Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland

This article was originally posted on site: nymag.com

Written By: Paul Murray

In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.

Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.

It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?

The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs?

Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!

Once we’re plugged in, Meta will have unparalleled access to users’ lives, even the parts the company is not now surveilling. Giving a presentation, meeting your buddies, sitting around watching TV — all of it will be coming through your headset. It’s a hypermonopoly, a metamonopoly. Zuckerberg doesn’t just want a lock on online experience; he’s planning to move all of experience online.

So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold — nowhere close to his goal of a billion users. On March 14, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was laying off around 10,000 workers, joining the 11,000 laid off four months earlier.

On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be lining up to join the misfits still populating it. Now that I’m away from my social network, though, I realize how much heavy lifting was being done by the brief, bantering, checking-in conversations I used to have with my friends and neighbors. So I’m determined to find the metaverse’s true believers, those left behind when the rest of fickle reality has moved on. They may not be able to lend me a spatula, but I’ve decided that, for now at least, these will be my people.

In Dublin, my brother-in-law comes to the airport at 5 a.m. to pick us up. In the days that follow, I take a lot of pleasure from seeing my son running around outside with his buddies. They’re constantly agitating to come in and play the Switch, but if we stand firm, they eventually give up and find something analog to do. If we can give him just one more year, we tell each other, one more year of being a kid, before his friends all get phones and he has to get one too …

“The greatest poverty,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens, “is not to live in a physical world.” Mark Zuckerberg has bet his fortune that the opposite is true. So far, however, it hasn’t paid out. The Quest has been a failure; the consensus is that the technology simply isn’t good enough yet to lure people away from their PlayStations.

Still, Zuckerberg is nothing but tenacious, and he’s playing the long game. The Quest 3 is coming — maybe that’ll be the one that catches on. Already, to add to the personal info you’ve uploaded to Facebook, Meta can track your eye movements and facial movements. Before long, you’ll have no need to go outside or even, perhaps, to stay awake; your meta-self, AI enabled, will do the working and the playing for you, and you can simply lie down, close your eyes, and dream of walking through far-off temples with the friends you used to have.

My wife wanted me to leave the Quest behind, but I brought it back. Unpacking, I think about jumping into the metaverse one last time — I never really got to say good-bye to the people I met there. Before I can switch it on, there’s a knock at the door. It’s our neighbors, inviting us to their house to watch the World Cup final.

“There’s beer,” they say.

“Beer? In your actual house?”

They laugh. Yes, in the house, for real.

It seems like the whole street is there. Being in a room full of friendly faces is almost overwhelming. “How was America?” they ask. Where can I begin? “There were two dog bakeries,” I say.

But that’s as far as I get. Then the whistle blows and the game begins.