Leaping Forward with One Eye Shut:
The Perils of Selective Futuring into the Metaverse
Facebook, like many companies looking to own the future, sees the metaverse as The Next Big Thing, and is making huge investments to try and place itself in the winner’s seat of this new future. Mark Zuckerburg’s recent keynote address was a kind of hyper-corporate future forecast, weaving video scenarios and descriptions of the fantastic (or frightening, depending on who you ask) new worlds they hope to offer in their new incarnation as “Meta, creator of The Metaverse”.
For many, the idea of Facebook owning and controlling this new shared reality platform is terrifying, particularly in the wake of the revelations that the Facebook Papers have provided as to just how uninterested the company is in prioritizing public good over profits. While many have speculated and accused Facebook of creating great harm, the Facebook Papers document in detail that not only does Facebook know how deeply its platforms are harming the world, but that it has developed and abandoned alternatives that reduce harm when they infringed on their prime directive to increase user engagement.
This directive is encoded into the algorithm that is the core of Facebook’s business model and the technology that decides what users see. Algorithms are, in essence, the instructions for how the systems we design work.
We live in a time when our economic algorithms are driving our technological algorithms, which in turn are driving our socio-political algorithms. It is the linking of several complex systems like this that often result in unexpected emergent outcomes never intended by the designers of the systems.
Jaron Lanier, one of the primary inventors, pioneers and evangelists of VR, recently commented on Facebook’s pivot to create the metaverse saying:
“If you run [the metaverse] on a business model that’s similar to the one that Facebook runs on, it’ll destroy humanity. I’m not saying that rhetorically. That is a literal and specific prediction that humanity could not survive that.”
Despite facing growing concerns, scrutiny, and even possible criminal prosecutions, Facebook leadership continues its dedication to its unofficial motto of “Move Fast and Break Things”. In his recent keynote announcing the rebranding and pivot, Zuckerberg made it clear that he continues to cast himself, and Facebook, as fearless pioneers creating a better future for us all:
“With all the scrutiny and public debate, some of you might be wondering why we’re doing this right now. The answer is that I believe that we’re put on this earth to create technology that can make our lives better and I believe that the future won’t be built on its own it will be built by those who are willing to stand up and say this is the future we want. And I’m going to keep pushing and giving everything I’ve got to make this happen.”
Facebook’s visionary VR CTO, John Carmack, who’s usually famous for being an uncensored critic of his own company, backed Mark up on this approach. In Carmack’s keynote that followed Zuckerberg’s he was asked whether he has any concerns about the possible ethical problems that a virtual reality metaverse could create. Carmack responded:
“I don’t buy into the precautionary principle idea…the idea of a speculative harm. I think generally the right thing to do is to wait until harm actually manifests… predicting the future is really hard… I encourage people not to think about the speculative problems” — John Carmack at Meta Connect 2021 virtual Q&A
Carmack’s statement stuck out for a few reasons. First, the idea that we are lacking evidence that Facebook is manifesting harm is pretty astounding, especially as the Facebook Papers have provided thousands of pages of Facebook’s own data documenting the problems it’s created.
Secondly, thinking about the future IS hard, but not impossible, and when your decisions impact billions of people it’s imperative. Companies that have more users than the Catholic Church, and whose disruptions and innovations — while hugely profitable — have been externalizing great costs to the world, have a particular responsibility to attempt to anticipate the unintended outcomes from their investments and algorithms.
Focusing only on the opportunities, and ignoring the potential downsides or unintended impacts, can have grave consequences when you are building platforms that have global reach and influence into our personal, professional and political lives.
FUTURES THINKING: PRINCIPLES & FRAMEWORKS
Thinking about things that don’t yet fully exist is what the Institute for the Future (IFTF) has been doing for over 50 years. IFTF was initially founded in 1968 by a few computer and social scientists working on a primitive early version of the Internet called “The Arpanet”. This “proto-internet” (and “proto-metaverse” really) connected a handful of university computers around the United States to explore how a decentralized data network could help the military maintain its communications resiliency during a nuclear attack.
Quickly these scientists realized there were much wider applications and implications for this kind of data network and began to ask “What if this new type of information network continues to grow and expand? What if people outside of academia and the military started using it as well? How would this change the future?”
Over these past 50 years, as the Internet has transformed how we do nearly everything, IFTF has helped the world not only think about the future, but also HOW to think about the future. It turns out that human beings are not really wired to think about the future, but that we can learn and develop tools to help us think more creatively and strategically about what unprecedented possibilities might be awaiting us down the road.
The first thing to know about futures thinking and the foresight practice is that the future doesn’t yet exist, and therefore no one can predict it. But we can anticipate it, and pre-seed radical possibilities that we’ve never experienced before so that we’re that much more ready for them if and when they actually emerge.
Effective futures thinking is really an application of systems thinking on a longer time horizon, investigating and exploring how interrelated and seemingly unrelated innovations and shifts might coalesce to bring about unexpected possibilities.
And when you are thinking about trying to imagine and develop not just possible futures, but “preferable futures”, as IFTF often is, it’s also very important to remember that there is no singular future, but that for the multitude of futures we imagine, there are multiple perspectives and a wider range of ways that people might experience those futures. There are almost always “winners” and “losers” in new systems, and new power dynamics emerge when systems shift and transform.
Just as it is often difficult for individuals to think about possible futures, it can often be even more difficult for organizations to think about the future in a holistic way that includes the diverse perspectives required to have useful conversations about the future. Large for-profit companies in particular often have an inherent aversion to discussing the possible negative outcomes or implications for the futures they are investing in, focusing their futures conversations primarily on the opportunities for new products, services and growth. Futurists who want to discuss the potential negative outcomes on the environment or society are often not invited back to present to corporate leadership.
To counter these kinds of biases there are a number of tools that IFTF and other futurists use to help ensure we are not turning a blind eye to visions of the future that are uncomfortable to explore and consider. Perhaps the most famous and widely used is the Alternative Futures Framework, created by one of the leading pioneers of futures thinking, Dr. Jim Dator, from the University of Hawaii.
The Alternative Futures framework establishes four categories to explore when developing ideas about the future. Using a framework like this helps us maintain diversity in our perspectives, which can help us see opportunities or possible unexpected or unintended outcomes from our actions that we would otherwise be blind to.
The four Alternative Futures framework categories are: Growth, Constraint, Collapse and Transformation. Typically, we will run our forecasts and assumptions through each of these archetypes to generate a richer set of scenarios to consider and contrast.
This is just one tool of many that futurists use to help expand people’s thinking about the future. The real product of futures thinking is not to predict the future, but transforming how we think about the future and expanding how we as individuals or organizations might respond to a variety of possibilities, in order to build deeper self-knowledge in the present and develop agility and resilience to better adapt to a rapidly changing world.
EXPANDING PERSPECTIVES WITH THE METAVERSE
One of the most exciting applications for virtual reality as a tool to imagine, model and visualize information is the potential to make visible the increasingly complex and interrelated systems that make up our world and that futures thinkers seek to anticipate, explore and question.
VR as a world-building medium allows us to not only take ideas about the future and simulate them as richly rendered 3D environments, but also allows us to step into these provocative simulations with other people to experience, test, question and iterate on new possibilities that may not have been obvious simply by reading about them. The forecasts and scenarios that futures work creates are not only given dimensionality in virtual reality, but add the ability to explore and interrogate our assumptions from a more embodied, social, and human perspective.
In 2017, our team in the IFTF Emerging Media Lab created a VR experience called SimTainer, which allowed participants to explore future scenarios around distributed infrastructure in a world of extreme climate volatility. This experience took place entirely inside of a real-world shipping container, which transformed into a medical clinic, micro-apartment and vertical farm at various points throughout the experience. While the notion of living or growing food inside a shipping container might feel inaccessibly alien as an abstract idea, seeing the possibility in front of you with your own eyes brings this potential to life in ways that are immediate and undeniable.
The idea of “The Metaverse” as a singular concept describing shared VR worlds is useful to help us talk about these emerging technological capacities, but it can also be misleading. I often like to refer to the “Meta-meta-metaverse” to help people think more expansively and inclusively about it, and recognize that the metaverse we actually get will inevitably integrate a wide range of existing and yet-to-be-created technologies, platforms, and human communities. Just as “The Internet” is less of a singular container and more of an expanding network of networks, “The Metaverse” will also be highly emergent, diverse and distributed in its formation and development.
As with all forms of media that can be used both for escapism or truth seeking, the Metaverse does not need to be relegated to entertainment and distraction, but with intentional cultivation can become places to develop new perspectives. And as the metaverse evolves to represent data that is more personally relevant and actionable than the fantasy data of games and demos, the possibility to use these new perceptual mediums to expand our understanding of our real world, and each other, grows profoundly.
At its best, the metaverse could not only be a place for spectacular, otherwise impossible experiences, but a way to explore otherwise impossible perspectives on our “meatverse” world in the past, present and future.
THE TYRANNY OF PLAYER ONE (& THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE METAVERSE)
In our pre-metaverse history, we’ve relied largely on science fiction to help us collectively imagine possible and far-out futures. Science fiction throws relatable characters into provocative and compelling scenarios, helping us explore what it might be like to exist in these worlds.
As we know, many of the most impactful technological innovations of our lifetime have been inspired by science fiction. While much has been written about Neil Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash coining the term “Metaverse”, Ernest Cline’s “Ready Play One” has also had a major influence on how the world, and specifically Mark Zuckerberg, sees this future of a universe of shared virtual worlds.
Ready Player One is a highly enjoyable version of the classic hero’s journey tale of a poor young boy’s triumphant rise from obscurity to epic importance. Our hero [spoiler alert] not only defeats the evil empire and gets the girl, but also wins a global competition to gain personal control of the world’s most valuable technology platform, “The Oasis”.
In Cline’s speculative futures world, The Oasis is the world’s most valuable company and technology platform, which has absorbed not only all other virtual world platforms, but taken over many of the functions of civil society (such as education). Fortunately, this mega-meta-monopoly is run by a brilliant and benevolent dictator who created, owns and controls it, and upon his death launches his final game to the world: a set of puzzles that stump the world for years, with ownership of The Oasis as the grand prize.
It’s not hard to see why this story might resonate with Mark Zuckerberg, who gave the book to new employees of his VR development teams as an onboarding manual for building the future.
Who doesn’t want to see themselves as the hero to their own story? But reality is not simply a hero’s journey, it is actually a collective journey. While it can be thrilling to imagine yourself as an underdog who rightly earned their place in the driver’s seat of a system that contains and controls the bulk of humanity, the realities of any one person having that much control has its own set of mythologies to warn us of the dangers that can ensue.
We are in many ways the “hero” of our own lives, but other people are not video game characters. Life is not a video game with endless replays, and we must live with the decisions we make and the futures we choose to pursue.
THE EXPANDING FUTURES OF THE META-META-METAVERSE
For those who are afraid of a future where Facebook does win the Metaverse, it’s important to remember that this latest maneuver is as much a hail mary pass as it is a strategic pivot.
As Mark Zuckerberg positions this dramatic corporate rebrand as visionary, he’s also motivated by the increasingly unstable position that Facebook holds in its traditional markets. In addition to the external pressures, public scrutiny, and potential government interventions, Facebook is also facing the most terrifying existential threat of any business: a decreasing user base, with daunting data showing that the next generation of young people find Facebook increasingly uncool.
For a company whose sole core business model depends entirely on growing a user base from which they can extract behavioral data, this is a potential death spiral. Apple recently accelerated the pressure on Facebook’s core revenue source when it gave over 1 billion iPhone users the opportunity to turn off the technological spigots that underlie Facebook’s endless harvest of personal data.
Through the lens of the Alternative Futures Framework mentioned earlier, we might reframe the Meta rebrand as Mark attempting to pass off their old GROWTH scenario as a TRANSFORMATION scenario, in hopes of navigating past the many CONSTRAINT scenarios posed by competitors, critics, and government regulators, and staving off the COLLAPSE scenarios posed by their externalized impacts on everything from the mental health of teens to our democratic institutions.
While they did capture the metaverse spotlight for the recent news cycles, Facebook is also facing a daunting field of competitors, many of whom have significant headstarts. It’s uncertain if Meta will be able to catch up to existing “metaverses” that have huge youth user bases like Roblox or Fortnite, or compete with companies like Microsoft who already have extensive ecosystems and enterprise client bases.
As we know, the future comes fast, but we have time, and we need to make time, to consider not only the wondrous futures that the metaverse might create, but also how it may grow, constrain, transform — or collapse — our shared human communities.
To help facilitate these types of conversations, IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab is launching The Metaverse Perspectives Series to bring together a diverse group of experts, artists, evangelists, critics, and futurists to share, discuss and challenge perspectives on what this next big paradigm shift could mean for humanity — both now, and in the future. We hope you’ll join us.
Contact eml@iftf.org for more information.
Toshi Anders Hoo
Director of the Emerging Media Lab at Institute for the Future
Toshi Anders Hoo is an award winning filmmaker, thought leader and creative technologist whose work has been featured around the world including the United Nations, TED, The Smithsonian and The Dubai Museum of the Future. IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab researches and prototypes the future of human connection, communication and collaboration through the lens of emerging technologies. IFTF is the world’s longest running futures research organization and has been helping the world think more creatively and strategically about long term futures since 1968.
