Kyle Chayka writes:

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. 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. 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.

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. 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 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. Zuckerberg seems ready to leave all of his company’s pesky issues behind, like relics of an already distant and irrelevant history. He is focussed on a newer, better world, a world in which the insidious problems caused by Facebook are remedied with a simple solution: even more Facebook—sorry, Meta—in every aspect of our lives.

Tightly composed and robotically scripted, Zuckerberg’s video sounds more like a cultic prophecy than a product announcement. [Continue reading…]