When Facebook Becomes a Place
The birth of the first internet nation (by 2032)
Facebook was founded in 2002. In 15 years it has signed up more than 1/4 of all humans. In the next 15 years it is poised to become a seemingly physical place, and exert the influence of nations. In this post we’ll explore why, including…
- The raw numbers on Facebook’s influence on daily life.
- A quick timeline of Facebook’s role in bringing VR to the masses.
- Facebook as a country, a religion, a language, a political force.
- Facebook as a place with physical architecture.
In Part 2, we’ll walk through what that world might be like, from entertainment, to shopping, to therapy, to citizenship.
Facebook and your life
Just under a month ago, on June 27, 2017, Mark Zuckerberg and his company Facebook announced the social network had bypassed 2 billion users. As we know, these 2 billion people rely heavily on Facebook…
- …to keep up with the world around them, both news and entertainment. More than 42% of U.S. adults cite Facebook as their primary news source; 800 million people “like” something on Facebook every day; well over 8 billion video views happen on Facebook daily, with live videos showing 3x retention, and 10x comments. Or, as the founder of The Pirate Bay put it, more tangibly:
“And really you can’t opt out of Facebook. I’m not on Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you’re not on Facebook. So it has real life implications.”
- …to keep up with the people they know. Between Messenger and Whatsapp (both Facebook-owned), 60 billion messages are exchanged daily — three times as many as all SMS texts. 3 of the top 4 largest social apps are all under the single Facebook umbrella.
- …as their de facto virtual identity card. As the most populous social network (by far), the Facebook profile also represents the default virtual identifier for an internet user.
- …as Facebook continues to improve in the space, as a destination for product and service discovery.
These details will soon take on new meaning.
Facebook and Virtual Reality (VR), A Quick Recap
Until very recently, we uploaded incredible amounts of data about the world around us online, and viewed them on screens, because there was no way of experiencing all that information in the real world. This is changing, as we outlined in our last post, Why AR/VR are the New Internet UX. Facebook is at the forefront of this change, and combined with its sheer size and influence, has the potential to transform how we live and socialize.
First, let’s get you caught up:
2010: Facebook acquihires the former co-founder and CTO of Linden Lab, creators of the famous pre-VR virtual world Second Life.
2014: Facebook buys Oculus, maker of the pioneering, industry-defining Rift virtual reality headset, for $2B. This acquisition is the earthquake that sets in motion a tsunami of VR-related interest and activity. Facebook effectively told the world “VR is a real thing, you better get on board.” Explaining the investment, Zuckerberg predicted that Oculus could be “the most social platform ever. Immersive, virtual and augmented reality will be part of people’s daily lives.” The other major technology titans didn’t hesitate: every major technology company has VR efforts that Facebook will theoretically be able to piggyback off of.
2014–2016: Facebook continues buying companies with VR applications. They include Wit.AI’s speech recognition, Two Big Ears’ VR immersive audio studio, MSQRD’s video augmentation, and FacioMetric’s face recognition. (Those focused on the relevance of face-tracking/ augmenting just to battle Snapchat are missing the bigger picture.)
2016: Oculus announced new “social games” coming to the platform for Gear VR users, including “the ability to create rooms with friends in Oculus Social. Now you can watch Twitch or Vimeo streams in a room with people you know.”
2017: Facebook announces Spaces, a virtual reality social environment where you can interact with your friends. It is relatively rudimentary, but it is a significant indicator of things likely to come.
While you might look at some of the above and think they are gimmicky or simplistic, you need only read this quote from Zuckerberg himself, just a few months ago (February 2017):
“I just think [VR]’s going to be a 10-year thing. The analogy I always use is, the first smartphones came out in 2003. The BlackBerry and Palm Treo, and it took 10 years to get to a billion units. […] And if we can be on a similar trajectory of anywhere near 10 years for VR and AR, I would feel very good about that…”
“I would ask for the patience of the investor community in doing that, because we’re going to invest a lot in this and it’s not going to […] be really profitable for us for quite a while.”
We’re only 3 years in. This is not something to dismiss due to looking at a 1–5 year window. It is something to seriously consider on a 10–15 year window. The internet as we know it is largely exploited. Facebook is betting on the longer play of owning the new internet — a virtual one, full of even more data and possibility.
Facebook doesn’t want to live in your analog world. It wants you to move farther into its digital one. […] In 10 years, Facebook would like anyone, anywhere, to be able to strap on a virtual reality headset and share moments with friends and family across the world.
Or, As Dan Kaplan of Expontents.co outlined in more detail:
Sure, there are a handful of core virtual reality applications that Facebook probably could and should address (basic telepresence, communication, and media sharing) but the huge money comes if Facebook decides to “let one hundred flowers bloom.”
[…]
Along this trajectory, Facebook, the site, would eventually slip away and get replaced by Facebook, the infrastructure. No, this wouldn’t be a “social layer,” a la Google+, but a fundamental reconsideration of the internet’s fabric.
[…] the fully-realized thing involves projecting your identity via an avatar into virtual space and socializing with other people. It’s far more like an evolved Second Life than it is like a VR Newsfeed.
What’s more, the technology is actually further along than Spaces lets on. Microsoft — which owns 1.3% of Facebook — has proven with its “Holoportation” demonstrations that the technology already exists — albeit through Mixed Reality — to experience a much higher fidelity shared virtual experience.
Now that you’re caught up on Facebook’s virtual reality leadership and potential, let’s add the second part of the puzzle: Facebook’s role in the real world.
Facebook: Ubiquity and Influence
To get a sense of Facebook’s size and influence, it helps to see the numbers in context.
Facebook as a country:
The site has more inhabitants than any country on Earth, and now by a healthy margin at that. It surpassed China in 2015. It is the largest consolidated network of any kind, ever. Period. This may seem like an arbitrary comparison, however given the ubiquity of Facebook, the comparison is apt: everyone you know and meet is on Facebook, and you all spend about one hour on it every single day. Is that so different from the amount of time you spend interacting with “the real world”, away from your own work and chores? It is the largest shared population you are tied to, you experience it almost every day, and it is governed and dynamic.
As the MIT Technology Review wrote back in 2012,
[As a country, Facebook] would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company’s servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it.
Or, from another angle, we can see the impact futurist Ray Kurzweil alludes to, where the virtual spaces we inhabit will unite us more than geography:
“We’re only crowded because we’ve crowded ourselves into cities. […] That’s already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication. We can have workgroups that are spread out. … But ultimately, we’ll have full-immersion virtual reality [that unites us].”
All in the context of a world where cities and movements — political, cultural, environmental — are increasingly more influential than the nations they technically belong to. It is what Alvin Toffler presciently outlined over 30 years ago in his seminal book The Third Wave:
If Singapore with its 2.3 million people is a nation, why not New York City with its 8 million? If Brooklyn had jet bombers would it be a nation? Absurd as they sound, such questions force us to question the notion of nation-hood and will take on a new significance as the Third Wave [of technological society] batters at the very foundations of Second Wave [industrialized] civilization. For one of those foundations was, and is, the nation-state.
Facebook as a religion or language:
The Washington Posts’s data reporter Christopher Ingraham recently wrote:
Two decades ago, the notion that billions of humans would be connected by a single product would have been seen as absurd, unless the “product” in question were, say, a religious text. But now Facebook has more adherents than any religion in the world, with the exception of Christianity — which it’s poised to overtake in just a few years.
There are more Facebook users than speakers of any of the world’s languages, according to Ethnologue, a long-running catalogue of the world’s languages […] Likes, shares, comments and friend requests are becoming the closest thing humanity has to a universal tongue.
Facebook as a political force,
is where you may find the most recognizable and literal thought exercise.
First, hand in hand with its business motivations to bring the other 6 billion non-Facebook users into the fold, is a goal to bring the entire world online. Facebook has invested heavily in innovative new methods of bringing internet to the developing world, and Zuckerberg just last year spoke before Chancellor Angela Merkel at the UN to argue for internet being considered a basic human right. In Zuckerberg’s perfect world, everybody has access to the internet — and, implicitly, also Facebook — by law.
Second, it is no secret that Facebook played a significant role in the latest U.S. election. After initially denying at all costs, it has come around the admitting its role in the explosive rise of Fake News; there are also various “political success stories” from leveraging and applying Facebook’s data to voters, including, ominously, malicious foreign governments. The larger truth is that Facebook has been influencing all aspects of public opinion both before and after Trump, either directly, or — more commonly — indirectly through the content sharing and conversations it enables.
As one of Zuckerberg’s own posts illustrates, the line between Facebook’s concerns and influence, and that of a country, are quickly blurring. NPR recently summed it up:
[Zuckerberg] posted a nearly 6,000-word essay to his page, entitled “Building Global Community.” Many are calling it a “manifesto.” His ambitions are global and his tone, altruistic. Zuckerberg writes: “Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses — like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics.”
Zuckerberg speaks to people who dream of global citizenship, a borderless utopia that many political leaders around the world don’t seem to be offering. “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” he writes.
Finally, there has naturally also been a lot of chatter about Mark Zuckerberg’s political aspirations given all of the above and some of his recent speaking engagements — specifically that he may be angling to run for President of the United States. What is more likely, however, is the theory put forth by former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard: Zuckerberg is behaving exactly like the product-oriented CEO that he is, and trying to understand the world he is now influencing on a much larger scale with his product.
Isn’t it telling that these two perspectives are easily interchangeable?
One is of a CEO running for president, the other of the same CEO — the CEO of a platform supporting and influencing the world’s largest group of people — making an impression on and trying to understand his population.
After all, as the Financial Times noted back in 2014, it was Zuckerberg who said
that power in his generation was ‘moving from countries to companies’. In that statement, he implied that heading up a company such as Facebook could put him on a par with world leaders.
“When Facebook becomes a place”
So let’s talk about Facebook as a place, not unlike how we think of a building, a university campus, or an entire country. In this author’s conversations with Facebook employees, prior to the Oculus acquisition, the idea of architecture had come up in various forms. One that sticks out is looking at Facebook’s network from a physical, architectural perspective: how do all the elements of the network fit together so as to allow the most pleasant form of space and movement, and naturally encourage community through that shared environment.
It is a fascinating thought experiment, however it becomes quite literal once VR is added to the equation. What if Facebook really was a place, enabled by virtual reality?
How would you organize it? Where would the entrance be, and how would it look?
How would you navigate space — at a personal informational level, at a community level, at a national level, at a global level?
These are questions that Facebook designers and engineers are already working on answering. After all, Michael Abrash, the Chief Scientist at Oculus VR, already alluded to what a virtual Facebook will be like:
“You’ll be able to pull the real world into virtual reality so you can pick up your coffee cup [at your desk],” he said. “You’ll be able to map your surroundings so you can stand up and walk around.”
Back in 2015, FastCompany’s Mark Wilson added important detail:
That mapping point might sound familiar: A major PC gaming company named Valve is developing virtual reality hardware with the smartphone manufacturer HTC. Its coup de grâce is its ability to map your room automatically, allowing you to walk around a virtual space without banging your head in your real space.
Oculus Rift is not augmented reality–it is not a Microsoft Hololens, or a Magic Leap that paints a few digital images on top of the real world. Abrash says that you will bring your real coffee cup into the Facebook Matrix and drink it there.
Couple Abrash’s point of view with the fact that Facebook is developing the Parse technology to connect our devices to the cloud and the AI capability to identify the world around us via visual algorithms–and I know I’m sounding loony here–and you have an entire infrastructure that allows you to interact with real physical things inside your fake digital world, just as Abrash teased.
It all leads to Facebook’s 10-year virtual reality conclusion: When our friends are connected, our devices are connected, and our faces are connected, we’ll all trap ourselves within the walls of Facebook, too starry-eyed to ever leave.
So what of architecture in this world? Will it then necessarily be a hybrid of our physical reality and the virtual one we construct?
If your Facebook groups become virtual halls, or brand pages gain virtual sales spaces, how will we get there or move from one to the next? What will exist between? Will there be a “between”? Will we simply teleport across countries, stepping through a virtual door that bridges, for example, your Facebook hub in Toronto and your friend’s profile room in Beijing?
If we thought Skype brought far-away relatives closer, a virtually-enabled Facebook would make distance almost negligible. Imagine every messenger conversation being able to be had face to face, with your choice of backdrop, whether coffee shop or sunny park. Perhaps there would be standard Facebook-approved physical accessories, such as tables and chairs that, when owned by all users involved, would help complete the illusion.
All without asking one of the trickiest questions of all: what will be the laws that govern these places and standards, if any?
These, and many more, are the possibilities we will explore in Part 2 of this post, touching on the specific forms entertainment, shopping, therapy, relationships, travel, and citizenship might take on a VR-enabled Facebook, or — unlikely as it may be —on an upstart network that is able to beat it to the punch.
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