When Zuckerberg first unveiled his plans for the metaverse in October last year, he had a pretty specific goal in mind that Meta would go beyond the social media experience of today and incorporate VR and AR into its current apps and services. He also mentioned that the new tech was expected to reach a billion people within the next decades.
It is indeed an ambition that would fundamentally change the direction of the company. But is Meta empowering the true metaverse that people are expecting?
People have been dreaming of something like the metaverse for years. If you take a look at the science fiction novels and movies over a long period of time, where virtual reality is normally used to provide people with chances to escape from the reality. Except for this, the recent pandemic has also exponentially increased the need for this technology - countless companies are rethinking their business plans to survive the slump as experts suggest that we'll probably have to encounter more occurrences of similar viruses in the near future. No wonder, the metaverse has the potential to be the biggest business in coming years because it will enable people to immediately transport themselves to another place or even time in virtual space. How incredible!
However, a true metaverse should be much more than that. Enabling virtual travel and interaction is one significant feature, but more importantly, the metaverse should be a virtual world built upon the concept of decentralization. This feature also distinguishes the metaverse from the internet we are using nowadays, which is usually highly centralized under the control of internet tycoons. Just think of how much personal information netizens are sacrificing every day and how many restrictions developers are facing whenever they try to use the service - these are not only what we, as common users, struggling with, but also what internet giants like Meta are making profits from.
Decentralization is about creating a system where the community decides how value is created and exchanged. Unfortunately, companies like Meta don't really contribute to the community, because what they want to do is just collect data, sell advertisements, and create products to empower their own ecosystem, which doesn't always interest the most common users. In that sense, even though the company claimed to empower users to be with their friends, family, and colleagues in a world free from the constraints of the physical world, it will never empower the real metaverse. This is simply because the nature of the enterprise (which is profit maximization) will never allow it to do so.