Hedgehog Chat: What Does Mark Zuckerberg Want from the Metaverse?

[Music] What does Mark Zuckerberg want from the Metaverse? Silicon Valley is building out new, immersive, and virtual technologies that they hope will transform the way that we work and live together. But how will those experiences be governed? How will they be tracks or manipulated? And what does all of this mean for the future of democracy? [Music] Welcome to the Hedgehog Chat, a new podcast from the Hedgehog Review featuring conversations about cultural change in the modern world brought to you by the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture at the University of Virginia. I'm Kyle Edward Williams. And for today's Hedgehog Chat, I sit down with Maloy Owen, a writer and doctoral student in political science at Stanford University who was doing exciting work on political theory and technology. Welcome. Yeah, thank you, appreciate you having me on. So I just want to start off with a sort of basic kind of two-part question. Could you give us a simple definition about what people mean when they talk about the Metaverse? And then does the Metaverse exist? And if it exists right now, what does it consist of for consumers? Can you go buy it? Is it a piece of software? Yeah, so what's imagined when we talk about the Metaverse is an immersive virtual space in which you would do a lot of the things that you do on the internet now. So like you would have like work meetings in the way that you would do on Zoom or you would attend events or you would interact with your friends in the way that people do on Facebook or you might engage in like commercial transactions the way that people do on shopping websites and so on. But it's in like a three-dimensional constructed virtual space that you navigate around as an avatar rather than clicking on things. And so the dream, like the appeal is that this comes much closer to simulating engaging in these interactions in real life than the kind of two-dimensional interface that we have on the computer now does. And so when Mark Zuckerberg talks about the Metaverse, he'll talk about how it's not natural to engage with people in screens and this is supposed to sort of restore some of that like natural feeling. So yeah, I mean to my knowledge I think Facebook is sort of rolling out or Meta is rolling out some sort of Metaverse applications. Also for a long time there's been something kind of vaguely analogous to this in video gaming. But I think the real dream of the Metaverse is that you would have a broadly integrated virtual space in which people could do all sorts of things and move kind of seamlessly from one part of the Metaverse to another and engage in a lot of different forms of activity in a single sort of connected virtual cosmos. And that to my understanding is not yet, we can't really talk about that as having been rolled out. Right, so the technology exists for virtual reality headsets and certain kinds of games are already being developed for this platform, but those are all very siloed at this point. And part of the reason is the technology is not as far along as it's going to need to be to make this super widely accessible. So there's people working in virtual reality still have all these problems where if you play the games like you feel dizzy, you know there's these issues that I think the technologist working on this probably are going to figure out, but some of the hardware is still in development. And so yeah, I mean we don't have sort of the Metaverse on the scale that's envisioned by Meta as yet. But some of the bits and pieces are kind of coming into being, especially in the video game world which has these more sort of dedicated fans who are willing to kind of try something out at an earlier stage. But I would say it's not like accessible to kind of regular people in the same way yet. Does the Metaverse conversation strike you as being at this point kind of the most ambitious tech idea that's on the scene, there's been on the scene in a while? I mean it strikes me in some cases of being very utopian. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think one thing to say is that there's a way in which if we're talking about ambition is building something radically new. There's a way in which the Metaverse just carries forward what the internet already does. You know lots of people have pointed this out. But as far as having a lot of the activity of ordinary life migrate into virtual space and you know happen on the computer, that's what the consumer internet became I think sort of fairly quickly in the early 2000s or whatever and has continued to develop into. And so in that sense, this doesn't represent a radical change of direction, but I think just a sort of a continuation and a deepening of a certain logic. On the other hand, as far as envisioning the next technological change that is going to have a huge effect on people's ordinary lives and experiences, I think it is tremendously ambitious. And I think if you think about Facebook now with 3 billion users, anything that touches 3 billion people, 100 years ago I don't know that there was anything that affected that proportion of the world's population in that way. And that kind of direct way, even 20 years ago, I can't think of something that's as immersive as addictive as engaging as those kinds of platforms. Yeah, and the dream in the hope is I think to deepen that further and to make something that's even more immersive, more persuasive, and yes, like addictive and I think it's easy and important to sort of point out the dangers. But also, you know, the hope is that this would be really useful for people and it would connect people across boundaries and borders and so on. And so I think, yeah, I think it is hugely ambitious, just in its global scope also as creating a community that really would transcend existing borders and bring people into a kind of, you know, very sort of personal, really sort of vivid forms of contact that are not possible currently. Yeah, yeah. So if there's one key figure prominent CEO personality that is kind of the driving person behind this conversation, at least for most people in the regular world, it's Mark Zuckerberg. But Zuckerberg is not the one who created this, right? It sort of comes out of much earlier countercultural Silicon Valley tech world. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, so the kind of dream of virtual connectivity is I think an old one like my impression is, you know, even the fairly early days of the internet, there was this kind of sort of homebrew computer culture and this picture of the internet as this starts out with DARPA, right? And so it's like a project of, you know, the American state. DARPA is the defense department, early internet sort of project, right? Advanced research projects, yeah, yeah, which I think, you know, is still around and does different stuff. But yeah, so the internet initially is this kind of military technology, but my impression is sort of very quickly in Silicon Valley, people see this as, you know, a possible source of decentralized community because, you know, there's like the cyber space manifesto, John Perry Barlow, I think, which just says, you know, this, this is like the end of governance as we know it because people can now sort of meet, interact, do things together. Build communities and engage in projects in a space that's not touched by existing governing structures, right? It's like independent of flesh and blood and, you know, the kind of geographic space that's regulated by governments. And so there was this picture, this countercultural picture of the internet as a place that was free and sort of fluid and sort of rebellious too, right? Yeah, totally. The early sort of phone freakers are kind of like hacking into the phone companies and a sense of existing in between the regulated spaces of corporations and the government and things like that, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know, we might ask about the origins of the term, and I think it's, you know, the first kind of high profile uses this sci-fi novel snow crash by Neil Stevenson, who's still around still writing science fiction. But this is a book from the 90s that depicts the metaverse as the kind of like spontaneous sort of vaguely like anarchist creation of, you know, a bunch of hackers who are like friends with each other, and they kind of get together and build this virtual space in which they can escape from sort of the banalities of ordinary life. And so the picture is of the metaverse is this kind of informal network. You know, there are some kind of leading figures in this network, but it's not a top-down corporate project as it's envisioned there. Instead, it's just people getting together and building something. So it has this sort of free-wheeling quality where it's not centrally regulated. It's an escape from all that and escape into a world where the hackers are in charge and, you know, they do things their way. And it's supposed to be the sort of attractive picture of freedom from from central control. And that decentralized ideal is something we'll get into in a second, but that's something that still kind of lives on and discussions about the metaverse today. So I want to talk about one more thing about the sort of origins of the metaverse and about Zuckerberg. One of the things that I've noticed and interviews that he's done and then public addresses that he's done talks that he's given internally at Facebook that have been leaked. He keeps returning to the same story about his childhood that he was a sort of a geek kid in decoding couldn't find the right friends. He says he's going to grow up in a small town and the only thing to do is play baseball, but he didn't want to play baseball. He was in white planes in New York, which is just down the train line from New York City, but whatever. And he talks about the desire to sort of want to escape the limits of his physical place, his small town. And he keeps returning to this in this sort of big vision that he casts about the possibilities inherent in the metaverse. Why do you think he keeps bringing up this story? Yeah, I think this is one of the things that really unites existing Facebook in the metaverse is this picture that I think is really fundamental to Zuckerberg's whole view of the world and the whole project of Facebook, which is that connecting people with the right people is a very powerful kind of absolute good. And so I think that Zuckerberg's kind of image of the world is that we're all sort of thrown into these communities that are maybe like not entirely to our liking, they're not totally suited to us. And maybe this was like white planes in New York for him when he was a kid. Maybe you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're, you know, this really sort of brilliant coder and you get really into computers. And then, you know, your high school doesn't have a computer club, but actually you know that sort of all around the country in the world, there are these other people who are like you and if you could find them. Then you could make these connections and your life would be, you know, much better and you wouldn't have to settle for the community that you've been sort of contingently thrown into. And so there's the promise of that Facebook will match people with the right communities for them and make these communities of affinity possible, make these profoundly meaningful connections possible that otherwise wouldn't be available to people. So I think that we can maybe recognize something of that dream in this picture of these immersive virtual communities in which it'll really be as if you were in the same room as like your fellow computer coders, even if you are stuck in white planes and so on for many other different identities and affinities. Right. And I don't want to dismiss the experience of the thing that strikes me about Zuckerberg's experience is just how banal it sounds. It sounds like a thing that every one of us goes through as you sort of gain more of a sense of who you are and you're learning about what you like and dislike and you realize, you know, I'd like to be in a different place. I'd like to connect with different kinds of people. And of course, there are more extreme versions of that people who are sort of dealing with trauma or violence or discrimination and desire to escape from that is a very real and important one. But his vision of escape sort of strikes me as a research childish, like an attempt to kind of get past what is a normal normal developmental experience as a young kid sort of learning about who you are and want to transcend the limits of your small world. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of us probably think that there's some good in learning to appreciate and become a part of the community that you're thrown into while acknowledging that it's, you know, it's arbitrary and contingent where we end up living and who we end up living with. So, yeah, I mean, I think insofar as Facebook and then more, you know, meta and metaverse representatives have to just say no to that and escape it. There is maybe something a little as you say childish or yeah, slightly troubling with that ideal. So, I want to sort of step back and transition into talking about Facebook as a company and sort of the big question is kind of like why the metaverse why now? Because I can think of a company that's really gone through the most sort of tumultuous PR crisis in the last five or 10 years. I think Facebook may not be at the very top, but it's pretty close to being at the top. I mean, it's a company that regularly gets hauled in front of congressional committees and gets chastised by prominent senators and congress people. It's the only company that I can think of that has been at the center of this international controversy about election interference in 2016 and then again in 2020. It's a company that both sides of the aisle blame for most of the ills that are sort of causing division in our country. So, can you talk a little bit about the crisis that Facebook is undergoing? It's a PR crisis, right? But you also, in your piece for the Hedgehog review on the metaverse, you describe it as a kind of crisis of governance. Yeah, so Facebook comes under fire for so many different reasons. There's a whole sort of like psychological critique of Facebook that somehow it's messing us up internally. It's bad for kids because, you know, there's, I mean, there's the self-imment problems with Instagram and, you know, it's bad for a conversation and it silos off political discourse and, you know, it's addictive and it's like, you know, chemically manipulating us and we could, we could go down this sort of endless list of all the different things people have thrown at Facebook. But I think that the governance crisis piece is separate from all those and I think it's really interesting. I mean, one of the fascinating things about Facebook's predicament is it's being simultaneously accused, you know, by, especially conservatives of discriminating against conservative speech, you know, shutting down conservative voices and then it's accused by the left of being, you know, too permissive. Regularly when I scroll through my Twitter timeline, I see people on the left posting the most popular links on Facebook that given week and, you know, eight of the 10 tend to be some conservative Facebook page. Yeah, yeah, so no, so it's remarkable that we have, you know, both the right complaining about censorship and then also the left saying actually sort of not enough censorship is being done. And I actually think there's some weird way in which sort of both this criticisms are true. And I think that sort of gets to Facebook's crisis. So it is true that, you know, Facebook has made some big mistakes in, you know, they were among the sites that banned the Hunter Biden laptop story and the lab leak theory and both of these, you know, turned out to be sort of things that the mainstream left was too quick to jump on and say this is misinformation. I mean, Facebook is sort of used its power to control discourse in ways that have, you know, sort of unfairly shut down conservative speech. At the same time, like there's, there's an awful lot of just like hate speech on Facebook, right? And there are actually, you know, white nationalist organizing on Facebook. And and there is a tendency for sort of the most extreme right wing tendencies to get represented in people's news feeds, say they, you know, lean a little bit conservative, they're going to get pushed in this for the right direction a lot of the time by the algorithm. And so somehow both these things are true that Facebook is is both censoring too much and too little. And so I think that's sort of the beginning of what I see as this crisis of governance. Yeah. I don't know if it's only people on the left. I sense that it's on both sides tend to view the company sort of through the lens of greed that the company has really no ethical center knows exactly what it's doing by promoting sort of extreme content. Because they know that it gets people addicted to its eyeballs. It keeps everybody engaged. It keeps people all fired up. They know that there's bad stuff on their platform, but they're just refusing to do anything about it. Yeah. And I think that's not quite right. I mean, I think that we have some internal documents from Facebook because the company's been so controversial and because they have 70,000 employees, like inevitably there's been some pretty substantial leaks. And so we know that people inside Facebook are saying things like, you know, if we continue to allow some of this content, like we're going to lose users. And they ultimately think that having a really to use the word that sort of most current in this discourse are really toxic environment on the website is will not ultimately be good for business. But I think also that there is really a kind of idealistic side, certainly to Mark Zuckerberg's attitude. And also, you know, I suspect to a lot of the people that he's recruited to work with him. So I think kind of like, you know, when you were talking about this childhood experience of his, I do think that vision really does on a profound level and form what he takes himself to be doing and what he takes Facebook to be doing. When he says that he believes in the power of connection, he really does. I do believe that. And I think I think he also believes that helping people to connect can be profitable for Facebook. But I do think that Zuckerberg is, you know, quite concerned with the ethics of what he's doing. I think he's, you know, somewhat naive about the way he thinks about the ethics of what he's doing. But I think this is a preoccupation of his, I think he's come to understand that that Facebook in many ways operates like a government. The question for him is whether it's possible for it to continue to do that and play this role while also, you know, being profitable enough to sustain itself. So the argument that Facebook knows exactly what people are doing is true in a certain way because Facebook is well aware that terrible things are happening in a space that they purportedly control. So, you know, we have Mexican drug cartels like posting pictures of like severed limbs of people they've massacred on Facebook and these don't get addressed, you know, until many people have seen them. Or we have cases of, you know, people who live in Sub-Saharan Africa who are being recruited for what turns out to be effectively like a kind of slave trade where they have to work as domestic servants on the Arabian Peninsula. Have their passport taken away and are paid and this is happening through Facebook. And Facebook is aware that a lot of bad things like this are happening. But there's another way in which the problem they face is, you know, it's a difficult one because they don't have the capacity to effectively monitor and pay attention to all the things that are happening, especially outside the United States and especially in languages other than sort of the big European languages. Because this would just require hiring a lot of people who know those languages, it would require building algorithms that can interpret activity that's going on in those languages. And sometimes the algorithms they've built have sort of comedic errors and consequences, right? You were telling me recently about how Mark Zuckerberg's on livestream was interrupted by Facebook AI sensors. Yeah, which had deemed apparently that he himself was spreading misinformation. So this was obviously the algorithm. But yeah, I mean, I think that just goes to show that these AI things are really works in progress. It might be that at some point they're going to be able to decode human language and rhetoric in a sophisticated way, but they're really not there yet. And I can say, like, you know, I'm in a political science department where a lot of people try and use machine learning to analyze large bodies of text. This is not a field that has gotten to the point where it would need to be in order to do the things that Facebook wants to do. It's not impossible to get there, but imagine trying to get an algorithm to interpret a metaphor, right? To be able to say, okay, here's one word that means something. And in this context, it just means something completely different. But you won't find it in the dictionary. This is very hard to do. That that that but happens to sort of the very basic questions about what artificial intelligence is even capable of doing right aside from the fact that it has to be done in real time globally with three billion users. I mean, this is a challenging project. Which leads me to another question that I wanted to sort of get into, which is to me when I think about Facebook now calling itself meta its announcement video for the metaverse that was released several months ago. Was my reaction to that was why now why take on such an ambitious projects when it seems like the very things that you're already doing, you know, you need to get a lot better at. So on the one hand, you can sort of see it as a case of a company taking on something that they're not prepared for. But maybe it's actually the opposite. Maybe the thing that they need to do to get better at what they're already doing is to take on something that's at this kind of scale. Yeah, no, so I think there are, I can think of two possibilities. I mean, there could be any number of things going on, but I can think of two possibilities here. One, I think the metaverse project is very personally important to Zuckerberg, and I think that's for reasons that you've already brought up Kyle. But I just believe that he, you know, he just really cares about this. He likes to return to this theme of the long history of the consolidation of human social forms. And so we go from these sort of scattered villages to tribes and then eventually to, I guess, like a feudal order in Europe and then like the nation state. And then there's this picture in which Facebook is somehow like the next stage in this process, right? It's like the further consolidation of humanity into some kind of global community. I think, you know, the metaverse would be crucial to that. It's a very sort of barbarian development kind of story. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I don't know if Zuckerberg's getting it from Weber. But it's, you know, it's sort of the modernization theory and it's, I think it's actually a pretty compelling story. Like I do think that the virtual perhaps does like represent the next stage of the consolidation of human community. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is sort of a further question, but just descriptively, I think this is really possible. But Zuckerberg, you know, believes this is, this is important. Facebook can kind of be the vector of this world historical process. One possible explanation for why meta, why now is that Facebook is, as you're saying in crisis and it's possible that they feel this is their opportunity. Right now is when they have the kind of access to capital and, you know, the credibility and the three billion person user base. This is the opportunity to take the next step. And there's some risk that, you know, if they just sort of sit on their hands and try and do what they're already doing, then they might decline. And Zuckerberg will lose his opportunity to be sort of the person who brings this new historical stage into being. Then we got the shot. They have the opportunity. Yeah, I mean, I listened to an interview that Mark Zuckerberg did with. One of the journalists at the Verge, their podcast, and he was, he was somewhat sort of bemoaning the fact that Facebook was came of age at a time when the smartphone was already developed or was reaching maturity. And he said that the reason that they wanted to jump into the metaverse project was to be there sort of at the ground floor, the development of the hardware, so they could shape it, so they could direct that process. Which I think is more evidence of the fact that he has ambitious aims with this. Yeah, and they've said the metaverse is supposed to be the replacement for the smartphone. So we shouldn't think of it as, you know, the replacement for some existing website. It's actually supposed to be sort of a hardware development where it's the whole way that you interface with the networked world is supposed to be through this, you know, three-dimensional virtual construction, as opposed to, you know, the smartphone, which is also a technology for getting you to interface with the virtual world, but that, you know, has these very different ways of doing that. So that is, I think, how I tend to read it. And then there's another possibility too. And these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but this is something I also think about that the metaverse might represent an opportunity for Facebook to reset its attitude toward governance. And so part of the paradox that Facebook is stuck in right now, I think, is that they actually have the capacity to shape and monitor behavior and the transfer of information. On a far higher level than any existing government, because everything that happens on Facebook is in principle available to be read. Their problem is they don't have enough employees to actually read and make sense of it, but if Facebook had a vast army of civil servants, right, on the model of a modern state, they actually would be able to go and, you know, prevent all the bad things from happening, because they could monitor everything that happens in their platform, because everything that happens on Facebook generates information that is available to Facebook. And this is not true of any sovereign state, which, you know, there's plenty of things that happen within the borders of the United States that our government doesn't and can't know anything about. But once you're in virtual space, the possibility for all information not only can be collected, but is collected, and, you know, it's available to you if you choose to make use of it. And then Facebook also has capacities for nudging, for behavioral influence that are also, like far exceed those available to any, you know, flesh and blood, real world government, because they can precisely shape the architecture of that platform in ways that doesn't determine the behavior of the people that use it, but that really shapes it. So they can, sort of, write the laws of physics within Facebook virtual space. And so I think the strange problem they have is they haven't figured out how to use that power. They haven't figured it out normatively. So Zuckerberg really, I think, has gone back and forth a lot. I think he has, sort of, libertarian instincts on speech, you know, Facebook supposed to be a communication platform, he seemed very reluctant to censor. But I think it's also been, sort of, pressed on him that some kind of discourse rejection is necessary, just because of the scale of the platform, the fact that people are saying these things and they can go out to millions of people very rapidly. And so he's sort of caught. And I think my sense is that, you know, there's real disagreement in Facebook and possibly even in Mark Zuckerberg himself internally about just sort of on what level it would be right to exercise that kind of control. And then I think they're also not sure about how to do it technically. So there are all these problems where you have these content monitors who, you know, get like PTSD because they spend all day watching, you know, like videos of people killing each other. And it's not clear what to do about that. Yeah. I want to sort of shift gears here and talk about a little bit more directly about your argument in this piece that you wrote for the hedgehog on between Utopia and disaster where you talk about this fantasy of perfect governance. And you reference two very prominent sort of theorists of the modern state and the way that they thought about how the state relates to its population. And James Scott is one and Foucault, Michelle Foucault is another. Can you talk about sort of how a virtual reality space sort of solves some of the most basic frictions and frustrations of the modern state. Yeah. So Scott, I think it's just really, I mean, he's not writing about virtuality, but I think it's a really great time to read saying like a state as we think about sort of what these virtual worlds could look like because the claim there is that actually wants to remake the world that it governs to make it more legible because when you make something legible, you can track and control it legible, meaning like something that you can you can observe that you can quantify that you can know about. Yeah, that's that's available as as information to you. And so virtuality, I mean, as we're seeing with Facebook, it doesn't sort of solve the problem once and for all, but it represents a huge advance toward legibility because everything that you do in a virtual space is legible. Because the space is constructed by people, it's helpful here to think ahead to the metaverse, which is going to look something like the world that we move through in three dimensions, but every rock, you know, tree table. I mean, like every object in the metaverse is constructed by computer engineers and follows rules that they write. Right, right, right. You can see some of the sort of frictions of the modern state's ability to collect information about its subjects or about its citizens and sort of the clumsiness and difficulty of these censuses that are done every 10 years, right. They have to send out an army of contractors to go out and knock on people's doors and call people and hope that they tell them the right correct accurate information. But if you're already in the world, a virtual reality world, everything is already known. Yeah, you don't have to report. Yeah, or at least, and this is a little bit of a problem for Facebook because what is known is, you know, what people are willing to give you in return for getting on the platform. And so Facebook does have this problem where, you know, it's not completely clear how many people are on Facebook because, you know, some people might have fake accounts and so on. But if they ask for a little bit more information, then they can solve that problem. And, you know, it'll be possible, I think, for them to sort of interface with tracking methods that are becoming more prominent in the real world. So, you know, for example, if Facebook wanted to make sure that everybody just had one account and they knew who that account was and they know what your real name is, they could, you know, they'll be able to get you to submit biometric data and confirm this. But yeah, I mean, just the possibilities for knowing are far greater in virtual space. And then I think the Foucault side is also interesting because the possibilities for shaping and conditioning behavior are also much greater. Because again, the laws of physics in the virtual space are given and controlled by the people who make it. And so, you know, what you're exposed to is, in principle, subject to control not only by the people who are, you know, acting in the virtual space, but also by the designers who have this kind of omnipotence as well as omniscience, right? So we might ask if they're omnipotent as well. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's been this kind of interesting work in the last kind of 20 years on behavioral nudging, the sort of libertarian paternalist idea. And paternalist idea that you can get people to do things not by just sort of coercing them outright, but by constricting their set of options. And virtual space, I think, is really well adapted to doing this because you can manually intervene or get an algorithm to intervene and control what options are available for what they do. And, you know, they have these avatars, but you control their avatars, right? You control their bodies if you want to. And so it's possible to restrict the set of actions that are available to individuals in a way that, you know, wouldn't be possible in the real world unless we were all locked up in exoskeletons or something. Right. Yeah, it seems like it offers an a virtual reality space that offers a smoother nudge. I think about when I get on Twitter and retweet something I haven't read or clicked on, I get the nudge. Now, shouldn't you really read this before you retweet it? And if they wanted, they could make it impossible for you to retweet it, right? So there's been a conscious decision. Well, we're not going to do that because people might find it a little bit invasive, but we will tell them, but it's also possible to actually make certain actions inconceivable. And I think that if you spend enough time in virtual space, like you might get used to that and forget that, you know, this was something that you used to be able to do. So that's some of the power of it. I want to just sort of interject here, another sort of question about the cultural mood, the moment that we're in, you know, where people are spending so much more time on their phones in digital spaces, if you want to call it that, on their iPhone, on their computer. And, you know, if you're a professional middle class kind of person, you're on your computer 8, 9, 10 hours a day. And the way that people sort of try to cope with that is they get off of their computers, they get off of their phones, they go get acupuncture, or they go hiking, or they go have some sort of experience that gets them off the screen, gets them into physical space. It makes me wonder if virtual reality of the order that Zuckerberg is kind of envisioning that you would be, you would have a headset locked to your eyes 8, 9, 10 hours a day is something that people are really going to be in the mood for. I think there's already a feeling, a kind of feeling of exhaustion, a feeling of smoothness in our lives that places start to feel more and more the same because you always have your phone with you. I mean, doesn't that just make that feeling worse? Yeah, so I think it's, it's a question that is wide open in my view. And I think it really could sort of go either way and perhaps it will go either way for different communities, maybe for different income levels. There's been the suggestion that the metaverse might be the sort of substitute for inaccessible experiences for people who don't have the money to actually go and, you know, get their acupuncture or whatever. Yeah, or travel or whatever, right? So, but I think that the dream and like the idea that Zuckerberg has and that, you know, people at meta have is that the metaverse will be, will feel less smooth and homogenous than existing virtual space does. And so, you know, if you watch the, you know, the long announcement video for the metaverse that came out back in the fall, you see people going to concerts in the metaverse. And so there's this, this idea that you get this kind of really actually very vivid, personal and sort of like visceral experience, like a really strong sensory experience of the kind that perhaps people are looking for when they go and, you know, do these real world activities to get off their computers. And so, I think the picture is one in which the metaverse and its immersive virtual reality becomes, you know, so vivid, so compelling, so exciting that it actually does serve people as a break from the monotony of sort of existing virtual life. And then, you know, the other part of it and the part that I think may be quite powerful in just getting people into the metaverse in the door in the first place is the idea of moving a lot of professional life into the metaverse. So, maybe those, you know, PMC workers who now are stuck in front of computer screens all the time, they'll put headsets on, okay, yeah, objectively like you're still sitting in your chair with a headset on, but your experience is of moving through an open world in which, you know, you're interacting with, I guess, like your colleagues on other continents or whatever. And you feel a lot less constrained because you have sort of the, like, the experience of motion and freedom. You know, this is what I think Zuckerberg is getting at when he talks about how our lives in front of screens are unnatural and the metaverse is going to restore the natural by imitating it so perfectly. It's a very idiosyncratic way of talking about what's natural. Yeah, I think it's like, you know, we can get back to nature by going deeper and deeper into more and more perfect artifice, but this is a kind of an old dream. You know, it's like if you can imitate nature perfectly, then maybe we're just, you know, we can get all the things that we want from nature and not have all the inconveniences, like being stuck in white planes in New York, like, you know, not being able to interact face to face with people you're working with who are in different, you know, different geographical locations. So there's this hope to sort of recapture the sensory experiences that we want from nature while also taking away the arbitrariness and contingency and the kind of messiness of nature as we currently inhabit it. Yeah, I mean, that gets into some of the things that you're talking about in your piece about the sort of cultural logics that might be driving this project. Well, I'll let you speak to this things yourself, but there are a lot of cultural logics that are driving a desire or a potential desire to get out of physical space. I mean, the pandemic is obviously an obvious one to be able to work remotely is obviously safer. Yeah, and I think this gets back to the governance question too, because there's this idea. Look, and, you know, there's, there are a lot of people in tech journalism and sort of activist communities and so on who are saying this. This is a world where we actually have the capacity to prevent bad people from saying bad things and doing bad things and you might actually be able to live your life in this safe world, which is benevolently governed by Facebook from Menlo Park and where these unpleasant encounters, these, you know, psychologically traumatizing encounters that you might have just can't happen because the rules are written in such a way that they can't happen. It's a kind of safety that is promised by precisely the sort of control character of virtual space, a safety that's not possible in the real world. Yeah, it offers a pure sense of representation, right? There are some of the most controversial questions that are going on right now have to do with whether people will accept someone's identity and their claims to an identity or not. When all you see is someone's avatar that they've constructed, then those controversies don't have to happen anymore. Yeah, and that's a related issue, but it also has a really deep logic in its own. I mean, there's some evidence that, well, some people think that a lot of modern identity politics has partly been driven by the advent of virtual spaces where people can really like, you know, radically define their own identities. And so this is, you know, this is already the case for social media right where you can sort of present yourself to the, to the world and whatever way you want. The metaverse would make those self presentations more persuasive, you would make them feel more real. I think both of the people who are engaging in them and then also the people they interact with. And so insofar as we think that identity is, you know, fundamentally an internal matter, you know, it's not about like what your body is or like what you look like physically or like the atoms that make you up. But it's about some kind of, you know, divine spark inside of you. The metaverse, the avatar, the possibility of totally controlled virtual representation gives you the chance to have the dictates of that divine spark, like totally validated to really like be in your everyday interactions, the thing that you internally take yourself to be. And so I think that is powerfully appealing to many people. And potentially in a social interaction that's a great deal more satisfying than posting on Twitter or whatever. Yeah, because I mean, it's like the difference between like being able to set your profile picture and like write your 140 character bio versus like inhabiting a different body. Virtuality represents a huge advance on what's available now in these terms. And yeah, so I think I think that is that is also one of the things that may incline people to to to go in this direction. But I mean, I also think you were you were pointing to some problems. I think it's also like I there are a lot of reasons why people wouldn't want to do this. And it just like sitting with a headset on all the time just sounds kind of grim and I like it doesn't sound that appealing to me like when I talk to sort of like obviously I'm sort of paranoid about all this stuff and think about all the time. But like I talk to friends of mine who like aren't super preoccupied with this and they're just like yeah it doesn't sound that great. Now maybe it's just because they haven't seen how amazing how persuasive and how you know gloriously colorful the meta versus going to be and like once they put on the headset they're just going to love it and everybody's going to want to do this all the time. But I don't know I'm not like yeah, I'm not totally convinced. The visualization so far that I've seen in the metaverse it just looks like second life it doesn't look all that appealing it looks like a you know bid 2000s a sort of computer game. It does not look as visually stunning as the analysis video sort of lead you to believe it would have to have those kind of satisfying experiences an authentic sort of compelling visual nature to it. And they would need to be a whole lot more than what it already is in order for people to not feel like they're just strapping a TV to their face right. Yeah and I think it's to be fair I think it's going to get a lot better in terms of the visual quality. I think it seems like you know with 5G and everything like the capacity for like fast transfer of really high volumes of data is getting you know a lot better very quickly. And so you might see you know a metaverse that looks a lot better a lot less just like second life for whatever the existing sort of kind of two dimensional virtual spaces were used to. But will that be enough I mean fundamentally just like the experience of you know like sitting in the chair right and having that be like your engagement with the world. Okay I guess there's like you know there's like the exercise program like the we fit where you get up and sort of move around but will people want to give up a model of engagement with the world in which you're moving through physical space and you know touching things and like how much of that can be replicated I'm not sure yeah. I mean I think it's common to be skeptical of this but going back to your earlier points about how meta is really kind of targeting workplace culture and targeting the sort of the market for for virtual meetings. I mean it reminds me of about the way that the personal computer was adopted in the 90s and early 2000s you know people didn't get on their computers and get on the internet primarily for personal use at first. You know it was for it was for educational purposes it was for office use and that eventually everyone had it and it took on a kind of a life of the sound or it became easier to envision. Easier to get for other kinds of purposes. Alright so we've been circling around this a little bit but I just kind of want to pinpoint this question about governance. We live in a world in which authority especially political authority is undergoing this sort of crisis of legitimacy. And so how do you see this sort of emerging metaverse world and its ability or inability to act and a governmental or a state like way to really deal with the risks and the problems that would come with a mass virtual reality. Yeah I mean I think this might turn out to be the problem that Facebook can't solve. One reason why Facebook has been struggling to enforce the rules that it already has is because it simply doesn't employ enough people and it's not clear that the business model actually works in a way that would allow it to employ the number of people that would be required to govern 3 billion people even in this limited sense. So I think Facebook has like 71,000 employees total which is a large number. You know China a nation of a billion has 10 million civil servants so the ratio obviously you know the Chinese government does a lot more for its citizens than Facebook does for its members. But I mean the ratio is not it's simply not adequate for Facebook and especially when you take into account that the claim Facebook is making is that it's it's you know it's going to have this global community. That is you know in some ways integrated but also is sort of distinctly responsive to local conditions in different places. And so Zuckerberg has even talked about how you know Facebook's kind of content moderation policies could vary according to local norms. So an issue that has kept coming up and that he's referenced is that like you know Europeans are more sensitive to hate speech but also like less sensitive to like sexual content. Whereas in say like Middle Eastern countries people are you know really don't want you know anything kind of remotely sexual coming up on their timelines content wise but then some of the sort of European preoccupations with hate speech or definitions of hate speech also are not universal. And so it's very difficult to come up with a universal standard and so there's this thought okay we'll have different policies for different places but again that just requires so much manpower to actually carry out to think through the policies to enforce them. And so one problem Facebook may have is that I mean they have a lot of revenue you know the ads are quite lucrative but it's not clear that they are capable on their current business model of employing a large enough workforce to actually enforce these issues. And so one thing that I wonder is whether Facebook might like to turn over some of that work to the sovereign state which you know has a surveillance apparatus already has you know systems for keeping track on bad people and punishing them and so on. And so something that I thought was quite suggestive was after these Francis Hogan revelations the Facebook files that the Wall Street Journal published back in was it October yeah that's right. So Facebook issued this sort of you know the kind of statement you would expect where they just said you know she doesn't know what she's talking about and this is you know we we have different interpretations of all this and so on. But the statement that was initially tweeted by this Facebook spokesperson and ended with I thought a very interesting statement so he says we don't agree with their characterization the many issues she testified about despite all this we agree on one thing it's time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. And so and this is in the context of Hogan testifying in front of Congress right so I think that people at Facebook are perhaps beginning to realize that it is actually in their interest to have the sovereign state involved with this because the state has you know more capacity to do this kind of enforcement. It also has a kind of normative legitimacy that Facebook I mean as you say Kyle like that you know the legitimacy of our governments is kind of shakier now than maybe it was a little while ago but nevertheless I mean you know especially democratically elected governments have a kind of legitimacy that a private company doesn't. And so I do wonder if we'll see sort of more efforts to for Facebook to draw on the enforcement capacities and then also the governing legitimacy that the sovereign state possesses that the company does not possess. Another issue that I think about in this context is the fact that Facebook you know has this kind of authority where it can decide what people see and what they do but it has that authority because they've agreed to use the service. And I think there is always the risk that a Facebook you know or let's say you know a future metaverse adopts you know really restrictive sort of authoritarian policies where they determine quite precisely what kind of speech and action is allowed. People may not want to enter into the social contract with Facebook anymore if they feel that you know their freedoms are being abridged beyond what they're willing to accept. And so Facebook you know like like real world governments but more so because the cost of exit from Facebook are fairly low has to come up with policies that its citizens think are legitimate. They don't have the ability to just dictate by fiat. However I think it's also important to say that the cost of exit from Facebook are not zero. And the more ubiquitous Facebook comes and the more ubiquitous the metaverse becomes the higher the cost of exit get and the more ability the company has to just dictate its own rules. And so one possibility is that Facebook becomes so useful to office you know offices and workers that everybody gets into the metaverse. And then now like you you know you can't do a white college job unless you have a metaverse account or something right and then the cost of exit become very high and the company actually does have the ability to really sort of dictate terms to you know to a pretty considerable extent to users. So these are things that will be worked out but I do think it's a difficulty and it's part of the reason why the company is I think struggled to sort of settle on a policy that works is because they have to balance the fact that you know they have this control capacity. But they can't just use it without limits because they are ultimately dependent on people voting with their feet. Right yeah one final question I want to ask is is this really going to happen it wasn't too many years ago that Google came out with Google Glass which was its own version of a kind of augmented reality and that disappeared almost overnight partly because Google Glass relied upon these kind of extravagant hand gestures just made you look quite silly if you weren't in private. So what do you see is the sort of emerging technologies that Met is working with what are they trying to solve that problem do you think they're going to be able to do it. Yeah so the hand gestures are a big problem and I think there will be a problem for the headset I mean I think an amazing thing about the smartphone and one of the reasons is to become so ubiquitous is because you can just like pull it out if you're in line at the grocery store. And it doesn't look stupid like it looks a little bit stupid but like you're just standing there and you know it's like you're not like whacking people in the face because you're like that. So Met is really well aware of this and they're so they're working on these sort of interfaces with the virtual world that will not require people to you know move around that much. And so there's a lot of different forms this takes the ultimate form it would take is the kind of neural link thing this is this company that Elon Musk bought that is supposed to literally read your thoughts. It's not clear how far along that technology is I think it maybe is further along than I would have like expected was possible but I don't think it's sort of like able to be put into operation the way the the metaverse would require yet. So employees ask Zuckerberg about this and he said you know I mean all you would need to do is have you know like a yes and a no that like you could activate using your thoughts right and that would already get you to like clicking on things. And so there could be some primitive version of this they try to develop however in the same answer he said but we're not really focusing on that. We're working on these I forget exactly a phrase you use but sort of external interfaces and so what this looks like people who watch the full metaverse announcement video will know one thing is you know they'll give you the glasses and the glasses have cameras that track your eye movements. So then you look at something in the metaverse they can pinpoint very precisely what you're looking at and then you know you can like click on it I guess by like doing some you know small gesture. Another thing they're working on is I assume this is true there are some sort of unused like nerve pathways in the wrist or something and it would be possible to sort of create some device that kind of hooks up to these and then people are able to in the same way that you like gesture with your hand and you're using some nerve pathways you'd be able to use these other nerve pathways to like gesture in the metaverse. I'm probably kind of butchering that but like that space it's supposed to it's supposed to sort of tap into our physiology like as it already exists. So it's not brain waves per se but it's you know you already have these these nerve pathways that can just be sort of used externally. So that you then are like sort of with the power of thought like moving your you know your your avatars arms around in the metaverse. They also I know we're working on something where like you move your finger down just like a little bit on a surface and then that would sort of translate into big motions in the metaverse in the same way that like if you have a track pad on your computer like you know you move your finger a little bit but then your mouse moves a lot something like this. So they're working on these kind of external applications you know I think the tech sounds like it's you know it's going to happen I think whether people find it appealing to do these things is a different question. I think depending on how invasive it is right if you have to get some kind of implant in your arm to do this you know that could be sort of a hurdle for people. So I don't know but I will say I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the possibility of carrying some of this out hardware wise because you know there are some smart people working these companies who seem very optimistic about possibilities for coming up with ways for people to operate their avatars that would not you know involve waving their hands around or like actually having to walk around physical space. Right right again I guess it kind of comes back to this question about are people really ready trusting willing to be this immersed willing to to take on a body modification from a big publicly traded corporation that already sort of lacks a certain amount of trust or are we actually in some way that I can't quite figure out. At the right moment poised for the right moment where people will adopt it I mean it seems like I could go either way and I think you know when you're talking about emergency technology it's easy to criticize it's easy to mock. It's easy to think there's no way I would do that but if anything about sort of consumer tech world can show us anything over the last 10-15-20 years it's that we end up adopting things that we couldn't have dreamed of 10 years before. So thanks Malloy this is fun yeah thank you yeah a lot of fun yeah no I appreciate you having me on. This hedgehog chat is brought to you by the hedgehog review and the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture at the University of Virginia. Please go to hedgehogreview.com to find recent issues and to read our web features. This episode has been produced by Mary Gardner McGee and is a production of the Virginia Audio Collective at WTJU Charlottesville. Thank you for listening to the hedgehog chat I'm Kyle Edward Williams. [MUSIC]