With the rise of Facebook’s metaverse, fiction becomes more real than reality

In creative talk, “meta,” derived from the Greek word for “beyond,” refers to a work that knows it’s a work, a dialogue that knows it’s a dialogue, a play that knows it’s a play, a film about making a film. In literary spheres, such works compromise their own genre, metafiction.

In a way, meta is breaking the fourth wall, blurring the line between audience and characters. Here, we, the supposed audience or the users, are also the creator, all at once.

While our social lives have always been a stage performance—diaries apparently were meant to be shared during tea time back in the day, and likely, people embellished their entries to impress their friends—digital technology is making it all the more so, blurring the line between on and off stage.

With Facebook rebranding into Meta, one can’t help but associate it with all the tenets above.

In Ernest Cline’s debut novel Ready Player One, which was adapted into a movie in 2017, US citizens live in squalid conditions: trailer cars stacked upon each other, reaching skyscraper levels all as the majority of the population spends most days tuned into headsets.

Literally an opiate of the starving masses, the story’s virtual world called Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation (OASIS), has people living the lives they otherwise can’t afford, eating the food they want, even if they starve in real life, looking lean and fit, even if morbidly obese in real life, even going to school in the OASIS, naturally, some locations are blocked to student-users during class hours.

Was this 2011 novel predicting 2021?

Unsurprisingly, most of the story, set in 2045, takes place in the virtual world, in the “oasis,” but with real-world outcomes at stake. As players rush to bag a code that can change the OASIS’ script, the reward of a hunt organized by one of OASIS’s first creators, a shadowy company tracks and eliminates players down offline to ensure that it alone determines the future of OASIS.

While that may be a dark vision of a metaverse (as of press time, my version of Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word, but that might change very soon), the setting isn’t far from the world today.

The launch of the metaverse comes at an interesting time. In September 2021, Apple released an operating system update enhancing user privacy that further protected against advertisers from tracking user data without their consent. This caused a big blow to Facebook’s main revenue source.

In early October that same year, the Wall Street Journal released a series of exposés called “The Facebook Files” in article and podcast form. Each article and episode tackled a different issue surrounding the company’s internal policies and how these affected individual and social health, from causing psychological problems to privacy violations and disinformation.

Toward the month’s end, Facebook announced that it was rebranding into Meta to signal its focus on developing the so-called metaverse, a virtual world focused on interoperability where people can work, shop, and even study all while connecting with friends and family in virtual spaces.

Is it just a name change? What makes the metaverse different from the current social media ecosystem, which already incorporates work, learning, and shopping?

For one, there’s interoperability. Currently, one needs to open accounts across platforms to be able to use these. With one meta account, it’s hoped that users can easily access other sites and services. Also, there’s virtual and augmented reality technology (VR/AR).

It won’t be very different from exchanging diaries during tea time in Victorian England, though it’s possible that your house in the metaverse is Victorian-inspired, all while your avatar is dressed like a character from a Jane Austen novel, and with VR/AR, you and your guests may taste and get warmed by the tea, even if you’re physically based in, say, Kamuning, Quezon City.

And this latter inclusion is what further blurs the line between on and off stage. Virtual reality doesn’t just engage the eyes as a screen does, but all the other senses, making for a more immersive experience. Augmented reality, on the other hand, projects the virtual world onto the real world.

It seems the metaverse’s primary physical access point will be through a headset, in truth, more of an eye mask, though it’s also planned to be accessible through phones, tablets, and computers.

It won’t be very different then, from exchanging diaries during tea time in Victorian England, though it’s possible that your house in the metaverse is Victorian-inspired, all while your avatar is dressed like a character from a Jane Austen novel, and with VR/AR, you and your guests may taste and get warmed by the tea, even if you’re physically based in, say, Kamuning, Quezon City.

And that tea, those drapes, those teacups, and even the diary you’re using, you probably paid for them—virtual goods—with real money. But that’s okay, it’s a new way to flex and say, “I earned this.” No different from Tito Butch showing off his fancy analog sound system, whisky collection, and rare kicks.

So will the metaverse really be the wholesome space its proponents envision it to be?

In any space, there will always be bad actors. But what if the designers of the space itself are the bad actors inasmuch as they have a (largely unaddressed) history of mining and selling user data without consent, which has impacted everything from democracy to depression?

By all accounts, a growing societal awareness of Big Data, not so much a conspiracy theory anymore, could explain why the focus on the metaverse is on users buying and selling virtual goods as a form of prestige. Given tighter controls on data mining, this shift from making users the product to the consumers might be Facebook’s, er, Meta’s attempt to keep revenues flowing.

We’re two years away from Facebook’s anniversary, yet in barely two decades, the company has truly “disrupted” the world as we know it. Now it seems, owing to a growing awareness of the costs of keeping Facebook free (see also: selling our data), the world is disrupting the company.

As it stands, the real fiction is that Facebook has always been about connecting people … with each other and not to ads.