Before the wave of stories published on Oct. 25 revealed new details about the troubling ways Facebook Inc. runs its social networks, the company had been hoping to spend the week talking about its plans to expand beyond that business. A major theme at its annual Connect conference beginning on Oct. 28 will be the company’s ambitions for the so-called metaverse, a new digital space that it believes will supplant smartphone apps as the primary form of online interaction. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said pursuing this path will transform Facebook, and has publicly set a goal of attracting 1 billion users to the metaverse by the end of the decade.

The metaverse has played a prominent role in science fiction for decades—the digital universes of the novels Snow Crash and Ready Player One, where characters live parallel digital lives to their physical existences, are metaverses. Video games such as Roblox and Fortnite are also similar to what Facebook has in mind. The idea is that smartphones are reaching their limitations in creating immersive computing experiences, and people will hunger to go further, opting to engage in three-dimensional digital interactions, for example, instead of doing video chats. “You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet,” Zuckerberg told the tech news website the Verge last summer, “where instead of just viewing content, you are in it.” The person in charge is Andrew Bosworth, a longtime executive and close friend of Zuckerberg’s who will take over as chief technology officer in early 2022. “We want to give people a glimpse into that vision, into that future,” says Bosworth, 39, known within the company as Boz. He describes the conference as a “love letter to the future of the metaverse.”

Facebook has been laying the foundation for this project since at least 2014, when it acquired the virtual-reality headset maker Oculus. Bosworth took over Facebook’s virtual- and augmented-reality efforts in 2017, and his elevation to CTO signals how high a priority the project is inside the company. Facebook recently said it would hire 10,000 people in Europe over the next five years to help create the metaverse. In its most recent earnings report, on Oct. 25, it said its operating profit will be down $10 billion in 2021 because of investments in the division building the metaverse, and it plans to increase that spending for years before making any real money from it.

Facebook is playing both offense and defense here. If the metaverse becomes the next way of interacting online, the company will benefit from having had a hand in its design. Facebook has also long been aware that its access to users relies on such companies as Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and their devices and operating systems, a vulnerability that has been highlighted by Facebook’s recent dispute with Apple over ad targeting. Facebook thinks that people will access the metaverse from their smartphones, but that increasingly they’ll use devices like the Facebook-owned Oculus VR headsets, which would be an obvious coup.

Facebook has already invested more heavily in the field than many people realize, says Tom Mainelli, vice president for device and consumer research at the research firm IDC. He sees the metaverse as key to the company’s plans to “diversify future revenue streams, cement its position in the next computing platform, and potentially rewrite its company narrative going forward.”

To fulfill its ambitions, Facebook will likely need cooperation from both a skeptical public and competitors it’s trying to circumvent—the metaverse idea only really works if Apple and Google users can play, too. Otherwise, says Bosworth, it’s just a bunch of universes.

The company is betting it can build the metaverse in a way that brings other companies along. Bosworth, who has been at Facebook for more than 15 years, has played a role in the creation of almost every one of its core products. He helped build News Feed, the main way people engage with the social network and the company’s core moneymaker, as well as Facebook Groups, Messenger, and the network’s ads team. For the past four years he’s been running Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s futuristic division building virtual-reality headsets, in-home speakers, and augmented-reality sunglasses. Zuckerberg considers him a close friend; their kids play together, and when Bosworth’s home was under construction he rented a house from Zuckerberg, moving in next door.

Bosworth is much more visible than most Facebook executives, who generally keep low public profiles. He’s a prolific user of both Facebook and Twitter, and (of course) he has a podcast.

Bosworth also considers himself a malcontent, and has shared provocative posts on internal Facebook forums. In one post, which he wrote in 2016 and was published in a 2018 BuzzFeed article, he suggested that the negative impacts of Facebook’s platform—exposing people to bullies or enabling terrorist activity, for example—were just the price of fulfilling the company’s mission to connect the world. “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good,” he wrote.

Bosworth says he didn’t really believe this even at the time, and was instead trying to spark discussion. He says he was embarrassed about how it sounded to colleagues and the public, and has learned from it. “That was super painful to me,” he says.

Bosworth’s comments were particularly damaging because they reinforced the perception that Facebook callously pursues growth no matter the cost, a reputation that could be a barrier as the company seeks to build trust in its efforts on the metaverse. Facebook will have to completely change established norms of online behavior, says Pano Anthos, founder of the venture fund and startup accelerator XRC Labs, who attempted to build a version of the metaverse 15 years ago. “It’s so early,” he says, and Facebook “is going to spend billions and billions trying to get people’s behaviors to adapt to this.”

Facebook’s strategy to defuse concerns about its intentions is to talk about them before the metaverse really exists, a seeming reversal of the grow-now-and-iron-out-the-kinks-later mindset that has led to many issues with its social networking products. Critics have suggested that the company’s metaverse discussions are primarily designed to deflect uncomfortable questions about those other products.

For his part, Bosworth says Facebook has learned about the consequences technology has on society and thinks it has to have faith that it can do better this time around. “The products that we’re contemplating have never existed,” he says. “We have to make decisions on how they’re going to be. And it just takes a degree of confidence to do that.” —With Clara Molot
 
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