Zuckerberg’s pivot to the metaverse is a useful distraction from an unflattering press cycle, of course, but it signals a much longer-term strategy, as well.
According to the leaked files known as the Facebook Papers, Facebook has long been aware of the damage that its social networks cause, from the way Instagram intensifies teen-agers’ body-image problems to how Facebook accelerates disinformation and ideological extremism via its algorithmic News Feed. Zuckerberg’s optimistic tone, as he toured this fantasy world, stood in stark contrast to all that his company was going through in the real one. Users will be able to communicate and navigate “across different layers of reality,” he continued, watching a concert with a friend in virtual reality or collaborating with the hologram of a colleague across a desk. The metaverse, which Zuckerberg has previously touted in earnings calls, will be “an embodied Internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” he said, as he paced through a series of palatial interiors, ambiguously real or rendered. Last Thursday, the same day that Facebook’s parent company rebranded under the new name Meta, Mark Zuckerberg gave a meandering tour of the metaverse-the as-yet-hypothetical next phase of the Internet, a unified space that mingles digital and physical reality-in a video presentation for the Facebook Connect 2021 event.
