Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans to shift Facebook into a "metaverse" company, bringing alive a vision of an online world populated by avatars and accessible by Facebook's Oculus VR technology. The idea of a "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash and various proto-metaverses have emerged over the years: arguably Second Life, Minecraft and even immersive games like Skyrim, GTA V or shared MMPORG environments reach towards an idea of a persistent online world that we not only visit, but live in.
Zuckerberg's vision is a little different because it aims to be a place we work, play and meet with avatars representing our real selves, and given that we now find ourselves working remotely more and more, there is a something seductive about the idea that we might be able to gather together virtually in an online environment that is sufficiently immersive that we can be as productive in such a space as we might have been in person.
At it's heart though, Facebook is an advertising company, so although Zuckerberg leads with a work/live/play utopia not subject to the limitations of geography, there's no question that this utopia is about marketing and advertising. The Social Dilemma illustrates how we companies like Facebook have developed algorithms to capture attention, to sow that attention with the messages and solicitations of advertisers, and to absolutely maximize the amount of marketing messages that can effectively be delivered to its users without turning them off completely.
The metaverse is an extension of that idea - maximizing the amount of time that a user spends on Facebook's properties in order to market to that user. Imagine a platform, in which you live and play for most of your day, where every surface, every item you interact with, was rendered by Facebook technology and therefore able to support marketing messages ad infinitum. A Facebook owned-metaverse a la The Matrix would give Facebook the opportunity to own digital marketing channels far in advance of anything its competitors could offer - giving Christof-like powers to the curated Truman Show experience of its users.
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