Ready Player Zuck
The next device wants to be your whole world.
This week was Meta Connect, the company's yearly showcase of its newest gadgets and plans. Personally, I have not been a big fan of Zuck's direction over the past decade. In the late 2010s, VR was largely a quick bubble that everyone thought would be the future of remote meetings, but in the end it was just too much overhead. Zoom was simpler, cheaper, and got the job done. But Zuck has stayed weirdly committed to his metaverse that is basically the OASIS from the dystopian novel Ready Player One.
Why? Well Meta's choices make a lot of sense if you step back and take a look at the whole field. Most tech companies today are in the business of inserting themselves between you and any product or direct human connection. Chatting, scheduling, work meetings, dating, planning a vacation, sharing photos with your family and friends after your vacation - they want you to connect in every way with everyone you know through that device and all the apps on it. That's the industry right now, but note that Apple and Google are especially untouchable currently because it doesn't matter which app you use, you do it all on your smartphone, and the device comes from one of them - unless you're one of those people of rare yet questionable conviction rocking a BlackBerry in 2026 - if so, rock on!
Building the next big app could make you a millionaire or even a billionaire like Zuck, but he doesn't want to build the next big app. He wants to build the next device that everyone else's apps are running on. What comes after the smartphone? Meta is attempting to answer this with a pair of VR glasses that are only 100 grams. You could comfortably watch a movie in a virtual movie theatre while you are flying from New York to London. Your noise-cancelling headphones really let you disconnect from the reality around you and escape in Meta's constructed reality tailored precisely to your senses for maximum comfort and minimal travel anxiety. Sounds pretty great. Right?
I'd love that device for a nine hour transatlantic flight, no doubt, but I found myself wondering about a future with devices like this in everyone's pockets. As a species we are not great at moderation. As adults we know not to eat candy for every meal because, though it will taste good, we won't feel well later - a lesson we learn on Halloween when we are very young and eat half our trick or treat bag in one sitting even though our parents said 'you don't want to do that'. But the thing about social media, AI, and many new emerging technologies is there won't be a canary in the coal mine. There are no wise adults who learned this lesson long ago who mercifully stop you at the point where you will just learn a lesson and not get truly sick.
If there was a really comfortable virtual world, would you still want to spend time in the real one? If you spent all your time there, what would you become?