Facebook's 'Metaverse' w/ Paris Marx: October 29, 2021

Ilena talks to Paris Marx, a Canada-based phD student at the University of Auckland, writer and host of the 'Tech Won’t Save Us' podcast about Facebook's 'metaverse'. 

Today, during Facebook’s annual Connect Conference, Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for what he calls a ‘metaverse’. The metaverse will be a social, 3D virtual space where users can share immersive experiences with other people, in real-time. It won’t be built, run or owned exclusively by Facebook. Rather, the company will collaborate with policymakers, experts and industry partners. There are already a wealth of New Zealand companies and creators working in this space, including fashion designers, gaming and VR experience creators, academics and marketers involved. To better reflect this new chapter in the company, Facebook is rebranding to ‘Meta’. This will include a new logo and colour. 

Paris discusses their concern that the rebranding could mean a renewed focus on addressing misinformation and echo chambers, or serves to distract from recent scrutiny that Facebook is under after internal documents were leaked by a whistleblower. They also talk about what the implications might be in who is funding this venture, and how the metaverse sits in a post-Covid, increasingly digitalised world.