An interview with Mark Zuckerberg about the Metaverse
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Maybe it's just the years of science fiction talking but I can't help but see this in a dystopian light. I don't want my social world to be created by"Meta". I want to use social media, and the internet more generally, as tools which enrich my life but don't dominate it. Directly opposite to how Zuckerberg pitches "Meta" in this interview.
My experience of the pandemic has taught me the primacy of physical, human, interaction. A VR headset isn't going to bridge that digital void. What's more, the internet is already addictive enough, already threatening those interactions I value. I recently read the short story "The machine stops" by E.M. Forster (available at http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html ), and I can't help but feel Facebook is building towards the dystopia it presents.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the vast scope of these ambitions. I'm lucky enough to be informed and privileged enough I can choose to ditch these companies but I worry for the many who can't.
I wish you were right, but looking at Internet traffic on mobile devices [1]:
* 24% is YouTube.
* 10% is Facebook.
* 8% is TikTok.
* 8% is Instragram.
* 7% is Facebook video.
* 6% is Instagram.
* 5% is Google.
* 2% is Netflix.
Note that this is mobile data, because it was the first dataset I was able to find easily.
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-most-used-apps-b...
The reality is that globally, mobile now surpasses desktop in terms of times spent: https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d....
And it's about 50/50 for the U.S.
100% of traffic goes to a space owned by someone. The fact that big companies can dominate profits, and still companies like TikTok can rise from no where is crazy.
Just because the internet is not decentralized IRC channels hosted in university dark corner offices doesn't mean that its a true walled garden in the typical sense.
I slack my coworkers, and imessaage my family, and facetime my partner, and discord my gamer friends, and use tiktok for entertainment, and use whatapp for my international friends.
Last week, i used teams for my coworkers and zoom for my family, and signal for my friends and ... and ... and ...
Apps come and go. TikTok is replacing youtube and Disney+ is replacing netflix and signal is (hopefully!) replacing something... While i wish that we actually owned our own servers, knowing that i can quickly change accounts and apps and "gardens" makes it better.
That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.
We're in a dangerous place where Apple is hardware locked to a single distribution channel (and its rules) & Android is heavy pushed towards a single distribution channel (and its rules).
It only takes a single round of bad legislation to get from there to "Your phone only runs what we say it can run."
Ironically, China has more diversity in app stores than everywhere else.
Are they all the same 3 apps the government approves of?
> That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.
I completely agree and hope apple gets pushed around until it opens up the hardware. I don't care (from a practical, non philosophical level) about APIs or federation or interoperable clients as long as i can just try something new. I have yet to find a single person who can talk with me over Matrix but a dozen who prefer signal.
Or any of the other user count indices.
Whew! $10 billion in funding and you call that "from no where".
What % of the 20-year old's day goes to YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix?
You can add more traffic to the internet but you can't add more hours to your day.
Once our attention spans are saturated, that's when things get really hard.
If I’m connecting to someone via that app it’s over a Wireguard tunnel. On desktop, let me drag files over, append to a synced message thread (stored in SQLite or something simple)
Open source design focused on beating desktop operating systems when it’s strength was always networking.
All the attention is on building tech for corporations to satisfy political memes. It doesn’t have to be if software people built different software
You can't even control the location, sequence, or time spent looking at different image content. They will know exactly what you are interested in, how much, and when that changes. They will know what distracts you most, and optimize it (for their customers the advertisers).
In the end I expect these to be given to high value (elite college students) consumers for free so that they can be monetized. Prepare to explain to your future wife why you always have goats in silk stockings on your feed!
Oh, also... compelling Metaverse content?! It will be user created. TikTok to the rescue!
It's like someone watched Wall-E and thought it looked like a utopia. I've been in tech for over 20 years and, at least in my mind, it really "peaked" in the late mid-late 2000s, before everyone became a phone addict. At that point most of the tech giants still believed in their own benevolence, instead of today where it's hard to even convince their own workers of their benevolence despite dumping boatloads of cash on them.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but every year I have a stronger desire to just chuck my phone and laptop out the window and go full Walden Pond.
If you are in the middle of a massive scandals (multiple massive scandals) about major issues like privacy, enabling genocide in certain countries, etc, if you really, really cared, your first step would be to stop what you are doing and fix things.
Instead of taking accountability, Zuck like always has some dumbass excuse about being "humbled". But humble people show they are humble.
If HN gets confused about why there is so much rage at people like Zuck, it's because we can actively see our lives getting worse because at 19 brolord here figured out how to get college kids to sign up for website. I mean, great idea, but I feel like that might, just might affect how you see the rest of the world and nobody in society agreed to this.
He needs to show that he's responsible, that he's grown up. Instead he's doing the next big thing and the next big thing is what any teenager that watched a recent Spielberg money would come up with. If Zuck and some of these tech savants want to impress people maybe they need to finish college so they don't still sound like high schoolers in their 30s.
We should demand more. We're tired of people like Sam and Graham and Zuck complaining about how hard it is when people criticize their work. They want to have insane wealth and have people kiss their ass.
Is it FB’s fault that they fell for it? No. Is it FB’s fault for recommending them very obvious QAnon groups? Yes. Especially since Facebook was aware of the misinformation on its platform: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-documents-misinformati...
Or you can ask the victims of the genocide enabled by Facebook: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I’m glad it seemingly hasn’t effected you, but doesn’t mean others don’t feel that impact.
though, when is that ever not true...
I guess it's not surprising that one of Zuck's heroes growing up was the first Emperor of Rome. It's true, look that up. It says a lot about the guy. I mean who saw Rome and thought I want to be that murdering little jerk?
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
Are you Jonanin from the old Xgen forums? If so, random thanks for giving this random kid free web hosting back in the day! If you happen to be around the SF bay area, it'd be my pleasure to buy you a drink sometime. contact info in profile.
That does not reflect any reality. If there was no need to care for regulation, guess what - facebook would not be under fire. Google wouldn’t be regulated left and right. There would be no GDPR, there would be no cookie consent.
I have nearly stopped paying attention after that sentence. Frankly, maybe that point is placed strategically in the overall writing because the most interesting question comes later:
> Is there a worry that Facebook is a liability for this future you want to build?
> MZ: Are you talking about the app Facebook?
> You can interpret that any way you want to.
Well, that’s a disappointing frame to the original question.
And how long has it taken for them to come under any sort of real fire? 15 years? Compare that to any company that creates a physical product. They’re highly regulated from day 1.
It is like aerospace or automotive. There were barely any regulations in 1950s…
Google is barely regulated. Especially in america.
> There would be no GDPR, there would be no cookie consent.
I wish! those cookie consent prompts are annoying.
Having the loophole whose exploitation is your business model get ever-so-slightly tightened is distinctly different than having lawmakers show up 10 years late to the realization that your business model has the potential to exacerbate societally self-destructive behavior (and I'm registering my bet now that neither Meta nor Alphabet will face any meaningful regulation).
Re Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google. The whole switch to Alphabet isa direct result of anti-trust and the risk of forced split. Safe harbor and GDPR are direct effects of regulation. The fact that Google is sending me emails with info about third parties they share my data with is a direct effect of regulation. Google News was on the news pretty often over the years.
Reasonably, digital business can’t anymore be done without worrying about regulation.
Regardless of what non-us people want, the US is not the outlier - its the center - It is uniquely the source of most tech companies. Almost all of the major tech companies are american, or move to america. Everything is created in america and shared with the rest of the world by nature of their being no borders online.
Or I guess here's the reality of it: Zuckerberg, I can only assume intentionally, has seemed to master the art of slipping his way out of tough questions non-stop. He lies to governments, he lies to users, he lies to advertisers, he lies to tech journalists; all behind the vail of a vague notion of where Facebook's perceived* value is. I have never, ever seen him get pinned down - this is not a compliment, he deserves to face real and tough criticism (regulation too), but I can only guess that every audience that's questioned him exists on a scale of ignorant to apathetic (on the apathetic side of the scale, see for instance how Ben ends this interview with a quip on touching base in 10 years; Ben's no dummy, he probably just grew exhausted from Zuckerberg's non-stop slippery, indirect answers. Zuckerberg stuck to his ,,human" script.).
* I stopped participating in social media years ago and my quality of life has skyrocketed (I'm here on HN to talk with others in my industry, so I view this as work-related). No one in their right mind can look at their 10-year vision of a metaverse and truly believe that Facebook will be the herald of this new economy.
There's essentially no such thing as a CEO that is truthful, but serious question - what are you referring to specifically here, do you have any proof of these claims?
Lying to governments (Congress at least) is, typically, a criminal offense. Lying to users and advertisers would result in loss of revenue. Lying to journalists will get you exposed by said journalists upon discovery of the lies.
In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles. When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
The reason why social-media is so popular is because it's basically a way to highlight reality and engage with it.
I honestly don't see the metaverse taking off. Facebook should've went in the other direction IMHO.
The pandemic has shown very clearly that people want to engage with one another in reality, not on the internet.
Ironically, the creator of the technology in that show was a lot like Zuckerberg. He naively believed he was creating some transformative device to make people better but then they only wanted to use it for sex, violence, and escapism. And his daughter ends up becoming a terrorist radicalized by religious extremists after being appalled by the no ethics nihilism of her dad's world, whose digital avatar gains its own sentience and goes on to become the first Cylon, whose followers and descendents eventually end human civilization.
I wonder what will eventually become of Zuckerberg's daughters, what they'll think of him when they grow up.
The future is now. Welcome to VRChat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s
VRChat is full of escapism, alchohol abuse, underage users, and explicit erotic roleplay. The latter typically involves nude avatars with full-body tracking using HTC Vive trackers. By the way, this game is free without age restrictions on Oculus Quest, a product which itself has no parental controls. VRChat has no system for filtering or proactively tagging NSFW content, so even users who opt-out of the private adult worlds will probably still see nudity and more in public worlds. Also, vulnerabilities in the official client (mostly in the Unity rendering pipeline and Photon RPC stack) means users of modded clients can crash others' PC or Quest from inside the game. "Crashers", as they're known to all longtime users, have been a problem for years with no solution in sight. In earlier versions of VRChat, users could attach arbitrary C# scripts to their custom uploaded worlds or avatars. At least one arbitrary remote execution vulnerability has been discovered and responsibly disclosed to VRChat:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-c...
The VRChat staff ostensibly review moderation requests for issues like hate speech or nudity in public lobbies, but each video clip I've included (as the report guidelines strongly recommend) in requests I've filed has 0 views per my video upload dashboard. I keep seeing many of the same perpetrators again and again in public worlds. Again, there are no age checks, even good-faith "enter your birthdate" dialogs, and this platform is full of suggestive and explicit NSFW content. Communication is mainly via voice chat, so children are highly visible to adult users who would abuse them, who sadly are also present on the platform. Unsupervised kids are all over the place in this game. VRChat moderation staff do not have any in-game presence.
Despite these issues, VRChat continues to grow due to the total creative freedom it offers for user-uploaded content, its popularity among content creators on YouTube e.g. Jameskii, HeyImBee, SwaggerSouls, and the fact that it's a free game on Quest. It recently topped 50,000 concurrent active users.
Advanced VRChat users have modded support for teledildonics, as one streamer describes in this safe-for-work YouTube clip:
Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare.
VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.
I mean, the trajectory of the world isn't great right now...
I could easily imagine a VR "game" in the near future that is just "walk around a virtual zoo that has leopards, rhinos, orangutans, gorillas and giraffes" because the real world no longer has them.
> When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
This is a good observation, but it's important to remember that quality of real world life is very fucking far from uniformly distributed now. There are already many people across the world whose personal life is in shambles enough that they spend every free moment escaping it in media consumption and video games.
Sure, if you have a good life, the metaverse pales in comparison. But what if you're stuck in a shithole town with no jobs and no prospects? At some point, frame rate and vertex count becomes less of an issue than "not watching yet another friend get addicted to opioids".
Maybe that's the real end-stage-capitalism opportunity for a soulless corporation: Everyone working on the metaverse is so focused on making it a primo experience that appeals to people already living well. Instead, maybe the audience to target is people whose real life already sucks. Sell virtual water in the desert, not the oasis.
Heck, it would just a one letter change for Facebook to go from Meta to Meth.
Things like a pandemic that forces people to be home. Rampant global warming that makes it hard to be outside comfortably.
Maybe small apartments in urban areas where its just too expensive to have a real home because zoning doesn't allow new apartments to be built fast enough...
lots of things come to mind.
Gen Z have also grown up in this reverse Truman Show dystopia where everyone has their own TV show (Youtube, Snap, Tiktok) that allows them to edit out the blemishes and embarassments of real life to produce a nicely manicured image to 'build their brand' on.
That might be the saddest thing I've ever read, and perhaps the first time I've ever felt sympathy towards Mark Zuckerberg.
It is hard for me to take what Zuck said on its face value any more. Every F8, Facebook announced new things that was going to work for the next ten years, and mostly nothing happened.
Every year since 1990s, Microsoft was talking about new paradigms of computing, in the living room, smart devices, voice controls. Things shipped, and fell on the side ways.
Products are built one after another. They are not willed into existence through a vision announced to the world beforehand.
We may as well just hold a World's Fair and let these mega-corps to host "Metaverses of Tomorrow". At least it is going to be fun to visit.
Now he's decided to make it even more of a bet. To me, it seems painfully clear that until the tech gets to a point where people don't need low res and heavy VR googles it will stay a niche.
Maybe it happens, eventually, I guess it will. But the future is rarely laid by the first movers. It's cemented by the first correct to market.
Expertly executed, infotainment media ate it up, 10/10, would be distracted again...
Seems to me they could've handeled it a bit better then :)
Are you implying that Facebook wasn't informed, asked to verify, or asked to comment on the publication of it's internal documents months ago?
* But sure, let's start with to things. Right here in the thread, people who have acquaintances working for the original meta ulc under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and them claiming they knew something is happening for months.
* The meta trademark transfer months ago
Also not sure why you think WSJ would contact them months before about/with a whistleblower. But I'm sure WSJ stated that somewhere then, right?
It was also pretty likely that this would be announced during Facebook Connect (former Oculus Connect), which always was around this time the last couple of years.
Was it still a welcome coincidence and convenient? Sure. And did they use it for that? Of course, too. Who wouldn't.
So for example, a BS narrative that worked was Zuckerberg claiming a week? before that he wasn't sure about the new name yet and that it wasn't set in stone yet. That was indeed eaten up by some media.
More if you're interested: https://stratechery.com/about/
Goes to show you can still launch a successful blog with a name that no one can pronounce or understand.
Even tho Mark believe he's doing the right thing here, to me this metaverse thing is evil.
You say the metaverse is evil but where do you draw the line? If you fill your waking hours pursuing other forms of fiction, is that any better?