In 2021, the company formerly known as Facebook announced their intention to focus on The Metaverse, an obviously stupid idea. Commentators were and continue to be baffled by the decision. In this post, I will argue that their decision actually makes perfect sense. It is the logical and inevitable conclusion in the online economy the tech industry has created.
Background
Most observers divide the history of the internet into two parts, creatively named Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (though blockchain enthusiasts, like many before them, have attempted to claim their own technological boondoggle as the beginning of Web 3.0. It won't stick). Web 1.0 was an online world of websites like this one, in which content was written by the site owners and distributed for consumption. In Web 2.0, websites became participatory and interactive. Their content became user-generated, like social media. The internet moved away from blogs and towards platforms.
Writing a lot of content is a lot of work, creating a natural soft limit to the size of websites in the Web 1.0 model. This meant there were many websites. Aggregators and discovery engines--some of which eventually transitioned to modern social media sites--allowed users to explore and discover them. In Web 2.0, website owners do not have to produce content. Instead, they attract users who will produce it for free. The more users they attract, the more content they have and the bigger they grow. This shift fundamentally changed the economics of the internet in many ways. It allowed for the giants that have come to dominate today's internet. Virtually every huge website is a platform for other people's content. Users began spending more time on fewer websites, and once a company has enough people's attention, we all know what they do with it.
Advertising and the Attention Economy
Obviously, advertising on the internet is as old as the internet, but as fewer websites dominate more of the internet, advertising becomes increasingly profitable because they can increase the quantity and, perhaps less obviously, the quality of ads.
Quantity is straightforward. More eyeballs = more ads = more money. Quality, however, comes from targeting. When choosing where to put an advertisement for binoculars, companies would rather show the ad to a community of birdwatchers than to a Jane Austen fan club. As participatory websites require users to browse and add content, the websites can learn about users' interests, and personalize ads directly to the user.
These ever-growing internet companies realized they could profit not just from showing personalized ads to their users, but from selling information about their users to other advertisers so that they too could make personalized ads. Soon, companies dedicated specifically to selling user data called data brokers were born. These companies operate with little to no regulatory oversight, and are a major economic force on the modern internet. Major players, such as Acxiom, claim to have profiles on 2.5 billion people, or roughly half of adult human beings in existence.
As the amount of data on users explodes in size, each singular data point decreases in value. Web companies whose business models depend on advertising/tracking (all of them) that are addicted to growth must therefore find ways to harvest more from their users.
This inflation doesn't only affect the companies, but the users, too. "Content creators" (as we've dehumanizingly decided to call the very cool and creative fields of writing, video production, etc.), whose revenue also comes from advertising, also have to compete for attention. If content creators hope to make a living from their work as the amount of total interaction increases, they have to interact with more and more users as the total value of each interaction decreases.
This inflation has led to countless innovations in the only thing Silicon Valley is actually good at: increasing engagement while collecting data on their users, or, alternatively, harvesting human life.
Harvesting Human Life
In order to more efficiently harvest human life, platforms with longer form content (Metafilter, Digg, Reddit, etc.) have given way to increasingly shorter form content (Twitter, Vine, TikTok, etc.). Even longer form content platforms like YouTube are adding features like YouTube Shorts to compete.
Shortening the content has allowed companies to create more interactions, but companies have also figured out how to increase the duration of these consumption sessions by implementing the infamous content recommendations algorithms, often referred to as "the algorithm." Tech companies employ thousands of data scientists to figure out how to increase the likelihood of users staying on their platform longer by recommending or autoplaying the perfect next video. These companies have learned that negative emotions like anger and outrage drive the most engagement. This single facet of the human life harvesting machine has done enough harm that it will surely be the subject of its own post in the future.
Between its algorithmic recommendations and barrage of short interactions, TikTok is the apotheosis of an app intended for the sole purpose of harvesting human life. The design is frenetic, addictive, and requires absolutely no effort from its users. It feeds users as many videos as possible as quickly as possible. From the content consumer's perspective, it lulls you into this trance of empty consumption, perpetually one more video away from closing the app. From a creator's perspective, each video lets you roll the dice on going viral, and the sheer amount of videos watched on TikTok means a video from any user can actually get significant attention. As a result, TikTok has 1,200,000,000 monthly users, or roughly 15% of humanity.
The Metaverse
Facebook, once the platform with the most monthly users, has fallen behind with roughly 266,000,000 monthly users. The capitalist addiction to perpetual growth requires that they expand, but they have run into a problem; the space is getting crowded. There is so much competition for harvesting life, they have decided to do the only thing they can think of - create a second, artificial life for them to harvest. It is both perfectly logical and an act of desperation. The Metaverse would allow for incredibly high value harvesting, since every single nuance of every movement can be painstakingly recorded. If you ignore the fact that it sucks, the Metaverse is a great idea. Obviously, I hope it fails, but whatever happens, its existence is a sign that the attention economy is reaching some sort of inflection point.
This is the first post in the Attention Economy series. Click here for the second one.