Meta had a big news day yesterday, showing off its new Quest Pro headset meant to push virtual reality tech forward to the center of our digital lives. Meta has also, as you might have noticed, had a big few news weeks — or months even — not all of it positive. There was the hiring freeze. And the FTC lawsuit. And the pushy memos that seemed to indicate the company is having a hard time getting even its own employees to use the virtual reality products that are supposed to be its future. A year into its wildly ambitious rebrand and push toward developing the metaverse, how far has Meta come — and what does it all mean for our (potential) virtual future? It’s an article of faith in the tech world that Meta and the metaverse are not the same thing. A shared 3D internet can develop with or without Mark Zuckerberg. But the ups and downs of the company most associated with the idea are a pretty good indicator of some of the emerging tension points — and possibly a hint at where we’re all heading. One big question is whether the metaverse will really just be a bunch of corporate bubbles, walled-off Zuckerbergian virtual Walt Disney Worlds built to capture ad money or subscription dollars. The fear that Meta will drive things in that direction is widespread,, but a year into its development project, it’s not clear at all that’s happening — or, if it is, it’s not Zuckerberg pushing in that direction. Meta has enthusiastically joined groups like the Metaverse Standards Forum , meant to smooth out development kinks for VR tech across platforms and companies, and announced a couple of big collaborations with would-be competitors at yesterday’s event. I spoke yesterday with Matthew Kanterman, formerly a metaverse-focused researcher for Bloomberg and now the director of research for the entrepreneur Matthew Ball’s metaverse-focused ETF. “Seeing even [an organization] like Meta, which historically has built kind of walled gardens, work with partners like Microsoft or Accenture and talk about interoperability and how they can open up their platform to other developers is really encouraging,” he said. On the contrary, it’s fellow tech giants Google and Apple that have so far declined to join organizations like the Metaverse Standards Forum and kept their VR-focused cards close to their chest. Kanterman, a believer in the interoperable vision of the metaverse laid out in Ball’s influential online “primer” and recent book , described how the lines of conflict and competition are being drawn and where they might lead. “This is the existential and almost theological debate that's going on, and I do think they need to open up,” Kanterman said, invoking the relatively open platform of Roblox as a point of comparison. “If they want to make it a destination not just for people to hang out, but for creators to build stuff, they need to open up, make it open standards-based, and make the technology available to as many people as possible.” If there’s a more profit-minded incentive for Meta to play nice in a way not traditionally common to American business, it might be because the tech giant needs more gamers to boost its bottom line. Amid the company’s current financial woes, another major announcement the company made yesterday was that it would be bringing Microsoft’s game library to its VR headsets — especially notable given Microsoft’s acquisition of the video game giant Activision Blizzard earlier this year. “That's a really powerful draw for a lot of people to buy the headsets and come into the ecosystem, and it was unexpected,” Kanterman said. So as Meta might be leading the pack with its branding and willingness to dump billions of dollars into research for a product it’s not at all certain a large number of people might actually use yet, its success might be contingent on bringing companies that could change that equation along for the ride — not totally subsuming them, like the FTC has accused them of doing with a workout app company. In this model, Meta spends its vast hoard to build the powerful technology necessary for the metaverse while other companies agree to share the components that will make people actually want to spend time there, everyone becoming very rich in the process. In that light, Meta’s move to dominate the metaverse is starting to look like something very different from a prime mover seeking out a monopoly, but not altogether unheard of in American business history: A collective action project. | 
