Everything a metaverse needs except the 3-D graphics

October 24, 2022 4:13 AM

Is Taylor Swift doing a better job at building a metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg right now?
posted by signal (31 comments total)

"Well, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg is almost totally failing, yeah. People building metaverse platforms, most of them think it’s a technology question. But it’s really a community and culture question."

posted by box at 5:09 AM on October 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

Taylor Swift - Anti-Hero (official music video)

'Taylor Swift's Midnights off to record-breaking start in US' (Billboard)

'Every song on Taylor Swift's Midnights, explained' (Vox)
posted by box at 5:14 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is ... kind of an ad for "Taylor Swift Has An ARG", despite our general disdain for the Markzaverse.
posted by mhoye at 5:30 AM on October 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

I read it as more of a 'you're wrong about metaverses,' but, if it feels like an ad, maybe pair it with The Atlantic's very tepid review of the album.
posted by box at 5:34 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have to admit this interview made my head hurt. 1500+ words of two people debating what the metaverse actually is will do that to you.

I guess that titling the article "Marketing continues to adapt to new technology" doesn't have the same ring to it.
posted by jeremias at 5:40 AM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Metaverse (Taylor's Version)

I would say to the interviewer and interviewee and Zuckerberg and others: Stop trying to make metaverse happen, it's not going to happen.

In reality, I guess it probably will happen, but it's not going to be because Facebook needed a place to pivot. I think the metaverse will be created by some young person doing something that is not explicitly trying to create the metaverse. So, maybe Taylor Swift.
posted by snofoam at 5:43 AM on October 24, 2022 [14 favorites]

taylor swift is blood-related to thomas pynchon btw
posted by chavenet at 5:54 AM on October 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

ungated version of the main article
posted by chavenet at 6:04 AM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Metaverse (Taylor's Version)
ft. Marky Mark and the Zuck-ey Bunch
posted by hwyengr at 6:11 AM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

snofoam: "I would say to the interviewer and interviewee and Zuckerberg and others: Stop trying to make metaverse happen, it's not going to happen."

I agree with the interviewee that it's already happened for a while: Second Life, Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft.
posted by signal at 6:23 AM on October 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

I read it as more of a 'you're wrong about metaverses

Same here. I was expecting the article to not have any idea what a metaverse is, but the title's premise is actually spot on.

Usually there's always such a stupid focus on the metaverse, as though there's only going to be one all-consuming alternate reality which everyone subscribes to ala Ready Player 1 or any other shitty science fiction story about VR.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:44 AM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Canadian national Sportsnet anchor @SNFaizalKhamisa:
I referenced every track on Taylor Swift's 'Midnight' during our morning Sports broadcast
posted by Superilla at 7:48 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

To me, the whole point is in the line right after the quote in the post title, which can get lost because they broke the text block with an ad, for some reason:

"I love that you asked me to do this, because I’m thinking, Wow, she’s actually bigger than the metaverse."

She has the numbers and the engagement. That's what matters, not the medium. Zuck would kill for that.
posted by martin q blank at 7:54 AM on October 24, 2022

From the article:
I would think there would be a hunger for people who follow Taylor on TikTok or whatever to do it in more of an immersive, 3-D experience.

God, no. Why on earth would anyone think that? These guys are still so obsessed with the idea that there's any sort of innovation in adding cartoon avatars to stuff. It's really the same old drivel Zuck is trying to sell too; I don't see a more nuanced understanding of the metaverse here at all; they're just a bit less hell-bent on insisting on the VR-glasses.

Of course the metaverse in the broadest sense - a mixed reality, where things that happen online also affect things happening in the "real" world and vice versa - already exists, has always existed since the creation of "online". (I've never bought into the online vs real world distinction). The most horrifying example is Q-Anon, but, sure, every fandom too.

But the metaverse-apostles are wedded to the cartoon-avatars. They need us to buy into those, so we'll spend money on stuff for them - virtual clothes, for the avatar to wear, and virtual appartments for the avatar to live in, all paid for with real money (they may still say crypto, but they may have to drop that sooner than the over-all concept). They want to turn us all into the sort of gamer who's addicted to in-app-purchases to level up their character. That's the only vision here.

To which I say, over my cold, dead body. There are a million ways to scam me, because I'm just another one of those suckers born every minute, but this particular one won't be one of them.
posted by sohalt at 8:02 AM on October 24, 2022 [18 favorites]

> "But it’s really a community and culture question."

> She has the numbers and the engagement.

In the Land of Too Much Television, This Nerd Is Queen

Bill Simmons, who hired Rubin at Grantland and later brought her to The Ringer when he started it in 2016, said he had been impressed by her work ethic and enthusiasm.

“When it came to the worlds that we wanted to cover, she was a 10 out of 10,” Simmons said. “She takes this stuff really seriously, which is something that I noticed and that I think the audience notices, too.”

posted by kliuless at 8:16 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I can't get traction with the article. Help me think through this...

Obviously to me communities are like fungus or mushrooms and grow where they can find space. Obviously also to me, a platform becomes ubiquitous for its ability to capture essential interactions and have a deep network of connections to benefit from (applying to Craigslist, Amazon Marketplace and eBay as much as leaving Whatsapp because your chats moved to Signal or Discourse). Classic analysis says 'get adopters on board with a distinguishing killer app' and Zuck thinks it's VR or Augmented Reality...

...but this chat posits para-social interaction with Taylor Swift and the puzzles of their liner notes as a better killer app, right?

Maybe that's right, but also this stuff is ephemeral. Maybe that's right, but the goal is financial expolitation of the hobby time of people in the metaversal systems. I guess Swift has already won.
posted by k3ninho at 9:08 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

...but this chat posits para-social interaction with Taylor Swift and the puzzles of their liner notes as a better killer app, right?

Maybe that's right, but also this stuff is ephemeral.

Also, probably insufficiently scale-able.

but the goal is financial expolitation of the hobby time of people in the metaversal systems.

Not just hobby time! Zuck wants us tp do all our office meetings as cartoon avatars too. Not for nothing, many think that's where he has most profoundly lost the plot. I in contrast think that's the only reason why he might have a sliver of a chance. Clearly no one in their right mind is going to join Zuck's version of the Metaverse unless it's forced upon them, and who has the power to do that? Bosses. Unfortunately, a certain echelon of upper-management seems to have bought into the hype - apparently just because they think it's time for a new tech-profit-bonanza and they can't think of anything else - and they might prop it up for a while just to save face.
posted by sohalt at 9:31 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Today's Dinosaur Comics got it pretty right.
posted by 7segment at 9:46 AM on October 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

By the article’s standard, Meta has a metaverse already: it’s called Facebook, and it contains Taylor Swift-level ARGs and much simpler interactions for those who don’t want to engage as much.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:49 AM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Getting companies to do VR meetings would require companies to actually spend money on their employees, which they're pretty unwilling to do unless there's a concrete benefit.
posted by meowzilla at 10:07 AM on October 24, 2022

My company just spent gobs tearing out all (perfectly working) tv screens, sound systems, and VOIP systems in every meeting space in all their offices across the country so they could install slightly newer tv screens, sound systems, and VOIP systems in all those spaces, all while also trying to tell their employees that it is far too expensive to relabel some bathrooms as gender neutral.

So.

Spending money doesn't seem like it's that big of a hurdle if the executives are into it.
posted by heyitsgogi at 10:20 AM on October 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

Getting companies to do VR meetings would require companies to actually spend money on their employees, which they're pretty unwilling to do unless there's a concrete benefit.

In spite of having lost faith in rationality in general, I do agree that most companies ultimately won't want to waste too much money on that sort of thing, so that should eventually put a damper on it. But right now, they haven't realized that yet, and they are investing, and sunk cost fallacy could drag things out longer than one would like to see.
posted by sohalt at 10:29 AM on October 24, 2022

She has what Zuckerberg does not have. She has a brand and an aesthetic and almost, like, a worldview that literally millions and millions of people—like, they have this world that is in their mind and that they share with people. And that’s something that Zuckerberg doesn’t have..."

Zuckerberg DOES have this though, by the non-technical definitions they give (in order to include TS into the Meta)
He turned the vague, general sense of "we need to be online to connect with people" into a given thing for billions of people and built one of the largest corporations on earth out of it. He precisely DOES have a worldview, founded on having this world in your mind and sharing it with people. Imagine every smartphone in the world was made by one company, and every 8 year old kid was begging their parents for one.

Granted, it is hard for FB to feel like a community or like it has any culture, but it certainly uses one. One that feels or felt like being active and present in social media was necessary to function.
They talk about how Taylor could direct people to a platform, and they would go there, and that makes it metaverse. Facebook is the place people are, that they would be leaving if Taylor directed them to.

For some, the idea of being perpetually online (for better or worse) is synonymous with Meta properties.
posted by shenkerism at 10:39 AM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Granted, it is hard for FB to feel like a community

But what it did have for a while there was ubiquity. Not in the sense that you could use it, but that you effectively had to. People's gatherings were being exclusively arranged on Facebook. Web sites were going Facebook-only. I still run into restaurants that make me squint into a 80% obscured Facebook screen (since I don't have an account) to see what their hours are. Hell, in the Fukushima accident, the best ready ad-hoc way for our scattered survey groups to communicate and coordinate was Facebook like it or not. Not having Facebook was becoming a serious social handicap. To me, that's what a metaverse is, and it has nothing to do with VR glasses.

(Thank god that has mostly gone away)
posted by ctmf at 11:14 AM on October 24, 2022

I haven't read the article but if anyone is making the metaverse happen in VR, it's furries on VRChat. (And as noted above, it's not because they're trying to make the metaverse happen, they're just having fun with it.)

I do think that the VR aspect of the metaverse formulation is doomed to remain niche; too many barriers to adoption, even if headsets have become somewhat more common. The note about FB sans-VR being the dominant social network as a stand-in for the metaverse is accurate; I've managed to not need to use FB much at all, but it definitely had the network effects to become a necessity for a large subset of the population. I really hope we move away from social network centralization, though I'm not holding my breath. It seems like the pattern so far seems to be for the new hotness to slowly replace the old, e.g. TikTok replacing Facebook.
posted by Aleyn at 11:38 AM on October 24, 2022

VRChat previously

> Clearly no one in their right mind is going to join Zuck's version of the Metaverse unless it's forced upon them, and who has the power to do that?

fwiw...
Meta Meets Microsoft

I don’t have much of a company, but I did buy Quest 2’s for the Passport team, and we held one meeting a week in Workrooms. One in particular stands out to me: we made a major decision about the product, and my memory of that decision does not involve me sitting at my desk in Taiwan, but of being in that virtual room. The sense of place and presence was that compelling...

It was my experience with Workrooms that undergirded my argument that Microsoft was the best placed to succeed with virtual reality. Yes, virtual reality entails putting on a headset and leaving your current environment for a virtual one, but that is not so different from leaving your house and going to the office. Moreover, Microsoft’s shift to Teams as its de facto OS meant it was well-placed to deliver company-specific metaverses...

posted by kliuless at 11:56 AM on October 24, 2022

From Au, the main distinction is that Swift isn't using anything with a simulated 3D space. But it's just because that would more closely fit the definition of Metaverse. They don't really establish any reason why Swift would see that as a benefit.

An example I like to use against the "more immersive == better" assumption is texting. Like, texting took off on the exact same device that could connect you to real-time voice chat. A lot of the same things that make a communication channel more immersive are the same things that make it less convenient.
posted by RobotHero at 12:03 PM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think using 3D VR as the definition of either "immersive" or "metaverse" is an unwarranted assumption. Co-creation is enough to completely pull people in, IME, and can happen over very low bandwidth (for some people, some projects).

I hate that there’s so much discussion centering the interests and plans of institutions and not, say, "Here’s some people having fun, you could too!" or "What effect would this have on you? What effect would it have on other people? Are there third order effects on institutions you value?"
posted by clew at 12:29 PM on October 24, 2022

VR makes me extremely sick. I wonder if I would have to go on disability if I were required to be employed in the metaverse/some VR-required workspace?
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:35 PM on October 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

The_Vegetables, one of our disability advocates would be happy to chat with you. You can find them in Virtual Room W.
posted by tigrrrlily at 12:46 PM on October 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

Forgot to link to the reference doc on what is and isn't a Metaverse.
posted by signal at 2:23 PM on October 24, 2022