“It is time for us to adopt a new company brand”
Come on, he’s gonna say it.
“Our company is now Meta.”
Okay Facebook just renamed itself as Meta.
So now you can really get closer to experiences like this:
“Just hanging out while you're sitting in your backyard, uh, waiting for your brisket
in your ribs to finish smoking.”
Okay.
This is Mark Zuckerberg's infamous 2016 livestream of him smoking meats.
But can you imagine getting to do this in an even more immersive experience?
“Right?
I got, I got ribs in there, so that's, uh, that's, that's pretty good”
Facebook is now Meta and Meta does now a metaverse.
So, what does that actually mean?
Well, augmented reality and virtual reality and coffee mugs.
Check it.
Uh, you know, metaverse stuff like that, but where did the metaverse come from?
This is the history of the metaverse from Meta all the way back to a groundbreaking
book and the video game that started it all.
And I mean, in 1985 ran into some of the challenges that are still around today.
“Do I look a little tired?
I actually...uh.”
Listen.
If you want somebody to stomp on Zuckerberg, I'm not the right person.
What if I told you I think the media’s antipathy toward Zuckerberg is an expression of professional
insecurity channeled into Luddite technophobia?
But whether Mark Zuckerberg wrote a hydrofoil into your heart or not, he did not invent
the metaverse.
Let's start with the etymology, the term itself.
We can pin it down to 1992’s Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
First meaningfully explained as: “He's in a computer generated universe, that his computer
is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his ear phones.
In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the metaverse.
Hiro spends a lot of time in the metaverse.”
Snow Crash was super influential for that word metaverse, but the idea itself is a bit
of a cyber punk mainstay.
Cyber Punk: think noir, plus computers, plus the word hacker used a lot of times.
There are some cyberpunk movies, including Ready Player One, which has obvious metaverse
connections.
“A whole virtual universe.”
In all these movies, they include lines like: “My name is Harddrive San Jose.
I'm a hacker who replaced his kidney with a megachip.
And my girlfriend, she's a toaster.”
Did I drive you away with that joke?
Do you wish that you were smoking some meats?
“Thanks for coming and hanging out with me in my backyard while I'm keeping me company,
while I'm finishing smoking these meats here.”
Cyber punk literary epics includes William Gibson's, legendary 1984 book Neuromancer,
which established a very metaverse-y cyberspace, and 1981’s True Names by Vernor Vinge, which
might be the first example of cyberspace.
Here's a real quote: “Ordinarily a prudent warlock used only limited bandwidth and so
was confined to a kind of linear personal perception.
If they grabbed a few hundred megahertz of comm space in a bigger share of random processors,
they can manipulate and search files in a way that would boggle Virginia the Femcop.”
But that book True Names is particularly important, because it was cited as inspiration for the
first real metaverse game.
“Hi there.
I'm Stephen.
Talking to you live from a popular nightclub in Habitat — a fantasy world made possible
by the miracle of telecommunications.”
Decades before the game Second Life that became the popular idea of a metaverse in the early
2000s, Habitat by Lucas Games was making it happen.
“Habitat will connect people from all over the country into a single imaginary cartoon
reality using a Commodore 64 computer, a modem, and a telephone.”
This was in 1985.
When you had to use your Commodore 64 to dial up a network over the telephone, but it worked,
people met from all over.
“Say, I know you're that guy Lamborghini from Detroit.
Aren't ya?
Oh,l the name’s Young Turk from Poughkeepsie.”
Other games soon followed, but Habitat set the precedent 36 years ago before shutting
down.
But the most interesting part and relevant part to Facebook Meta might be what they learned.
The creators behind Habitat wrote a post-mortem on the lessons they learned from running the
gate.
And honestly it has some lessons that could apply to Facebook Meta.
Even today.
First they reference all that cyberpunk stuff as inspiration, but then they get down to
the lessons.
“A multi-user environment is central to the idea of cyberspace.”
That's still true.
“Communications bandwidth is a scarce resource.”
Broadband makes the metaverse possible now over the internet, but latency in AR and VR
headsets is a modern analog to those connection problems.
“The implementation platforms should be relatively unimportant.”
And this is totally the approach to an interoperable multi-platform metaverse.
But after all these happy similarities, it gets complicated.
“Data communication standards are vital.”
Meta is going to have to learn how to make a metaverse inter-operable among different
companies and owners across the globe.
Yikes.
Then they get into the world-building habitats makers found, in the 80s, that users could
totally confound central planning and running the world was really hard.
Here's the quote: “Again and again we found that activities based on often unconscious
assumptions about player behavior had completely unexpected outcomes when they were not simply
outright failures.”
Even primitive Habitat had big debates, leading to a warning:
“You can't trust anyone.”
Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine assumes that Facebook's metaverse rebrand is in part an
effort to make it a more appealing place to work.
Quote: “the Facebook brand has achieved maximum saturation, and now we're starting
over with something cooler.”
Even if that's true, the first metaverse experiment suggests that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
will encounter a lot of the same problems that they have right now, distrust from the
media, users that they can't control, and thorny issues of ownership over public space.
That'll happen, whether it's on the Facebook app or in the Facebook metaverse.
The metaverse has a storied history from cyberpunk literature, to Habitat, to it's coming implementation
today.
But the lesson, the lesson, it's always the same: You can't trust anyone.
“Hi everyone.”
Okay.
That is it for this video.
If you haven't been here before, I do history and personal type videos on this channel.
This is a video where it's really weird to say that it fits in the history category.
We're talking 35 years.
So yeah, it kind of does.
Um, I'd love it if you subscribed to see more videos like this, or let me know in the comments,
if you like, think the metaverse will be a real thing or not.
I'm kind of 50/50 on it myself, to be honest.
Uh, but yeah, until then I will see you in the next one, uh, or somewhere in the cyberpunk
dystopia that is our present.
All right.
Tell then.
Bye.