What’s in a name? Facebook, Meta, and trust in the metaverse

Posted on by Jennifer Ryan
BORN Views
What’s in a name? Facebook, Meta, and trust in the metaverse

Towards the end of October 2021 Facebook announced big news: the corporate business was changing its name to Meta, while Facebook the social media platform would remain. 

Mark Zuckerberg has solid reasons for the rebrand. The company needed a broader title, now that it also includes Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus VR as well as mobile web analytics company Onavo, and Messenger precursor Beluga. Meta reflects a new focus on the metaverse and demonstrates the ambition to lead the way in this future digital realm. As an aside, it’s also worth noting that Facebook the social media site is more popular than ever, but it’s not attracting young people like it used to. A shrewd operator like Zuckerberg knows that it’s better to shift focus when a successful product is at its peak rather than on the decline.

All of this makes sense. First imagined in a 1990s sci-fi novel and conjured up in movies from Total Recall to Wreck-It Ralph, the future metaverse is an exhilarating concept, a place of boundless possibilities and experiences. Zuckerberg wants his company to be its guiding light. Yet many people are sceptical. Was this really the deciding factor for the name change, or was it to distance the business from negative press? 

Trust in Facebook was already low after testimony from whistle-blower Frances Haugen hit the press, telling of polarizing algorithms, understaffing in key areas concerned with safety and a culture that ignored known problems. The rebrand hasn’t helped its cause. A survey by SightX reported that 37.5% of respondents did not believe the name change would bring any real changes to the organization. Many believe it was because of poor public perception, rather than to better fit the company’s future goals and vision. Still, 2022 is a new year and as people start to see the metaverse taking shape they may be more accepting of the reasons behind the rebrand. 

The good, the bad, and the need for regulation

Like Coca-Cola, Facebook the platform is nigh-on universal; open to anyone with internet access. Most of us have been Facebook users at one time or another and have had largely positive experiences. We’ve enjoyed its window into the lives of friends, family and colleagues, the way it has re-connected us with those we had lost touch with and enabled groups of people from all over the world to create communities around niche interests. But there’s no ignoring the bad stuff.

That bad stuff has been coming from all angles. Privacy and a lack of transparency over user data is one issue; the company’s low tax contributions is another. Cloning competitor apps like TikTok (Instagram Reels), and Snapchat (Facebook Stories), has also attracted criticism. Content moderators brought a lawsuit after reporting poor working conditions and post-traumatic stress disorder; some have now been compensated for their experiences. 

But the biggest concerns are to do with the disconnect between Facebook’s mission statement of bringing the world closer together, and the real-world damage caused to individuals, minority groups and sometimes entire nations because the business hasn’t done enough to take down and prevent the spread of fake news and harmful content.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that changes to Facebook’s content algorithm stoked division and did not do enough to reduce Covid 19 vaccine hesitancy. In addition, Instagram was harming the mental health of teenage girls. UK natural beauty company Lush recently took the radical step of quitting Facebook and Instagram alongside Snapchat and TikTok, citing the negative impact the social media sites have on young people’s mental health.

Comments made by ex-members of Facebook staff together with the company’s own leaked research and that of many other organizations also suggest that not enough is being done to deal with misinformation and malign content. Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya didn’t pull any punches about the seriousness of the issue, saying ‘We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works’. 

Meta/Facebook stress that they make robust efforts to deal with negative content. The company has just announced the development of a new AI which is quick to ‘learn’ to spot harmful content, rather than taking months of training. 

However, the company has been criticised for placing too much emphasis on reacting to problems and not enough on preventing them. So far, AI does not seem to have been able to spot harmful content before the damage is done. Is it possible to do enough? And how can they be confident about policing behaviour in the future metaverse, with its billions of tiny interactions in every moment? We just don’t know the answers yet. 

Meta’s Horizon Worlds platform may provide a clue as to how moderation of the metaverse might work. Users in this colorful virtual space can report harmful behavior and send recorded data from their device as evidence. They can also activate a ‘safe zone’, a personal space where they can take time out and mute, block, or report users if necessary. Users can be suspended or permanently excluded if they are found to be breaking the rules. Community Guides with their own avatars inhabit the space and keep an eye on things. It’s a mostly reactive rather than preventative approach, but then it’s hard to see how prevention could work. Though some warning signs can be noted, we can’t – yet – predict crime in the way shown in Minority Report.

People might just have to accept that a future virtual world, like social media, reflects society and so will never be perfect. Techdirt editor Mike Masnick put it like this: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale, because in a situation where there are billions of interactions, even if 99.9% of content decisions are ‘right’, the 1% of ‘wrong’ decisions could still represent thousands of negative experience. It will be up to individuals to decide how much time they want to spend in the metaverse and, to a degree, how to keep themselves safe.  

But more regulation will be needed. Businesses exist to make money; it’s governments who must take charge of putting in measures for the sake of the public good. Future metaverse users will be under constant surveillance. VR headsets will be tracking what users see, hear, feel and how they react, both physically and mentally. This puts current concerns about how much Google and Facebook/Meta know about us in the shade. In the metaverse, users could be subject to a constant deluge of exceptionally nuanced marketing that taps directly into the emotions felt during virtual experiences. It needs regulation to ensure that users can control who their data is shared with and always know when they are being marketed to, whether they’re watching a video or talking to an avatar. Somehow, limits for manipulation, whether political or commercial, need to be set, so that people are free to enjoy the metaverse without fear of exploitation. 

The metaverse must be built

The consensus is that the Metaverse should be built by communities, rather than by one corporate entity with a guiding hand at best, or ultimate power at worst. Even Zuckerberg seems to agree, stating in his Meta Founder’s Letter that ‘The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies’. Though it’s hard to see Facebook’s name change to Meta as anything other than an attempt to ‘own’ the space. 

Just in 2021, Meta spent $10 billion developing metaverse technologies. The company is creating 10,000 jobs in the EU as part of its growth program. It recently invested more than $50 million in non-profit groups to help ‘build the metaverse responsibly’. Other major players turning their attention to the metaverse are Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, Pokémon Go developer Niantic, graphics technology company Nvidia, blockchain-based virtual world Decentraland, Microsoft, and Apple. 

Meanwhile Elon Musk believes that his own Neuralink brain interface products will eventually offer a better way to experience virtual reality than spending much of the day trying to move around in a VR headset.

So, the issues of the future metaverse, the problems around trust, privacy, transparency, manipulation, and possible harassment are not just Meta’s to solve. All the more reason why it’s important that government regulations keep up with the technology. 

The metaverse will transform our lives. It could enrich our day-to-day experiences, and even reduce our environmental impact by allowing us to be ‘present’ in the office, ‘attend’ concerts hundreds of miles away, and ‘travel’ to see the world’s sites without ever leaving our homes. 

Like the internet in general, and social media in particular, the metaverse will hold a mirror up to our world. There’s extraordinary potential for good, and equally for bad. Meta and others cannot just go through the motions. To create trust, companies need to demonstrate that they are truly doing all they can to keep users safe. 

Above all, metaverse businesses and governments must work together to build the metaverse we want – a creative, inspiring space worthy of exploration, a place where we feel safe and protected, but have the freedom to make up our own minds. 

  1. Founder’s Letter, 2021, Meta, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/
  1. Facebook Wants To Attract Young People, But Gen Z Teens Say It’s A ‘Boomer Social Network’ Made For ‘Old People’, Insider, https://www.insider.com/facebook-gen-z-teens-boomer-social-network-leaks-2021-10
  1. This 29-Year-Old Book Predicted The ‘Metaverse’ — And Some Of Facebook’s Plans Are Eerily Similar, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/03/how-the-1992-sci-fi-novel-snow-crash-predicted-facebooks-metaverse.html
  1. Facebook Whistleblower Hearing: Frances Haugen Calls For More Regulation Of Tech Giant – As It Happened, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/facebook-hearing-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testifies-us-senate-latest-news
  1. Facebook’s Name Change Receives Poor Marks In New Poll, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2021/10/29/facebooks-name-change-receives-poor-marks-in-new-poll/?sh=30c5c49a444b
  1. Facebook Will Pay $52 Million In Settlement With Moderators Who Developed PTSD On The Job, The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scola-ptsd-mental-health
  1. The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
  1. ‘I’m Happy To Lose £10m By Quitting Facebook,’ Says Lush Boss, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/nov/26/im-happy-to-lose-10m-by-quitting-facebook-says-lush-boss
  1. Ex-Facebook Executive Chamath Palihapitiya: Social Media Is ‘Ripping Apart’ Society CNBC (via YouTube), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MakEIlvlyfE
  1. Our New AI System to Help Tackle Harmful Content, Facebook/Meta, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/12/metas-new-ai-system-tackles-harmful-content/
  1. Horizon Community, Oculus, https://www.oculus.com/facebook-horizon/community
  1. Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well, Techdirt, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml
  1. Founder’s Letter, 2021, Meta, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/
  1. Facebook Says It Expects Its Investment In The Metaverse To Reduce Its Profits By ‘Approximately $10 billion’ This Year, Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-metaverse-investment-reduce-profits-by-10-billion-2021-10
  1. Investing in European Talent to Help Build the Metaverse, Facebook/Meta, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/creating-jobs-europe-metaverse/
  1. Building the Metaverse Responsibly, Facebook/Meta, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/building-the-metaverse-responsibly/
  1. Breakthrough Technology For The Brain, Neuralink, https://neuralink.com/

Elon Musk Sits Down With The Babylon Bee, The Babylon Bee (via YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaRKd4U6Ixg

NFT Artworks Find Their Place in the Metaverse

Posted on by Antony
BORN Views
NFT Artworks Find Their Place in the Metaverse

In March of 2021, American digital artist Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as Beeple, made history. His artwork, Everydays: the first 5000 days, was the first non-fungible token (NFT) ever to be auctioned by a major auction house1. Sold by Christie’s for a head-spinning $69,346,250, it became, to date, the fourth most expensive artwork by a living artist2. Numerous platforms such as Opensea and Rarible provide places to buy and sell NFTs costing anything from the equivalent of a few dollars to millions. 

NFTs are a revolutionary new art form for artists, musicians, and makers. For the benefit of those who haven’t already fallen down the crypto-art rabbit hole, an NFT is a unique digital asset or token, a ‘proof of ownership’ on a piece of digital art. They can be bought, sold, collected, and displayed in virtual or physical galleries. Because they are recorded and stored on the blockchain, there is a permanent record of authenticity, ownership and transactions related to the asset. Just one NFT, or several, might be ‘minted’ (created) for a digital artwork, an analogy in the physical world might be a one-off painting, vs a print in a limited number of editions. NFT owners can also action fractionalized ownership, allowing a multitude of people to each own a ‘piece’ of perhaps a very valuable artwork. Art, photography, animation, video, music, cartoon cats, tweets, any of these can become the basis of an NFT, and some rapidly become highly valued. This very new market is awash with possibilities but has numerous challenges too. 

A new world of opportunities for artists and creators

Creating NFTs give artists and musicians a chance to connect with a new audience, selling their work directly with no need for agents or dealers. It’s an opportunity not just for those who don’t yet have industry connections, but also for many whose lifestyles are marginalized in their own countries, allowing a freedom of expression that may not be possible or even legal at home. Artists can always see the latest value of their work, as each NFT has a public ledger of its creation and ownership history, whereas in the physical world it’s easy to lose track as art is bought and sold. Even better, creators can opt to automate a royalty paid on their work, so that every time it is sold on, a percentage of the price will come back to them. 

Barriers to entry are low to moderate, though not non-existent. A digital artist won’t need to rent a studio to work in (unless their NFTs are based on physical paintings or sculpture that require space). Instead, they’ll need access to the internet and some cryptocurrency, most likely Ethereum as this is the blockchain the majority of NFTs are stored on. This is necessary to cover the costs involved in verifying and processing transactions and might work out to between $50-400 per asset or collection of them. Once armed with cryptocurrency, a would-be NFT artist just chooses which platform they want to use to mint and sell their wares. 

A new means of support for museums, galleries, and charities

As well as providing a new revenue stream for artists, NFTs are raising funds for museums around the world and other non-profit organizations.

In Russia, St Petersburg’s State Heritage Museum is creating a limited edition of NFTs created from masterpieces in its own art collection, including works by Leonardo Da Vinci, Monet and Van Gogh. The project, titled ‘Your token is kept in the Hermitage’ is intended not only to raise funds but also to provide a new kind of accessibility to the museum’s collection and lend gravitas to the idea of collecting digital art3. In Italy, after months of revenue loss due to the pandemic, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence created a one-off edition of Doni Tondo by Michelangelo, selling it in May 2021 for $170,000. Hot on the heels of that success, the gallery is now minting NFTs for works including Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus4. 

Meanwhile, reference book publisher Merriam-Webster minted ‘The Definition of NFT’ and raised around $48,000 for children’s education charity Teach for All5, while NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden worked with photographer Platon Antoniou on a portrait that raised $5.4 million for the Freedom of the Press Foundation6. 

NFTs are not only making headlines and raising funds, in the future they may also make museum collections more accessible. Even large museums often only have the space to keep a small percentage of their works on show. Creating NFTs can open up the wider collection to people all around the world. 

NFTs and their place in the Metaverse

But one of the most fascinating things about NFTs based on art and collectables is their status as elements in the ‘Metaverse’, a concept set to transform our world in the next decades just as the internet did in the last 20 years. The future Metaverse is a shared, inter-operable digital space containing all the virtual worlds we know, not only in gaming but also social media, ecommerce, education, and recreation, with its own economy and experiences. Sometimes it may be in VR, resembling a next-generation Second Life, sometimes it might be AR, where digital elements are overlaid onto our physical world. Mark Zuckerberg sees it as a means of accessing ‘presence’ in the digital realm, imagining our future Zoom calls with holograms of colleagues, or loved ones seemingly sat right next to us7. At this early stage no one, not even Zuckerberg, can be quite sure what the Metaverse is. Although it was named nearly 30 years ago in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash8, the word doesn’t even feature in the current Merriam-Webster or Cambridge dictionaries. 

What we can be sure of however is that NFTs, and galleries in which to view them, will feature in the Metaverse, because they’re already here. Individual Metaverses created largely to display NFTs already exist. This year multinational auction house Sotheby’s opened a prime-location gallery within Decentraland9, the ‘virtual destination for digital assets’, while CryptoVoxels allows users to build stores, museums and galleries in a Minecraft-like environment. In both cases these spaces have their own economies: users can buy ‘land’ with cryptocurrency, ‘hire’ a digital architect to build out their spaces and sell NFTs once they’ve created them. This is a whole new world of art, enabling people all over the world to ‘teleport in’, ‘visit’ galleries and see famous artworks without having to get a visa or pay for a flight. One day the hope is that all these individual Metaverses will link up, allowing people to move seamlessly between different experiences. 

The issues still to solve in the new ‘Wild West’: identity, property, and theft

The industry is in its infancy and there are a number of legal and security issues still to be ironed out. Theft is a problem; with not much to stop someone ‘stealing’ a digital artwork and minting it into an NFT. There’s plenty of reported instances of this happening, from people finding false ‘verified accounts’ offering their own work to the heart-breaking story of the Japanese artist whose work was tokenized after her death10. Platforms will take down NFTs based on stolen artwork, and once deceit is discovered an NFT is discredited, but it can be akin to fighting a forest fire, stamp out one and more pop up elsewhere. 

In March 2021 hackers stole thousands of dollars’ worth of artwork from NFT marketplace NiftyGateway from users who had neglected to set up two-step authentication on their accounts11. A month later an anonymous artist known as Monsieur Personne ‘sleepminted’ a copy of Beeple’s market-busting Everydays: the first 5,000 days, creating a token that looked like it had been created by Beeple but wasn’t and proving that even NFTs can be fakes12. No doubt all NFT marketplaces are working on ways to stay one step ahead of bad actors. 

In this largely unregulated space, tax evasion and money laundering are also potential problems. The IRS sees NFTs as a tax evasion risk, since in theory people using cryptocurrency to buy and sell NFTs may be liable for tax during different parts of the process. Because the ‘value’ of an NFT is subjective, it’s also not too difficult to collude with others, for instance selling an NFT for a hyped-up price to an associate, in order to collect ill-gotten crypto gains. Existing laws may cover some issues but as so often happens, the regulators need to catch up with the technology. 

A greener, more sustainable future for NFTs

Like many new art forms throughout history, NFTs have caused controversy, much of it centred around environmental impact. Most are built on the Ethereum blockchain, which is ‘mined’ using the energy-heavy ‘Proof of worth’ system to ensure security. It’s hard to calculate exactly how much energy creating an NFT might use, but it’s been estimated that one Ethereum transaction consumes as much electricity as the average U.S. household uses in just under five days13. Some artists have attempted to make their NFTs carbon neutral by offsetting potential emissions caused by energy use. Opinions differ on how effective this really is. 

The good news is that the Ethereum Foundation and others are already finding solutions to radically reduce the amount of energy needed by NFTs in the first place. Ethereum has been working on a move from the electricity-guzzling ‘Proof of work’ system to the far more efficient ‘Proof of stake’ for some years. A 2022 upgrade promises to cut energy use by more than 99%14. In the meantime, some artists are choosing to use Tezos, Wax and other energy-efficient blockchain alternatives to Ethereum, including the British artist Damien Hirst who is using Palm for his monumental new enterprise, The Currency Project, comprising 10,000 oil paintings on paper, each accompanied by its NFT15. In terms of both legal and environmental issues, it is of course in the interests of the entire industry to find solutions, whether through regulation or by vastly reducing its environmental impact. 

Some people, particularly those who came of age before the digital revolution, struggle to get their heads around the idea of NFTs. How can anyone assess their value? If things only exist as pixels, do they really exist at all?  But this exciting realm is awash with possibilities, not only putting a value on digital art, but opening up to artists and audiences who are entirely new while creating an economy and an ecosystem already worth billions of dollars. With individual Metaverses like Decentraland already offering a ‘place’ to view NFTs in the virtual world, this is no mere fad. As the Metaverse comes of age these experiences will become mainstream. So perhaps it’s time to start breeding those CryptoKitties – NFTs are here to stay. 

___

Footnotes

1. Beeple’s Opus: Created Over 5,000 Days By The Groundbreaking Artist, This Monumental Collage Was The First Purely Digital Artwork (NFT) Ever Offered At Christie’s, Christies, https://www.christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Beeple-is-first-purely-digital-artwork-NFT-to-come-to-auction-11510-7.aspx

2. Beeple’ NFT Sold For $69 million Is The Fourth Most Expensive Artwork Sold By A Living Artist, Cryptoslate, https://cryptoslate.com/beeple-nft-sold-for-69-million-is-the-fourth-most-expensive-artwork-sold-by-a-living-artist/

3. Tokenized Art From The State Hermitage Museum, Including Leonardo Da Vinci, Will Be Featured On The Binance NFT Marketplace, The State Hermitage Museum, https://nftcalendar.io/tokenized-art-from-the-state-hermitage-museum-including-leonardo-da-vinci-will-be-featured-on-the-binance-nft-marketplace/

4. Uffizi Sells Artworks As NFTS To Recover Losses, The Art Insider, https://www.art-insider.com/uffizi-sells-artworks-as-nfts-to-recover-losses/2238

5. The Definition Of NFT, Opensea, https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/13014153790550692438812020292530308527796599818332639642513535596840089550849

6. Historic Snowden NFT Auction Benefits Freedom Of The Press Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, https://freedom.press/news/historic-snowden-nft-auction-benefits-freedom-of-the-press-foundation/

7. Mark In The Metaverse: Facebook’s CEO On Why The Social Network Is Becoming ‘A Metaverse Company’ https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview

8. Snow Crash, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

9. Sotheby’s Opens A Virtual Gallery In Decentraland, Decentraland, https://decentraland.org/blog/announcements/sotheby-s-opens-a-virtual-gallery-in-decentraland/

10. An Artist Died. Then Thieves Made NFTs Of Her Work, Wired, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-fraud-qinni-art

11. People Are Reporting Thousands Of Dollars Worth Of Crypto Art Was Stolen On An NFT Marketplace, Business Insider, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/stolen-nfts-on-nifty-gateway-reports-nft-art-marketplace-2021-3,

12. A New $69 Million NFT Was Sleepminted, NFTheft, https://nftheft.com/

13. Ethereum Energy Consumption Index, Digiconomist, https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/

14. A Country’s Worth Of Power, No More!, Ethereum Foundation Blog, https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/

15. 1The Currency By Damien Hirst Is Now Live On HENI, Palm, https://palm.io/studio/the-currency-by-damien-hirst-is-now-live-on-heni/