On October 28th, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the parent company Facebook was changing its name to “Meta,” a company that would make “the metaverse.” The public’s response was one of general confusion. What even is the metaverse? Viewers of the accompanying video could be forgiven for being underwhelmed. Why was Facebook rebranding over this? 

The term ‘metaverse’ derives from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which the metaverse is a virtual reality successor to the internet that allows users to escape a dystopian reality. Though few share their view, proponents claim that the metaverse will be like Ready Player One, an immersive virtual reality where one can work, play, and truly own things independent of platforms¹. In the intervening time since the announcement, corporate media have isolated a single key fact about the metaverse: at this point, we have no clue what it will look like. 

Why has Facebook invested this much energy and capital in the metaverse—to the point of changing its name to Meta—when the technology is so speculative? In the fourth quarter of 2021, Facebook’s average number of daily active users declined for the first time in its seventeen year history². Shocked investors dumped stock, leading to a twenty percent decrease in the company’s stock price. Meta, of course, has access to active user data internally before that data is released to shareholders in quarterly reports. Zuckerberg’s announcement came in the middle of the quarter, likely when it became clear internally that average user numbers would not recover. Meta has long known that Facebook’s user growth was declining and may have accelerated pre-existing plans for rebranding in an attempt to mitigate stock price losses. 

Glimpses into the metaverse offered to journalists underscore the project’s nascency. The Financial Times interviewed Nick Clegg, an ex-UK politician turned Facebook executive, in the metaverse in December 2021³. The first words Clegg said were, “Can we get the sneering and mockery out of the way?” Unfortunately for Clegg, Meta has invested too much to back out now. Starting a major project and then publicly abandoning it is a recipe to tank one’s own stock price, something they would like to avoid doing a second time. The other options available are either to attempt to build the metaverse or to quietly scrap the project and hope no one notices. Currently, the metaverse is little more than a videoconferencing software for out-of-touch elites like Clegg, but it promises to be something like a massive, immersive video game. If Meta does try to build this virtual world, they’re going to encounter a problem: building virtual worlds is hard. 

On November 14th, 2018, game studio Bethesda released “Fallout 76.” “76” was the first online iteration of Fallout, a series which began in the 1990s as an offline roleplaying game and evolved under Bethesda into a single-player first-person shooter. The release was not a success⁴. The game’s major problem was that it was buggy: the larger the virtual world, the more opportunities for things to go wrong. And the world of “76” was colossal. 

Bugs in “Fallout 76” created exploits, including the ability to steal from the inventory of other players; access to a virtual room containing copies of every item in the game; and unlimited in-game currency. As of writing, Bethesda developers are unable to find or remedy common exploits. 

Worryingly, the Metaverse is supposed to exist at a scale that can accommodate billions of users—what happens when there is an exploit? Meta cannot give a serious answer to this question, because the metaverse is not a technology proposal, it’s a grift. 

This is why the metaverse is vague—if you can’t understand the metaverse, you can’t criticize it. Silicon Valley investors are notorious for investing in speculative technologies that either fail spectacularly, like Theranos and WeWork, or bankrupt themselves in desperate obscurity. It’s surprising that Meta’s announcement didn’t encourage a spate of hedge fund investment. 

If Meta chooses to go through with building the metaverse, it will be rolled out piecemeal; major bugs risk expensive lawsuits. Competitors like Epic Games⁵, Google, and Microsoft, which have announced multibillion dollar metaverse plans, will simultaneously construct their own metaverses. Perhaps it was a mistake to have thought there would be just one metaverse. Instead, we may see a number of different platforms of varying quality and interoperability. The metaverse, promised as a successor to the current internet, is likely to replicate its structure, along with that structure’s problems. 

In the current platform ecosystem, platforms make money by commodifying personal data and selling it to third parties⁶. While metaverse companies may profit from in-app purchases, the metaverse will give companies unprecedented access to biometric data like heart rate and facial expressions. This raises significant privacy concerns, but it also raises questions about the metaverse’s universality. Facebook already encounters problems in European Union privacy regulations, and California may replicate those regulations. If the metaverse is invasive, it runs the risk of being unable to operate in these areas, which together are more than a fifth of the global economy. Because the value of the metaverse for an individual depends on the number of other users, excluding large markets poses a significant challenge to the technology’s potential for profit. 

It’s difficult, moreover, to see a workplace of doll-like avatars being competitive with Zoom in the videoconferencing market, and, given the lukewarm public reaction to Zuckerberg’s announcement, it’s unlikely to seriously compete with touching grass. If the metaverse succeeds, it will be a result of the antidemocratic control over our lives tech companies already possess, not any positive feature of the technology itself. 

It’s no small wonder that the technology sector has learned to mimic innovation in form but not content, creating announcements that appear to make sense while simultaneously lacking any substance that could be considered meaningful. The obscurantism of cryptocurrency, the stupidity of Teslas in tunnels, and now the utter vacuity of the metaverse. The comprehensive designers are perhaps our generation’s most adept nonsense poets. 

And as in uffish thought he stood, 

The metaverse, with eyes of flame, 

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, 

And burbled as it came! 

Unlike the Jabberwocky, Mark Zuckerberg’s poetry is neither whimsical nor enjoyable—it’s insidious. One comes away from it not chuckling, but confused and concerned that one’s workplace will be converted into a dollhouse for uncanny, emotionless avatars. “The metaverse” is a nonsense word. With luck, it will never mean anything. 

1 Cryptocurrency investors believe that integrating the Blockchain and ‘web3’ into the metaverse will allow users to own unique tokens representing digital items. This is in contrast to the current situation, where one owns an iPhone but licenses iOS from Apple, an arrangement in which the company holds all the cards and can unilaterally make changes to ‘your’ software. These investors seem to have overlooked the inconvenient fact that the metaverse is itself a platform, and while owning a token is nice, that ownership is moot if the token’s value derives from its relationship with a platform economy in which participation is at the pleasure of the platform. 

2 Facebook’s growth rate has been declining for the past seven quarters, but this was the first time it had lost users. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/ 

3 Legs are currently unsupported: https ://www.ft.com/content/913c0cc2-9498-4d25-b2e8-794e24702e0b 

4 Internet Historian documented the problems with the release rather extensively. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=kjyeCdd-dl8

5 Epic Games is the most interesting player in the metaverse industry. Fortnite is the extant product most similar to what the metaverse promises to be: The ability to watch a virtual concert, hang with friends, and a high degree of third-party product integration. 6 See ambivalently Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019) 7 cf. Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, reprinted in The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (New York: Random House, 1983), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky