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The Metaverse Is Bad

It is not a world in a headset but a fantasy of power.

In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.

And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other purveyors of private space travel imagine a celestial paradise where we can thrive as a “multiplanet species.” That’s the dream of films such as Interstellar and Wall-E. Now comes news that Mark Zuckerberg has embraced the premise of The Matrix, that we can plug ourselves into a big computer and persist as flesh husks while reality decays around us. According to a report this week from The Verge, the Facebook chief may soon rebrand his company to mark its change in focus from social media to “the metaverse.” [Update: He’s gone ahead and done it! One week after this piece was first published, Zuckerberg announced that the company will now be known as “Meta.”]

In a narrow sense, this phrase refers to internet-connected glasses. More broadly, though, it’s a fantasy of power and control.

Beyond science fiction, metaverse means almost nothing. Even within sci-fi, it doesn’t mean much. No article on this topic would be complete without a mention of the 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term. But that book offers scarce detail about the actual operation of the alternate-reality dreamworld it posits. A facility of computers in the desert runs the metaverse, and the novel’s characters hang out inside the simulation because their real lives are boring or difficult. No such entity exists today, of course, just as no real product even approximates the rough idea—drawn from Stephenson or William Gibson or Philip K. Dick—of having people jack into a virtual, parallel reality with goggles or brain implants. Ironically, these writers clearly meant to warn us off those dreams, rather than inspire them.

In the simplest explanation, the metaverse is just a sexy, aspirational name for some kind of virtual or augmented-reality play. Facebook owns a company called Oculus, which manufactures and sells VR computers and headsets. Oculus is also making a 3-D, virtual platform called Horizon—think Minecraft with avatars, but without the blocks. Facebook, Apple, and others have also invested heavily in augmented reality, a kind of computer graphics that uses goggles to overlay interactive elements onto a live view of the world. So far, the most viable applications of VR and AR can be found in medicine, architecture, and manufacturing, but dreams of its widespread consumer appeal persist. If those dreams become realized, you’ll probably end up buying crap and yelling at people through a head-mounted display, instead of through your smartphone. Sure, calling that a metaverse probably sounds better. Just like “the cloud” sounds better than, you know, a server farm where people and companies rent disk space.

It’s absurd but telling that the inspiration for the metaverse was meant as satire. Just as OZY Media misinterprets Shelley, so Zuck and crew misconstrue metaverse fiction. In Snow Crash, as in other cyberpunk stories (including the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow film Strange Days), the metaverse comes across as intrinsically dangerous. The book’s title refers to a digital drug for denizens of the metaverse, with harmful neurological effects that extend outside it.

That danger hasn’t survived the metaverse’s translation into contemporary technological fantasy. Instead, the concept appeals to tech magnates because it connects the rather prosaic reality of technologized consumer attention to a science-fictional dream of escape. You can see why Zuckerberg, plagued by months and years of criticism of his decidedly low-fidelity social networks and apps, might find an escape hatch appealing. The metaverse offers a way to leave behind worldly irritants and relocate to greener pastures. This is the rationale of a strip miner or a private-equity partner: Take what you can, move on, and don’t look back. No wonder fictional worlds with metaverses are always trashed.

The fantasy is bigger, though. CEOs in tech know that billions of people still live much of their life beyond computer screens. Those people buy automobiles and grow herb gardens. They copulate and blow autumn leaves. Real life still seeps through the seams of computers. The executives know that no company, however big, can capture all the world. But there is an alternative: If only the public could be persuaded to abandon atoms for bits, the material for the symbolic, then people would have to lease virtualized renditions of all the things that haven’t yet been pulled online. Slowly, eventually, the uncontrollable material world falls away, leaving in its stead only the pristine—but monetizable—virtual one.

The technical feasibility of such an outcome is slight, but don’t let that bother you. More important is the ambition it represents for tycoons who have already captured so much of the global population’s attention: Even as a hypothetical, a metaverse solves all the problems of physics, business, politics, and everything else. In the metaverse, every home can have a dishwasher. Soft goods such as clothing and art (and receipts for JPEGs) can be manufactured at no cost and exchanged for nothing, save the transaction fees charged by your metaverse provider. A metaverse also assumes complete interoperability. It offers a path toward total consolidation, where one entity sells you entertainment, social connection, trousers, antifreeze, and everything in between. If realized, the metaverse would become the ultimate company town, a megascale Amazon that rolls up raw materials, supply chains, manufacturing, distribution, and use and all its related discourse into one single service. It is the black hole of consumption.

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Intel wants to take you inside the metaverse

Among Silicon Valley’s hottest buzzwords, the metaverse reigns supreme. Coined by Neal Stephenson in the 1992 novel Snow Crash, the metaverse is a next-generation immersive internet experienced through augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR).

The concept of the metaverse has inspired the tech industry for decades. Long after the virtual world Second Life popped up in the mid-2000s, gaming companies like Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) and Roblox have started describing their worlds as an early version of the metaverse. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s parent company name to Meta signaling his intention to design the new immersive internet in its image.

Yet few chip companies have gotten in the game. They’re crucial to making the metaverse a reality. Relative to the enormous computing demand for fully immersive virtual worlds, today’s chip are underpowered. They’re also in short supply: supply chain woes mean the semiconductor industry is months behind on delivering enough chips for everything from video game consoles to cars.

So far, only one chip manufacturer, NVIDIA, has announced that it is is building a platform for metaverse. Called Omniverse, its chips are designed for “connecting 3D worlds into a shared virtual universe.”

Now Intel is entering the conversation. Intel will release a new series of graphics processors starting in the first quarter of 2022, which it announced in August 2021, and says will power the metaverse. Intel’s Raja Koduri, who leads Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said in an exclusive interview that the computing power of today’s chips will need to improve 1000-fold to power the metaverse.

Koduri spoke about the path to the metaverse, his vision for what it will look like, and how Intel wants to help build it ahead of his public remarks at the RealTime Conference on Dec. 13.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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The Metaverse Is A $1 Trillion Revenue Opportunity. Here’s How To Invest...

Quick: What do Mickey Mouse, the Gucci bee and Snoop Dogg have in common? Besides being animal-themed, all three are coming to a metaverse near you.

The metaverse, as I’ve explained before, is part of the next iteration of the internet some are calling Web 3.0—and it promises to upend everything as we know it. Within the next few years, we will all work, play, socialize and invest in this all-encompassing ecosystem, whether that means attending a professional conference at a virtual Four Seasons hotel, shopping for a new designer handbag for our digital avatar or swinging through the New York City skyline with Spider-Man.

First, a short primer on the history of the internet and where we believe it’s headed. The earliest days of the internet, known as Web 1.0, were characterized by static, one-way webpages—think Netscape and Yahoo. Users were little more than passive observers.

Next came Web 2.0, the period we’re currently in. Controlled by a disproportionately small number of companies (Facebook, YouTube, etc.), the internet of today is highly centralized despite users’ role as an active participant.

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Facebook who? Say hello to Meta, the company’s newest attempt to cover-up scandal

In October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be changing its name to Meta. In his Facebook Connect keynote live stream, he stated the word “meta” is derived from the Greek word meaning “beyond,” expressing Facebook’s interest in expanding. Additionally, the term “metaverse” is defined as an online virtual world, painting Facebook’s goal of strengthening its online community.

However, recent events suggest that Facebook’s attempt to forge a new identity for itself is not about its growth and future goals. Whistleblower Francis Haugen’s documents have spread through the internet like a wildfire, revealing a number of underlying issues. Nearly 17 news organizations have investigated the internal documents analyzing Facebook, appropriately titled “The Facebook Papers.” These papers contain tens of thousands of pages of information exposing Facebook and its many flaws.

Many are already aware of Facebook’s circulation of misinformation, hate speech and incitation of violence, but the document took it further by shedding light on Zuckerberg’s dismissing of the human trafficking taking place through Facebook. The document also cited Facebook’s continued initiative to attract teenage viewers despite the numerous negative mental health impacts Facebook has been known to have on youth.

It is no coincidence Facebook happened to change its name to Meta directly after the release of Haugen’s documents. It is a common tactic used by companies attempting to cover their previous mistakes and protect their reputation. Facebook chose their new name on a whim as a final effort to mask its plethora of disastrous policies.

The name switch has also faced heavy backlash from the Hebrew speaking community. The word “meta” is Hebrew for “dead,” leading to an explosion of both offended and amused messages from Hebrew speakers all over social media. “Facebook shouldn’t use a name that could potentially offend others… [it] carries a negative connotation, so it shouldn’t be used at all,” health teacher Barbara Contino said. Negative names may repel and insult potential users, only further destroying the social media’s brand.

The company is made a fool again as there was already a company named Meta, forcing Zuckerberg to pay $20 million to purchase the name. These mistakes Facebook made are outright mindless. Given its expansive database, Facebook could have easily checked their name for potential issues that could arise and prevented their embarrassment completely. Zuckerberg’s impulsive name change of an already well-known application is a last resort to cover up the innumerable scandals Facebook is involved in.

Though Facebook may be trying to play off their new name as a way to branch out into the metaverse, it is obvious that their stunt is merely an attempt to seize the spotlight from their never-ending scandals. The shiny new label will hardly last and if anything, the new name Meta reflects Facebook’s relevance. Truthfully, we have all known that it is dead for a long time.