If the mystery of Second Life is how a company widely acclaimed as the Metaverse could fail to become that on a mass market scale, then the mystery of Meta offers us a mirror image conundrum:
How could a company with such a massive user base and near-infinite resources of money, talent, and experience also fail so thoroughly at making the Metaverse? (So far.)
And to enhance that mystery, here's another layer to consider: Meta's initial metaverse efforts were largely led and advised by veterans of Second Life.
Indeed, by the time you read these words, Meta may have officially pivoted away from its metaverse strategy. Although Mark Zuckerberg in late 2021 announced its creation of the Metaverse as so important to the company that he actually changed the company's name to reflect that, the Internet giant already appeared to be backing away from that goal within a year.
By December 2022, after months of punishing stock declines, his trusted lieutenant and head of Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth posted an announcement with the somewhat defensive title “Why We Still Believe in the Future.”
Notably absent from those 1,800 words: a single mention of “the Metaverse.” Not one.
With corporate announcements of that caliber usually reviewed by dozens of eyes, it's difficult to believe the omission was unintentional.
For the record, I attempted over several months through various channels to speak with Mark Zuckerberg. After a couple of preliminary screening calls with his effervescent PR team, an interview seemed to be quite possibly happening—when suddenly I was informed that Mark's schedule was “completely bananas,” and “we won't be able to make interviews work.”
On the very week I received that message, Zuckerberg conducted a three-hour, in-person interview about the Metaverse with controversial podcaster Joe Rogan. It felt like an intentional troll.
To be sure, I do not also have millions of credulous listeners. Then again, to my knowledge, Zuckerberg has never granted an in-depth interview with any journalist well versed enough in virtual worlds to ask hard questions about his metaverse ambitions. (And there are several who write for major news outlets.)
At any rate, I have forwarded key questions to Meta PR staff about the thorniest revelations I came across in the writing of this chapter, based on interviews with numerous insiders, on and off the record. As of press time, I have not received a reply. Which is a shame, because these sources document Meta's first lurching steps into the virtual world, and how it managed to go so wayward so quickly.
This is an important story to tell, especially because many if not most people probably still assume Meta and the Metaverse are interchangeable.
For those of us who've worked in metaverse platforms for decades, the widely held assumption that Meta is the Metaverse is very much a blade that cuts both ways. If a massive company like Meta is making it, it seems to follow that the Metaverse must indeed be the next generation of the Internet. By that same logic, however, any slip or stumble by Meta is taken to be a death knell for the Metaverse as a whole.
No: Speaking with many people directly involved, the story I came away with is Meta systematically ignoring decades of knowledge and experience that have gone into building metaverse platforms before its own.
This is the story of how Second Life veterans helped shape Meta's foray into the Metaverse from the very start—but then how Meta refused to heed their warnings as it all veered off course.
In a very real sense, Meta's Metaverse ambitions may not have ever happened at all, were it not for Linden Lab's own metaverse plans with Second Life falling into disarray.
After Linden Lab founding CTO Cory Ondrejka exited in 2007 from the startup in bitter acrimony, he taught at USC for a time, worked for a record label, and in 2010, became Facebook's Engineering Director.
Ondrejka joined just in time for Facebook's first existential crisis, when the social network, still a startup back then, was attempting to shift its focus to smartphones.
When high-tech publications recount Silicon Valley's recent history, much is written about this move, and it's typically narrated as a moment of heroic decisiveness on Zuckerberg's part:
“That company-wide pivot—despite the bad timing, considering the then-looming IPO—is widely considered the most important move in Facebook's history,” as tech news site Vox depicted this moment. “[A] recognition by Zuckerberg that mobile, not desktop computers, was the next great platform. If Facebook wanted to survive, it would have to do so by riding that mobile wave.”
To the extent that this pronouncement is accurate, credit for Facebook's survival belongs in good part to Ondrejka. At Linden Lab, he had faced a somewhat similar crisis, with Second Life missing its chance to evolve into the mobile era. Now Cory made the case to lead this change for Facebook.
“[S]oon after I got there,” Ondrejka remembers, “when I looked at the mobile strategies at Facebook, it was pretty clear that [the current mobile app] wasn't good enough. So I pitched Mark that we had to go build a really great native experience on mobile.”
Driving all of Facebook's mobile projects before and after its successful IPO, Ondrejka and his team “took us from mobile being a real problem in Facebook to mobile being Facebook's fundamental strength.”
Having succeeded at that task, Cory remembers, “Mark was like, ‘Figure out the next exciting thing you want to do.’” A tip from VC Marc Andreessen led Ondrejka to Oculus, still a small crowdfunded startup in Irvine.
It's where Ondrejka saw, as he recalls, “[the] best VR demo I'd seen,” on par with expensive VR technology he'd demoed at Stanford.
Ondrejka quickly lobbied Zuckerberg to experience it for himself:
“I go back up to Facebook and say ‘Look, we know you need to see this.’ We were spending a lot of time thinking about what platforms were coming. And while it was never VR on its own that was going to be the next platform, it felt like VR could be a part of it, because of games and because it allows you to learn so much about wearables, navigation, 3D space navigation. And it really sets you up for AR, which always felt further away.”
Cory's shepherding ultimately led to Facebook's acquisition of Oculus in 2014.
As part of that purchase, Ondrejka began telling company leadership, including Zuckerberg, about the power of virtual worlds.
“All the work we did during that time was sharing some of the lessons from Second Life, sharing virtual world lessons in general, thinking about what it'd mean to have virtual world notions connected with a social network—either connected directly or near it, having VR as an interface,” Ondrejka recalls.
“And really laying out that: ‘Look, there is a play to be made here, once Oculus is shipping out product, and is high quality.’ So that was in 2014 where I was talking [to Facebook executives] about virtual worlds as one obvious application of VR.” He wrote up numerous documents and decks about virtual worlds, presenting them to Facebook leadership.
In the period around the Oculus purchase, Ondrejka doesn't recall talking about the Metaverse specifically as a project Facebook should start building—but they did reference the concept quite a bit:
“Mark and Meta are certainly free to carve out whatever way they want to tell the story,” as he puts it. “But it certainly isn't one that we were talking about in that era. We were talking about virtual worlds, and certainly the word Metaverse would be used because everybody's read Snow Crash.”
But beyond talking about the technical standards or virtual worlds, Ondrejka doesn't recall “Building the Metaverse” as an explicit goal for Zuckerberg back then:
“It certainly happened sometime between when I left [in late 2014] and when they announced it.”
But he definitely presented an intellectual, aspirational framework for it to Zuckerberg.
“It was virtual worlds, whether you call it a metaverse or not, as powerful economic engines, as powerful places to apply technology, or incredibly powerful spaces for people to interact and collaborate—that we were talking about in 2014. I wrote all of those white papers and decks. Because look, Second Life taught us all that. And so the notion that Facebook could apply its scale to that problem? Absolutely, we were talking about that.
“Deciding to brand it all as a story around the Metaverse, that ultimately came later.”
Perhaps not much later: A year after Ondrejka departed, Oculus’s then-CTO John Carmack was openly talking about early metaverse plans in the works at Oculus (still a separate brand from its parent company, Facebook). In 2015, metaverse developer Joyce Bettencourt recorded an off-the-cuff chat with Carmack at an Oculus dev conference.
“I fought against us staffing up the metaverse team at Oculus because I thought that was going to be a disaster because we don't know what we're doing well enough yet,” he told her. “That's always a problem with a well-funded company. It's like, ‘Let's put 30 people on this problem and see what happens.’”
Carmack then mentioned that the team at Meta still wasn't clear what metaverse actually even meant:
“‘Metaverse’ means different things to different people, and you need clarity of purpose. And I tried to get some of that. ‘What exactly do we mean?’ And there was still lots of hand-waving.”
If Facebook's purchase of Oculus set the company on the path to Meta, it also led to a chain of unintended, painfully ironic consequences.
As I mention in Chapter 2, the Facebook acquisition of Oculus, led by Second Life cofounder Cory Ondrejka, sparked a ferocious buzz around VR in Silicon Valley. That in turn led Linden Lab to make its Second Life spinoff, Sansar, a VR-focused product—a costly, disastrous move that ultimately led to Linden Lab being sold.
The other unintended consequence is even more painful and continues to linger over the entire tech industry.
Shortly after the Oculus purchase was announced, esteemed academic danah boyd, a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, published a much-discussed opinion piece in the online business site Quartz, proactively entitled: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?”
In it, danah brought up an earlier study she had published that strongly suggested VR tended to make women nauseous. It began when she was a grad student given a chance to try out an early VR demo:
And then I promptly vomited.
Hardly an obscure researcher, danah is a widely and frequently cited expert in tech and mainstream media, especially around her work on teens and social networks.
That VR can cause nausea has been fairly well known for decades—it was reported by military researchers as far back as the 1960s, who noticed it among some volunteers testing early flight simulators. However, it's often attributed to poor graphics or how the sensation of motion is displayed. Any variation in VR nausea based on gender is usually explained away by pointing out that males tend to play 3D video games more than females, and are therefore better acclimated to immersive virtual reality.
But what danah boyd discovered went deeper than that. She noted, for instance, that a difference around experiencing 3D was even observable in trans people at a gender clinic in the Netherlands—and that it also influenced thinking about 3D:
Although there was variability across the board, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on…. I'd posit that the problems of nausea and simulator sickness that many people report when using VR headsets go deeper than pixel persistence and latency rates.
Emphasis mine, because it bears repeating: As I read it, danah's research suggests that the different responses to VR based on gender happen at the hormonal level, and therefore, may not be addressable by technical improvements.
danah ended her essay with a call for researchers to follow up on her findings around biology and VR: “In other words, are systems like Oculus fundamentally (if inadvertently) sexist in their design?” It was not a condemnation of VR per se, but a call for researchers working in the technology to explore her findings.
“I want folks to take what I did and push it further,” as danah told me at the time. “If researchers start to investigate this issue, I'll be ecstatic.”
On this point, she has not been made very ecstatic.
Few if any VR industry leaders contacted her after the Quartz essay was published, she told me; nor later in 2017, after a study published in Experimental Brain Research confirmed danah's findings of nausea propensity based on gender.
Reached in late 2022 for this book, danah tells me that the team developing HoloLens, the augmented reality headset owned by Microsoft, had been probing at the questions she raised.
However, she doesn't recall anyone from Oculus or Meta ever approaching her: “To my knowledge, they did not pursue any of those research questions.”
I've repeatedly asked Meta about this and received no reply. In 2017, I asked John Carmack himself if the company had tested its product by gender to address the issues that danah had raised. He wasn't sure:
“I'm not involved with any of our user studies,” Carmack told me then, “so I don't have any insight there.” He pointed me to Oculus’s PR contact, but my question to them yielded no answer.
“I mean, danah's a friend, so of course I knew about it,” Cory Ondrejka tells me now. He agrees that more studies on this topic are needed:
“danah's research was super early on this one, and the opportunity for Meta has always been to have a scale of resources to be able to do much deeper research on this question,” as he puts it.
“This is all still such an early moment in VR, there are tons of things we don't understand about how people react to this. If I was ever in charge of VR stuff again, I would be paying for these studies.”
I cannot overstress how mind-boggling an oversight on Meta's part this is.
The company paid $2 billion for a piece of consumer-facing technology that reputable research suggests tends to make half the population literally vomit.
Then spent tens of billions more to bring it to market anyway.
Then Silicon Valley followed suit, investing tens of billions still further, an entire industry sprung up around it, nearly all of it ignoring evidence that the whole enterprise was built on sand. Usually it seems impossible to calculate the opportunity cost of unconscious gender bias, but in this specific case, the price tag approaches $100 billion.
The consumer market they got from this investment? As of early 2023, the Quest 2 has an estimated install base of 18 million—significantly smaller than the install base of the leading video game consoles, let alone the leading smartphones.
This is not to impugn the entirety of VR as an industry, I should add. Virtual reality has many proven and valuable use cases, including physical therapy, meditation, and, of course, use by some people in metaverse platforms.
Then again, if VR was developed with danah boyd’s cautionary words in mind, it would likely be in a much more sustainable state. And Meta probably would not have spent billions in the hope that VR would evolve into the next great platform after smartphones.
Cory Ondrejka was not the sole Second Life veteran to shape Meta's course, for even during his time running the mobile division, he helped recruit numerous developers who worked under him at Linden Lab to join the Facebook team. Among them was Jim Purbrick, a British developer who loved the virtual world so much, he'd spend many hours of his spare time developing various game projects under an alias avatar.
Shortly after the Oculus acquisition, Purbrick joined Facebook's VR team. Management was interested in evolving the device beyond a gamer focus to support social applications.
Before Bosworth took over Meta's XR strategy, Purbrick remembers many leaders at Oculus with aspirational metaverse plans and “glorious visions” of its future—Bosworth synthesizing these into something like a workable product roadmap.
For Purbrick, this hit very different from his days with Philip Rosedale at Linden Lab:
“Philip was very much, ‘Here's the awesome vision, let's go!’ Inspiring people to follow the dreams and plans he had for virtual worlds and VR from years ago.”
With Facebook, the tone was much different: “‘This is a strategic acquisition.’ Certainly when I was involved it was not like the grand vision for Facebook. It was like, ‘OK, we spent a load of money on Instagram, we spent a load of money on Oculus, which is part of our long-term bet that they're doing interesting stuff for future interfaces.’”
Still, team members clamored to hear best practices from Purbrick based on his time at Second Life. Like Ondrejka, he gave many presentations on Second Life to Oculus team members.
It didn't quite take, in part because so many staffers were being shifted around so rapidly:
“The people involved were rotating through so quickly,” as Purbrick remembers it. “It almost felt like you'd help people get up to speed and learn about this stuff, and there'd be somebody else [who replaced them]. So it always felt like it wasn't really enough time for people to understand what was going on.”
What Purbrick says now echoes what another Facebook veteran with deep knowledge of Horizon Worlds, the company's first metaverse platform, told me in July 2021:
“With the average employee tenure being two years or so, and the need to expand teams at rapid rates, it's very difficult to make decisions and stick to a single vision because things are always changing,” as they put it. “This [turnover] leads to teams at Facebook fast following on trends,” they added. “You can see it when you look at Horizon and Rec Room.”
A metaverse platform launched in 2016, Rec Room was made available for the Quest 2 in late 2020, just months before Horizon went into open beta. Horizon's expressive if legless avatars have a notable resemblance to those of Rec Room. However, with its powerful content creation tools and multiplatform support (it can be played on mobile and game consoles, in addition to VR), Rec Room rapidly gained a large following among Quest users.
By early 2022, according to Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room, the platform had 3 million VR-based monthly active users and—in an apparent tweak at Meta—told me, “A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2.”
In other words, Rec Room was by then vastly more popular than Meta's Horizon—on Meta's own device.
Back to my Meta insider and the state of Horizon in 2021:
“[N]ew leaders have been coming onto the Horizon project with new ideas to be prioritized, or the development team would be tasked with re-doing a feature made years beforehand.”
This surprised me then and still does to this day. Zuckerberg publicly expressed his desire to build metaverse-like technology at least as far back as during the acquisition of Oculus Rift in 2014. “One day,” he announced then, “we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.”
His team evinced similar enthusiasm. In November 2021, developers at Blind, an anonymous community app for employees, surveyed 1,120 staffers at Meta about Zuckerberg's metaverse plans. Asked if Meta would successfully build the Metaverse, over 75 percent said Yes; questioned whether they believed, as Zuckerberg predicted, that 1 billion people would be in the Metaverse by 2030, 67 percent answered Yes.
Yet apparently this vision staggered forward without any actual sight. The open beta launch of Horizon Worlds in late 2021 enforced that sense in the worst way possible.
Soon after launch, Horizon Worlds was barraged by a slew of bad press when a female journalist reported being sexually assaulted in the virtual world, with male avatars aggressively grinding up against her own avatar almost immediately after she logged into the platform.
The violation was horrible but completely predictable. Understanding and preparing for avatar-to-avatar harassment, especially directed at female avatars, has been a recurring virtual world challenge for literally decades.
Was no one on the team experienced enough to anticipate it?
As I soon learned, however, Meta was warned this would happen, many times—it was a recurring theme in internal talks given by Jim Purbrick. But somehow, his warnings, recommendations, and best practice summaries were not centered:
“I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row,” Jim Purbrick told me with evident frustration. “I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly.”
My Tiny Life is Julian Dibbell's classic account of virtual world sexual assault from the 1990s; yes, the problem has been well-known and documented for that long. (That same book also inspired me, as a very young writer, to consider the possibility of embedded avatar-based journalism.)
“There are a lot of griefing and bullying behaviors that [Meta] seems somewhat slow to respond to,” Cory Ondrejka puts it tactfully. “And that's just failing to have learned from prior lessons.”
In retrospect, I should have known how wildly off course Mark Zuckerberg would take the Metaverse when the avatars started warning me of trouble in 2009.
That's when I began getting reports that Second Life users were creating Facebook accounts for their avatars—and Facebook the company was summarily deleting them. Some SLers received this helpfully unhelpful system message from the community management team:
“Facebook is built around real world interactions. Operating under an alias detracts from the value of the system as a whole.”
The avatar deletions were not due to overzealous policy enforcement but reflected a core principle of Facebook as a corporation. When the company filed with the U.S. government to become a public company in 2012, this philosophy was emblazoned within the stock filing itself:
Authentic identity is core to the Facebook experience, and we believe that it is central to the future of the web. Our terms of service require you to use your real name and we encourage you to be your true self online, enabling us and Platform developers to provide you with more personalized experiences.
It's hard to understate how antithetical this premise is to the core concept of virtual worlds and the Metaverse since conception, where avatars are richly varied but almost always anonymous.
It took Facebook's enforcement of its philosophy, and Second Life users’ resistance to it, to illustrate that point to me in painful detail.
At the time, Facebook seemed like the best way for Second Life to grow its user base, by connecting dedicated users sharing virtual world–related content with their friends network. While the social network forbade people from creating avatar-based profiles, they were perfectly free to create Facebook group pages devoted to their second life. So why shouldn't virtual world fans share their avatar content on Facebook?
Most Second Life users I talked to were unconvinced:
“Creating a Facebook page for your avatar doesn't seem like much help to me—the point of pseudonyms is anonymity,” as Graywolf Midnight, a longtime furry avatar, put it to me. “If I create a Facebook page for Graywolf Midnight, it's very easy to find out who owns the page. That defeats the point of pseudonyms in the first place.”
Graywolf, by the way, is itself a pseudonym, because—in a perfect illustration of the larger point—the metaverse user I am citing has been doxxed in real life through searches of their genuine avatar name.
Nevertheless, I kept forcefully advocating for Facebook integration back then. Until a woman who read my blog quietly messaged me and torched that notion to the ground. “You don't understand,” she explained. “I have a friend in Second Life who uses it as her social escape valve, because she's hiding from her abusive husband. He's trying to find her. She can't share anything on Facebook, because he'll use it to track her down. She once mentioned playing an MMO on Facebook. Her husband figured out her username and started stalking her in the game.”
Up until then, my blithe and sheltered privilege as a straight male in California (speaking of bias!) had blinded me to that reality. Not just for women fleeing abuse, but for racial and religious minorities, LGBT people, and on and on, especially those people living in parts of the world where their identity is actively hated, it is imperative to keep much of their expression and identity secret, hidden under the guise of an avatar.
Meta's confusion over avatars is best illustrated by the strangely avatarized version of Mark Zuckerberg himself—the one that went viral in 2022, with huge, childlike eyes worthy of a Margaret Keane painting.
The backlash and ridicule that followed was so fierce, it even seemed to hurt Meta's stock price. While market fluctuations are impelled by many factors, the simple fact is that Meta's share price was $181 on the evening of August 15th, 2022, when the big-eyed announcement was unveiled. By August 19—with no other obvious factor at play, beyond the social virality of Mark Zuckerberg's bizarre avatar—Meta's share price had fallen to $167.
Scrambling in response to such a storm of Internet snark, Zuckerberg hastily posted a new update to his Facebook wall, depicting a much more detailed and realistic version of his avatar, which looked even more like Zuckerberg IRL.
This follow-up confirmed that Meta really did seem to believe that, ideally, metaverse platform avatars should resemble their real-world users as much as possible.
For newcomers to metaverse platforms, this is a common assumption, enforced by mainstream press coverage, which tends to cover virtual world events involving real-life celebrities—for instance, Travis Scott in Fortnite or Lil Nas X in Roblox (more on them in Chapter 10). For occasions like a mixed-reality concert, it does make sense for the avatar to resemble their real-life owner.
But this is actually the exception. Overwhelmingly, metaverse platform users do not prefer avatars based on their real-life appearance—even when the internal tools to customize them that way exist.
This should have been clear to Meta even before the company began formulating its approach to avatars. By then, the most popular metaverse platforms’ avatars were very much not architected to be mirror images of their users—Minecraft and Roblox with its blocky or LEGO-like avatars, Fortnite with its expressively stylized cartoonish characters—or to consider a VR-centric example, the floating marionette-esque avatars of Rec Room.
According to a survey of hundreds of thousands of gamers conducted by Nick Yee and his Quantic Foundry firm, about 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars (and about 1 in 10 females choose male avatars).
Why did Meta design avatars to look like their real-life owner, when so many people don't even want avatars that share their real-life gender?
As we'll explore in later chapters, the popularity of nonrealistic avatars reflects the internal motivations of people who most enjoy metaverse platforms—especially the very young, who comprise their core user base: They are in virtual worlds where they can explore and create and experiment with identity, which they are still developing there, and in their own lives.
So it was a mystery how Meta went ahead with mirror-world avatars anyway. I had assumed it was the consequence of deep market research, with thousands of volunteers reviewing dozens of avatar options and customization suites.
An insider recently told me the reason was simpler than that:
“As far as looking like your real life [appearance],” they explained, “the thinking behind that was that people will be less inclined to harass others. Same idea behind only having one profile to your name, and your real name.”
In other words, the developers applied the Facebook identity model to their metaverse platform—even though Facebook itself is rife with harassment.
“[Everybody] operating in a world of metaversal punditry comes to assume you want a single singular permanent identity and you want that singular permanent identity to kind of look like you,” Cory Ondrejka observes now. “And we know from 50 years of online communities, that that's wildly untrue.
“The reality is that people have roles, people have modes of interaction. They don't want to always show up as themselves either by name or by appearance. What we saw in Second Life is that many people just put on outfits like clothing. And even in situations like experiments with IBM where it was initially thought, well, you know, for serious business to work, you got to show up wearing a business suit—not a fire dragon. And then it turns out the fire dragon is just as welcome into the business community and everything works fine.”
During his time at Meta, I wonder if Cory Ondrejka had ever told Mark Zuckerberg about some of the avatars Cory created for himself in Second Life: They include a floating cartoon sun (the kind you'd see in a Betty Boop short), a Transformers-type robot that could fold itself into a jet, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a 3D rendition of an early 2000s Internet meme. (Long story but look it up.)
At any rate, once again ignoring Ondrejka's learnings from Second Life, Meta positioned its Horizon avatars to be “infantilized human avatars” (in Cory's words), architected to look like their owner.
Ondrejka agrees with my thesis that Meta's design decisions around avatar identity and appearance are baked into its corporate DNA:
“I don't want to speak for Mark or Meta's choices,” as he puts it. “You can look at the public information about Facebook, which has been the notion of having strongly an identity that is one-to-one mapped to your real identity. And doing that helped Facebook grow to the scale it grew. I think the challenge is, it's pretty clear that [this approach] doesn't map to games, to virtual worlds, to 3D spaces.
“But they can figure that out or they won't. That's their journey to go on.”
All these missteps contributed to a muddled product with an unclear purpose or audience.
In February 2022, despite running a spot during that year's Super Bowl—surely the first metaverse platform commercial to run during that event—Meta reported that Horizon Worlds and its live-event component, Horizon Venues, had all of 300,000 monthly active users.
It's difficult to overstate the paucity of those numbers. As I note in Chapter 2, Second Life still amasses nearly 300,000 new signups per month.
It's unclear if Zuckerberg's company is still driving a vision for creating Meta's billion user Metaverse, or how many idealists in leadership remain to shape it.
According to a survey conducted in late 2022 by Blind, confidence in the Metaverse and Meta's efforts around it had dropped sharply over the previous 12 months:
To the statement, “I believe Meta will successfully build the metaverse,” 77 percent of Meta staff had answered in the affirmative. By December 2022, only 50 percent of them answered Yes.
Following Cory Ondrejka to the exit a few years later, Jim Purbrick departed Meta in 2020, near the height of its metaverse ambitions.
A key reason he did so is particularly telling: The company kept demanding that he make work trips from his home in London to San Francisco, to work on the Metaverse there.
At first he convinced his superior to let him work remotely (“We're a VR company, this should be easy!”), but the travel requests kept coming. Unable to justify the environmental cost morally, Purbrick finally bowed out. There are very few if any Linden Lab alumni who remain.
John Carmack, who has envisioned creating the Metaverse since the ’90s—and has frequently and publicly chided Meta's excessively high-level “architecture astronaut” approach to building it—finally resigned his senior consultant role at Meta in late 2022.
That December 2022 Blind survey, by the way, also asked Meta staff if Mark Zuckerberg had clearly explained what the Metaverse even is. Fifty-six percent of his own employees answered No.
As of this writing in early 2023, it's still too early to write off all Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's efforts to make the Metaverse. The company could, with a few judicious moves, regain momentum on that front.
But even if they do, it remains confounding how Meta made so many painful, easily avoidable errors in its construction.
Meta can still change direction to a path that actually gets them closer to their original metaverse ambitions. But it would require radical departures from its current course.
Renowned UX designer and futurist Amber Case (a former fellow at MIT and Harvard's Berkman Center) is skeptical Meta can do so:
“That's like thinking IBM can change its character. [Meta's] such a huge company. Now, you could have a skunk works group, you know, like Wyden & Kennedy had.” (She's referring to the acclaimed advertising agency that cultivated a small independent team to create highly quirky and unique brand campaigns.) “Or like a little research department where they would actually have to make weird stuff.”
We've already touched on how Meta's focus on real-life identity is baked deep into its character. Amber notes how visual UX is too, taking us back to a time when Facebook wasn't the leading social network, trailing far behind one that allowed much more user creativity:
“Facebook's entire ethos, why it won over MySpace, is MySpace allowed you to do anything. It was kind of junky.” She means that users could wildly customize their personal pages, even to the point where many pages were transformed into cluttered monstrosities.
Facebook, by contrast, presented users with a neat and highly constrained profile page, limiting how much an individual user could customize it, while also imposing a uniform format for how they described their background and interests—what Amber calls “the templated-self.”
“Having a templated-self company make an open metaverse doesn't work. They can only make it a closed templated-self metaverse, where you represent yourself as if you're representing yourself on Facebook.”
Amber makes another fascinating suggestion for Meta if it wants to improve its Metaverse plans:
“They'd have to hire a lot of trans people.”
Her reasoning is immediately obvious to me; in every metaverse platform I've worked in and reported on, there's a disproportionately large number of trans people in the active user community. Indeed, as I'll explore in Chapter 7, nearly one in five VRChat users surveyed identified as trans/nonbinary, or otherwise outside traditional male/female categories. (By contrast, in a 2016 study, less than one percent of US citizens were estimated to be trans.)
“When you're trans,” Amber goes on, “you're actively thinking about the shape that represents you, your outward container, and how it doesn't match your inner container. So when trans people go into VR and the Metaverse, they can be anything they want, and it's free and it's fluid. So when they're making these environments, they're much more likely to be creative and allow you to be a horse or a dragon or whatever. Because they understand arbitrarily defined identities, and that you can change them at will.”
Whether or not Meta turns its metaverse efforts into an independent spinoff company that actively recruits nonbinary people, the Internet giant will definitely require confronting the sunk cost fallacy that is the Quest headset line—an impressive piece of hardware, to be sure, but still selling at a glacial pace. And which research suggests (I must say yet again) is a likely deal breaker to roughly half the population.
“Anything that is going to move the world forward, as a social avatar experience, has to be primarily on mobile,” as Philip Rosedale puts it, speaking from painful personal experience.
“And I would also say that to Mr. Zuckerberg, right? Like, I got bad news for you Mark: You're not gonna want to hear this. But your stepping stone to where you want to be steps on a mobile phone. And you better figure that out.”
But perhaps the key realization Meta must make is that the vision of one metaverse platform owned by Meta that somehow amasses a billion users is not even feasible.
At least that's the take of the person who helped set up Facebook to buy a VR company, and in doing so, helped put it on the path to becoming Meta.
“The notion that there is only one virtual world is a little silly,” as Cory Ondrejka puts it to me now. “I think it's going to be many of those things. Some of them will share technology, some of them will share standards…. You would expect providers to work across some of them, you would expect things like payments stored across all of them. They might even share some rendering techniques. But fundamentally, doing mirror worlds, doing really high-fidelity real-world implementation, tends to require very different approaches to meshes and rendering than more game-like environments.
“So no, I was never pushing the singular world [at Meta] and never felt like that was a particularly strong direction.”
It's true that no one virtual world could ever support all the use cases attributed to the Metaverse while appealing to all the people who enjoy immersive experiences. It's why I say the one platform that first meets Neal Stephenson's underlying goal of being as popular as television qualifies as The Metaverse.
The lead candidate to be that, if only in terms of raw user numbers, comes with the most unlikely origin, dismissed for years as trivial. You probably know little about it.
But chances are every single kid in your life knows all too much.