On October 28th local time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the Facebook Connect conference that Facebook will be renamed "Meta", reflecting the social media company's ambition to enter the "metaverse" (metaverse).
Facebook's third-quarter sales and fourth-quarter forecasts fell short of analyst expectations, partly because Apple made new regulations on the iPhone user data that its apps can collect.
Zuckerberg realized that Facebook does not have the digital real estate base occupied by most users. Through the Metaverse, he expects the company to get the opportunity to become the next Android or iOS/iPhone, not to mention that it may also build a virtual product version of Amazon .
Written by article | Hu Yong Professor of the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University and member of the "50 Forum for Information Society"
Editor | Qi Qing
In June 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confided in an ambitious new move to employees. The world's largest social platform will have a far greater future than what it is currently doing, namely building an interconnected social application and supporting it with some hardware. Instead, Facebook will strive to achieve a maximum, directly from science fiction, game-like connection experience—a world called the Metaverse.
On July 22, Zuckerberg said in an interview with technology media The Verge: "In the next five years or so, in the next chapter of the company, we will effectively transition from a social media company in people's minds to a meta-universe company."
In the financial report conference call at the end of July, Zuckerberg spent a lot of time explaining what the meta-universe is. He said: "This is a virtual environment where you can be with people in digital space. You can think of it as an embodied Internet where you are, not just browsing. We believe that this will be the successor of the mobile Internet." Only three months later, Zuckerberg took a shocking step: Facebook took the prefix of the English word "meta" (meta, derived from Greek , meaning transcendence) and changed its name to Meta (full name: Meta Platforms Inc.). Zuckerberg spoke at the Facebook Connect conference on October 28 and said, "The meta-universe is the next frontier, and from now on, we will put the meta-universe first, not Facebook first." On the same day, Zuckerberg published an open letter from the founder, saying that the metaverse "will touch every product we create."
Zuckerberg said, "We now see our business as two different parts: one is our application series and the other is our work on the future platform." The Metaverse encompasses the above two major blocks: social experience and future technology. "All our products, including our applications, now have a new vision: to help bring the metaverse into life."
In addition to the group's name change, accordingly, Facebook stock code will also be changed to "MVRS" from December 1. Starting from the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta will be divided into two parts for financial report disclosure: one is the social application series including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsAppp, etc., and the other is Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), which covers AR/VR software and hardware and content services. Of course, the Oculus hardware department is indispensable. In other words, the sixth most valuable company in the world will become Meta, a meta-universe company in the future.
Zuckerberg opened the meta-universe zodiac
Zuckerberg's thoughts on the intergenerational evolution of the Internet are not starting today. In 2014, Facebook acquired VR headset company Oculus for $2 billion, and Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time that the social networking site was "preparing for tomorrow's platform."
From the perspective of business strategy, Zuckerberg is now "All in Metaverse" and it is a wise move.Because, if the metaverse becomes climate, Facebook will lose the most from it compared to any other company. Facebook’s most valuable assets are its social graph, its user data set, links between users, and the content they share. Assuming that in the future of a meta-universe, we all have identities in it, and anyone can open a virtual space, share photos of birthday parties, or show themselves through digital fashion, then such a virtual world socialization will become Facebook’s nightmare.
Metauniverse will fundamentally make social networks irrelevant. So Facebook has to act to draw a larger, more capable social map and represent a new computing platform and a new engagement platform.
Although the metaverse may replace the mobile Internet as the next computing platform, its basic development process probably has little in common with its predecessors. The Internet comes from projects from the University of Public Research and the U.S. government. This is partly because few in private enterprises understand the business potential of the Internet, and universities and governments did then form entities with computing talent, resources and ambitions to build the Internet. Now, when the metaverse opens, all these conditions change.
Private enterprises are not only fully aware of the potential of the metaverse, but also have the most positive belief in this future, not to mention the most cash, the best engineering talents and the greatest desire to conquer. Major tech companies don’t just want to get a piece of the metaverse, they also want to own and define it. Open source projects with nonprofit spirit will still play a big role—they will attract some of the most interesting creative talents in the metaverse—but there are only a few possible contenders in the crackdown that Facebook has opened. You will recognize each of them.
Of course, the war was burned from the mobile era. Meta has invested a lot of money in virtual and augmented reality , constantly upgrading hardware such as Oculus VR helmet, committed to developing AR glasses and wristband technology, and purchased a large number of VR game studios including BigBox VR. In September 2019, Facebook released the VR social platform Facebook Horizon and launched a public beta version in August 2020. Users can build environments and games in it and socialize with friends.
In October 2021, Facebook removed its own brand from the VR platform, gave it a new name, Horizon Worlds, focused its work on building tools based on VR, and set up a $10 million fund to encourage creators.
Obviously, Facebook believes that VR will become the entrance to the metaverse. The Oculus Quest 2, the new generation VR device it released in September 2020, has sold more than 4 million units, exceeding the total of Oculus VR headsets of all generations.
Although it is not worth mentioning compared to mobile phone shipments, Facebook's bet is that it can reduce its dependence on other hardware manufacturers as the next big computing platform converts. Going further, the widely used VR device will give Facebook the opportunity to issue orders, allowing it to bypass the privacy protocols of Apple and Google and the app store fees it charges.
Despite some efforts in establishing a smartphone operating system and deploying consumer hardware, Facebook is still a FAAMG company that is purely stuck in the application/service layer (the English abbreviation of the five major platform companies in Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoftml4). Neither Facebook's third-quarter sales nor the fourth-quarter forecast met analyst expectations, partly because Apple made new rules on iPhone user data that apps such as Facebook and Instagram can collect.
Facebook realizes that it does not have the digital real estate base occupied by most users. Through the Metaverse, it expects itself to have the opportunity to become the next Android or iOS/iPhone, not to mention that it may also build a virtual product version of Amazon.
From a hardware perspective, it is still far from the point of view of the metaverse.Zuckerberg estimates that it will take about ten years. By then, the new hardware will have higher resolution, stronger processing power, and better quality screens and lenses to provide users with crazy immersion.
Another important pillar is the economy spawned by the meta-universe. In the words of venture capitalist Matthew Ball, make the meta-universe a fully operational economy - individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and get rewards through an incredible series of "works" that will be recognized by others. For example, creators can sell real-world products, but they are more likely to sell consumer-level digital content, such as virtual offices and users, or digitally avatars of VR/AR fashion items, etc.
Facebook's meta-universe advantage is huge. It has more users than any other platform on the planet, more frequent daily use and richer content created every moment, as well as the second largest share of digital advertising, billions of dollars in cash, thousands of world-class engineers, and the firm belief of the founders who hold the majority of the voting rights.
Its assets for the meta-universe are also growing rapidly, and now it also includes patents on semiconductors and brain-computer interfaces . The disadvantage is that it has a very troublesome record of building a platform where third-party developers/enterprises can build sustainable businesses, acting as leaders of consortiums (such as Libra), and managing user data/trust.
So, Zuckerberg's bold plan and arrogance (why believe other tech people will follow him?) is trying to place Facebook, which now has 3 billion global users, at the forefront of an inevitable wave.
Human life in the metaverse
For many years, Facebook has described its mission as connecting people online. Zuckerberg believes that the metaverse is part of the company's natural development, allowing people to move freely between virtual reality, augmented reality, personal computers and traditional smartphones.
"You will cross these experiences on different devices - augmented reality glasses stay in the physical world, virtual reality is completely immersed in it, while phones and computers jump from existing platforms. It's not about spending more time on the screen; it's about making the time we've already spent better," Zuckerberg said in an open letter.
The promise of time reminds people of the guarantee that games will not be addicted. The metaverse can allow users who are tired of photo filters and video editing tools to embody completely new characters in different digital ways and show their creativity through incarnations. This will surely prompt young people to spend more time online.
To be honest, new Meta companies may have a hidden reason to change the old corporate image. As the social media market faces new pressures, a more tilt towards the metaverse can make the company look like it is diversifying its business. Young competitors, such as ByteDance's TikTok, have a fatal attraction to people under the age of 25, so Meta's new move can also be understood as finding ways to focus on attracting young adults again.
The meta-universe is not valuable almost secondary, because it is coming, if not already. Technology and video game companies, such as Epic Games, Roblox, Disney, Microsoft , and of course Facebook, are investing billions of dollars in these virtual worlds.
One can imagine that tech companies may decide to subsidize their own VR glasses and other devices—as they do with smart products like home smart speakers—in order to drive consumers into their world.If the metaverse now has a clear sense of early adopters (like focusing on the game user base), it may soon be “democratized” to provide incentives for less-than-rich users to spend time and attention in these environments.
Even if you can't afford a beautiful digital property or even a helmet to watch it, you will definitely have the opportunity to earn living expenses by performing virtual tasks, mining cryptocurrencies, handing over personal data, watching advertisements or minting NFT. These types of micro-labor, one of the frustrating innovations in the Internet economy, are too suitable for the meta-universe and its overheated forms of digital capitalism.
Metauniverse capitalism has other characteristics. Think about it, the success of global economy is mainly because openness, trade, and people, capital and data can flow from one ecosystem to another, which should also be the model of the metacosmic economy. People will need to move skins (incarnations), assets (such as NFTs) and currencies on different platforms, preferably without import tariffs or exchange rate .
users also need a way to view all their digital assets in one place. To manage all this, new financial services will be needed, such as metaverse wallets or locked storage facilities. How to move money and assets in the metaverse will be a huge headache before we can fully realize the benefits of blockchain.
A decentralized, automated and rights-confirmed blockchain model means that companies, developers and end users can rest assured that their virtual investments and the value of these investments will not be arbitrarily changed or disappeared overnight due to the whim of a certain CEO or a certain government. In the absence of a metacosmic government or other regulatory agencies, the blockchain technology will ensure that the transactions and identity of the metacosmic are secure and public.
In addition, NFT will allow users of the metaverse to have unique and customized items, just like in the real world, while cryptocurrencies provide a roadmap for the formation of the metaverse economy. We are counting on all these new financial instruments to increase the economic efficiency of the metaverse .
But who will create all this? Companies led by Facebook are building different versions of the technology they believe will constitute the future. This brings us an extremely important question: Will there be only one meta universe? And how to manage the meta-universe?
Zuckerberg admitted in an open letter: "The meta universe will not be created by a company. It will be built by creators and developers to create new experiences and digital projects that are interoperable and release a huge creative economy that exceeds today's platforms and their policies." We are very familiar with the rhetoric. In the face of the open Internet, the giants said the same. The ultimate development result is that their business models are based on forming scale and squeezing competitors, while saving their most powerful assets—user data—in a walled garden.
is inferred from the current version of the Internet. The subsequent development is likely to be that technology giants like Facebook define and colonize the metaverse, while traditional governance structures are difficult to keep up with the pace of technological change. There are a lot of ready-made questions: such as how virtual space is managed, how its content is controlled, and what impact its existence will have on our shared sense of reality. We are still worried about the two-dimensional version of social platforms; it may be even more difficult to deal with the three-dimensional version.
If we are a little more cynical, it might be better to say that the metaverse has allowed technology companies to avoid the negative burden related to the Internet, especially social media. Observers have found that as long as you can make the technology look fresh, novel and cool, you can escape regulation. At least, you can defend for a few years before the government catches up.
There is another very simple reason for the popularity of the meta-universe: it sounds more futuristic than the "Internet", which makes investors and media people excited. Of course, the tycoons who peddled this vision of the future themselves are even more excited. Create an alternative world in which everyone must use your currency and act according to your rules, while at the same time, they can't help but strive to promote themselves. This idea of "creating a world" really has a huge attraction to rich people.
I believe Mark Zuckerberg's passion for the metaverse stems from his desire to retreat into real space. A man who became the fifth richest man in the world before he was 40 may have more influence than anyone in history, but he is increasingly regarded as a threat. I believe he is likely to find this confusing and frustrating, and perhaps unfair. We should acknowledge his achievements. We should give him freedom to enter the metaverse.
Now it’s time for us to change our word to Facebook company Meta. How will it "beyond"? Xiao Zha, as the leader of the metaverse, where will he lead humans next? Is it a Matrix-style happy world with beef scented programs?
