Except, of course, it can’t. Virtual reality has hovered on the cusp of success for decades and has never really managed to attract the masses. In an essay written for WIRED just before Facebook went Meta, writer and academic David Karpf writes outlined how the culture-shattering promise of VR had repeatedly failed to materialize despite major advances in hardware and software. “The technology is always as regards turn a corner, as regards to be more than just a gaming device, as regards to revolutionize fields such as architecture, defense and medicine. The future of work, entertainment, travel and society is always on the verge of a massive virtual upgrade,” he wrote, arguing that the problem boils down to the simple fact that “wielding a virtual sword gets tiresome pretty quickly.” .
Zuckerberg’s particular metaverse can barely provide the expected number of limbs, let alone the sense that those limbs are somewhere they aren’t, as they snuggle up with distant loved ones. Far from feeling “deeply present”, people currently traversing Horizon Worlds must do so while wearing a clunky headset that requires regular charging, meaning they not only transcend the “tiny window” of a screen, but that they are also physically attached to a charger.
Sure, it’s early days, and maybe there will be big innovations that will make it more likely to be physically present with other people in a virtual space 20 or 30 years from now, although even that seems unlikely. (Matrix pods, anyone?) But even if that happens, there’s a much bigger obstacle to overcome: whether people want this in the first place. Do we really want to plop down our bodies, ignore corporeal existence, and instead spend much of our wild and precious lives in a corporate-controlled simulacrum? Even the coolest virtual sword loses its shine.
Big Tech leaders, Zuckerberg in particular, have made a bold bet that they can take advantage of the metaverse. This does not make it something people automatically want. In particular, the folly of Meta’s quest is related to how broad her ambitions are. The most successful current metaverses are gaming platforms like roblox and epic games’ Fortnite. But Meta has no plans to be next roblox or Fortnite. It wants to gobble them up and then spew them into the corner of a much bigger world, one where people go to work as well as games, hang out, read, stream, scroll, and of course, buy stuff.
This more ambitious view of the metaverse – the fully-fledged parallel world – is misguided. It depends on this downright strange assumption that people long to move forward in a digitized facsimile of the real world, complete with real estate bubbles, art speculation, and Zoom meetings. This is an assumption that has ample evidence against the. It’s not that society is turning away from the internet – people really are spending an inordinate amount of time both online and playing video games – but there isn’t a big clamor for a new, more intense version. Particularly after the pandemic pushes a large number of urban professionals to an extremely remote online life, the cultural appetite is for in-person events, face-to-face conversations, and non-augmented reality.