddies, sitting around watching TV — all of it will be coming through your headset. It’s a hypermonopoly, a metamonopoly. Zuckerberg doesn’t just want a lock on online experience; he’s planning to move all of experience online.
So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold — nowhere close to his goal of a billion users. On March 14, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was laying off around 10,000 workers, joining the 11,000 laid off four months earlier.
On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be lining up to join the misfits still populating it. Now that I’m away from my social network, though, I realize how much heavy lifting was being done by the brief, bantering, checking-in conversations I used to have with my friends and neighbors. So I’m determined to find the metaverse’s true believers, those left behind when the rest of fickle reality has moved on. They may not be able to lend me a spatula, but I’ve decided that, for now at least, these will be my people.
...As I walk around some more, a strange sensation grips me. It’s … boredom. I’m bored! When was the last time I was truly bored? I don’t think I’ve felt like this since I got a smartphone. It’s actually kind of interesting, though mostly it’s just boring. A panel appears in front of me. Nutsacksandwich has been reported, it says, with a picture of Nutsacksandwich’s avatar. Do you want Nutsacksandwich to be ejected? I give the question some thought. I decide to let Nutsacksandwich stay: I like his energy.
I can’t stress how unlike a party house the Party House is. It’s not just the amateurish, low-tech design; it’s not just the sparse attendance and desultory interactions. It’s the total absence of mood. It reminds me of when I’d try to get together with friends over Zoom during lockdown — everyone’s face appearing in a box in the grid like contestants in some bleak, prizeless game show, the total absence of physicality making us feel more distant from one another than ever.
A man in a beanie approaches me. His username is Impala-expert. I ask him whether it’s Impala the car or impala the animal. This seems to confuse him.
“Lotta sweet-looking ladies here tonight,” he says as a woman, or at least an avatar of a woman, goes by in a crop top.
I ask how long he’s been using the Quest and what activities he’d recommend.
He thinks about it. “There’s ping-pong,” he says. “And there’s porn.”
“Porn?”
“Yeah, virtual porn. You tried it yet?”
I haven’t.
“Yeah, that’s some good stuff,” Impalaexpert says.
I ask if he’s concerned at all about being tracked. With Zuckerberg, you can’t rule out the possibility that the whole metaverse is some sort of Matrix-style life-force drain. (A Meta spokesperson assured New York that “privacy is an integral part of our product design, and we offer privacy controls that put people in charge of their experience.”)
“People always hating on Zuck,” Impalaexpert says.
“That doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” I say.
I can’t stress how unlike a party house the Party House is. It’s not just the amateurish, low-tech design; it’s not just the sparse attendance and desultory interactions. It’s the total absence of mood. It reminds me of when I’d try to get together with friends over Zoom during lockdown — everyone’s face appearing in a box in the grid like contestants in some bleak, prizeless game show, the total absence of physicality making us feel more distant from one another than ever.
A man in a beanie approaches me. His username is Impala-expert. I ask him whether it’s Impala the car or impala the animal. This seems to confuse him.
“Lotta sweet-looking ladies here tonight,” he says as a woman, or at least an avatar of a woman, goes by in a crop top.
I ask how long he’s been using the Quest and what activities he’d recommend.
He thinks about it. “There’s ping-pong,” he says. “And there’s porn.”
“Porn?”
“Yeah, virtual porn. You tried it yet?”
I haven’t.
“Yeah, that’s some good stuff,” Impalaexpert says.
I ask if he’s concerned at all about being tracked. With Zuckerberg, you can’t rule out the possibility that the whole metaverse is some sort of Matrix-style life-force drain. (A Meta spokesperson assured New York that “privacy is an integral part of our product design, and we offer privacy controls that put people in charge of their experience.”)
“People always hating on Zuck,” Impalaexpert says.
“That doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” I say.
...After a certain number of hours in Zuckerberg’s personal universe, you find yourself asking questions like “Does he think this is good?” Looking through my notes, I keep coming across words like diminished, depleted, wan, bleak. The beta-ness of it all is mystifying. If I were Zuckerberg and I’d spent $36 billion building a metaverse, I’d make sure when I launched it there was something to do. Why would he go to all the trouble of building a virtual world, then leave it to the users to make their own fun, as if they were at a holiday camp in the ’80s?
This strange sense of anomie hasn’t escaped the people I meet in the metaverse. “We from all around the world and we all in one place and look at us, we bored, we don’t know what to do,” a user named Cprlrpg says from the Soapstone stage, though it must be conceded that he drops this truth bomb directly after his poorly received three-minute comedy set, which revolved around video games he played as a child. (“Flight Simulator, that was another good one.”)
This strange sense of anomie hasn’t escaped the people I meet in the metaverse. “We from all around the world and we all in one place and look at us, we bored, we don’t know what to do,” a user named Cprlrpg says from the Soapstone stage, though it must be conceded that he drops this truth bomb directly after his poorly received three-minute comedy set, which revolved around video games he played as a child. (“Flight Simulator, that was another good one.”)
