Facebook, Metaverse and the Extraction Imperative of Surveillance Capitalism

Kallol Mustafa

Recently Mark Zuckerberg has declared the beginning of the ‘next chapter of Internet’ and also
the next chapter of his company ‘Facebook’ which has been renamed as ‘Meta’. According to
Zuckerberg, today’s ‘Mobile internet’ will be transformed to ‘embodied internet’ where people will
be in experience, not just look at it. This new platform is called ‘Metaverse’- a network of
immersive and interconnected experiences partly accessed through virtual reality (VR) headsets
and augmented reality (AR) devices. Meta’s focus will be to ‘bring this metaverse to life’ and
‘help people connect, find communities and grow businesses’. (Introducing Meta: A Social
Technology Company, about.fb.com, October 28, 2021;
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-meta/) The defining quality of the
metaverse will be a ‘feeling of presence’ — like one is right there with another person or in
another place. In the metaverse, people will be able to do almost anything they can imagine —
get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new
experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today. (Source: Mark
Zuckerberg, Founder’s Letter, 2021, October 28, 2021;
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/)

Zuckerberg has explained the concepts of Metaverse in his Connect 2021 key speech in the
following way: When I send my parents a video of my kids, they’re going to feel like they’re right
in the moment with us not peering through a little window. When you play a game with your
friends, you’ll feel like you’re right there together in a different world, not just on your computer
by yourself. And when you’re in a meeting in the metaverse, it’ll feel like you’re right in the room
together, making eye contact, having a shared sense of space and not just looking at a grid of
faces on a screen. That’s what we mean by an embodied internet. Instead of looking at a
screen, you’re going to be in these experiences. Avatars will take the place of profile picture;
instead of a static image they’re going to be living 3D representations of people, people’s
expressions, gestures that are going to make interactions much richer than anything that’s
possible online today. People will be able to buy digital clothes for their avatar and then wear
them into the metaverse more broadly. Different creators will sell both physical and digital goods
as well as experiences and services in the Metaverse. (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta (Facebook)
Connect 2021 Metaverse Event Transcript, Oct 28, 2021;
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/meta-facebook-connect-2021-metaverse-event-transcript)
Now if this vision of Metaverse elaborated by Mark Zuckerberg seems to be taken directly from
the pages of a science fiction novel, that’s because it is. The term Metaverse first appears in
Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian novel ‘Snow Crash’, which follows the futuristic adventures
of Hiro, a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia who is also a skilled hacker having the propensity to
immerse himself in the ‘Metaverse’.( Source: Ryan Zickgraf, Mark Zuckerberg’s “Metaverse” Is a
Dystopian Nightmare, Jacobinmag, 25 Sep 2021). To have a better perspective and implication
of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, let's look into the details of Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse.

Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse

Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse is an imaginary place, a computer-generated universe where

users log in using different devices like ‘goggles’ and ‘earphones. It is always nighttime in the
Metaverse, and the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of
physics and finance. One can see a lot of people in the streets, but these are not real people.
This is all a part of the ‘moving illustration’ drawn by the computer according to some
‘specifications’. These people are pieces of software called ‘Avatars’. They are the ‘audiovisual
bodies’ that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.

If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar
can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a
gorilla or a dragon or anything in the Metaverse if you have the skill to write the required SW
coding or have enough digital currency to buy off-the-shelf ‘Avatars’ produced by different
corporations!

Like any place in reality, the Streets in the Metaverse is subject to development. Developers can
build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs,
as well as things that do not exist in reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special
neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat
zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. The only difference is that since the
Street does not really exist—it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of
paper somewhere—none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of
software, made available to the public over the ‘world-wide fiber-optics network’. In order to
place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the ‘Global Multimedia
Protocol Group’ which is the de facto controller of the Metaverse, have had to buy frontage on
the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors etc. The money these
corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by
the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to
exist.

You can't just be present or ‘materialize’ anywhere in the Metaverse. Materializing out of
nowhere and  vanishing back into reality is considered to be a private function best done in the
confines of your own House. But If you don’t have any house in the Metaverse, you can
Materialize in a port which serves a function analogous to airports in Metaverse. Once you have
materialized in a Port, you can walk down the Street or hop on the monorail or whatever. On the
other hand, If you have the required digital currency and/or necessary skill, you can buy your
own piece of real estate in Metaverse, build your own house, office, shop, club and so on. After
that you can even use some software to collect information of the people who visit your places,
listen to their conversation, record those and sell to third parties for profit.

The protagonist of the Novel, Hiro, who is a hacker and Pizza delivery person, though lives in a
20 by 30 room of a ‘franchise ghetto’ in reality, has a nice big house in the Metaverse! Let’s see
what the Hiro Protagonist does in his business place in Metaverse named “The Black Sun”:

Hiro mumbles the word “Bigboard.” This is the name of a piece of software he wrote, a power tool
for a CIC stringer. It digs into The Black Sun’s operating system, rifles it for information, and then
throws up a flat square map in front of his face, giving him a quick overview of who’s here and
whom they’re talking to. It’s all unauthorized data that Hiro is not supposed to have. But Hiro is
not some bimbo actor coming here to network. He is a hacker. If he wants some information, he
steals it right out of the guts of the system—gossip ex Machina. (source: chapter 7, ‘Snow Crash’
by Neal Stephenson)

On another occasion in Metaverse:

“He mumbles “Bigboard'' again, recalls the magic map, pinpoints his own location, and then reads
off the name of this nearby screenwriter. Later on, he can do a search of industry publications to
find out what script this guy is working on, hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish
for bazookas. Since this whole conversation has come to him via his computer, he’s just taken an
audio tape of the whole thing. Later, he can process it to disguise the voices, then upload it to the
library, cross-referenced under the director’s name. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call
this conversation up, listen to it over and over until they’ve got it memorized, paying Hiro for the
privilege, and within a few weeks, bazooka scripts will flood the director’s office.” (source: chapter
8, ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson)

This dark side of the Metaverse is the reason why Mark Zuckerberg wants us to forget the
original connotation and metaphors of the concept of ‘Metaverse’ of the sci-fi novel ‘Snow
Crash’. In an interview about Metaverse, when he was asked whether the dystopian origin and
context of the term ‘Metaverse’ concerns him or not, Zuckerberg replied that, “Obviously, the
book has this whole environment around it that’s sort of negative. But I don’t think it has to be
that way. I also think that as these technologies develop, they take on different connotations and
metaphors. I would be very surprised if five years from now the main association that almost
anyone had with the metaverse was about the initial mention of it in Snow Crash. What it’s
going to mean to people is going to be all the use cases that they have in there and what they’re
able to do with it.” (Source: Mark Zuckerberg On Why Facebook Is Rebranding To Meta, By
Alex Heath, the verge, Oct 28, 2021; link: https://www.theverge.com/22749919/mark-
zuckerberg-facebook-meta-company-rebrand, accessed on 16 November 2021)

Let's have a deeper look into the business model upon which Facebook is built to check if its
Metaverse initiative can really be a digital utopia to improve peoples live as claimed by
Zuckerberg or it’s business model has some inherent tendency which might justifiably evoke the
dystopia of Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse. 

Surveillance Capitalism and Its Extraction Imperative:

“At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old
image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of
labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” (Source: The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page 9)

Shoshana Zuboff has shown in her seminal study of Surveillance capitalism that surveillance
capitalism uses human experiences as free raw material to convert into behavioral data. Some
of this data might be applied for improvement of the service or the product but the rest are
claimed as proprietary ‘behavioral surplus’, processed and fabricated into ‘prediction products’
that anticipate what users will do and when. These prediction products are then traded in
‘behavioral future markets’ for huge profits. The competitive dynamics of these new markets
drive surveillance capitalists to acquire ever-more-predictive sources of behavioral surpluses:
our voices, personalities and emotions. (Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana
Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page 8)

This ever-more hunger for behavioral surplus drives the corporation like google to evolve from a
simple search engine to provider of ‘everything in the online world’: It offers services designed
for work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email (Gmail),
scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), instant
messaging and video chat (Google Duo, Google Chat, and Google Meet), language translation
(Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, and Street
View), podcast hosting (Google Podcasts), video sharing (YouTube), blog publishing (Blogger),
note-taking (Google Keep and Jamboard), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos),
mobile operating system(Android), web browser(Chrome) etc. Using these ‘free’ online services
google can capture all kinds of behavioral surpluses like: locations, communications patterns,
attitudes, preferences, interests, emotions, illness, purchases etc. The products and services
might be different, but the aim is always the same: behavioral surplus capture.

As Shoshana Zuboff has shown, to remain successful in this behavioral future market,
surveillance capitalists need to discover new supply routes of behavioral surpluses
continuously. The routes which are successful in extracting behavioral surplus in a massive
scale, such as the smartphone operating system or Gmail, are further developed and
institutionalized. (Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd,
2019, London, page 129). When Google launched the android operating system for smart phones, some
observers thought that the motivation was to compete with Apple for the lucrative margins on
smartphones, but Google insiders knew very well that the main focus was to capture more behavioral
surplus using the operating system. That’s why Google licensed Android to mobile handset makers for
free, so that it can be used to draw users into Google Search and Google services, ‘establishing a
ubiquitous mobile supply apparatus to sustain known terrains of behavioral surplus and open up new
ones, including geolocations and mobile payments systems that are highly coveted by advertisers’.
(Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page
133-134). Google’s behavioral surplus analysis can predict that you are likely to buy an expensive woolen
suit and its real-time location data can trigger the proprietor or advertiser’s real-time prompt, matched to
your profile and delivered at the very moment that you are within the sight of the flannels, tweeds and
cashmeres. Each human response to each commercial prompts yields more data to refine into better
prediction products. (Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd,
2019, London, page 154).

Competition for ‘every aspect of every human’s experience’:

Google’s success in constructing the mechanism and principles of surveillance capitalism and attracting
surveillance revenue ignited competition in extraction of behavioral surplus. Facebook was the first and
still remains the main competitor of google for behavioral surplus. (Source: The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page 158-162). 

According to Facebook's annual report submitted to the US Securities and Exchange

commission, Facebook generates substantially all of its revenue from advertising. Its advertising
revenue is generated by displaying ad products on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and third-
party affiliated websites or mobile applications. Marketers pay for ad products either directly or
through their relationships with advertising agencies or resellers, based on the number of
impressions delivered or the number of actions, such as clicks, taken by users. (source:
Facebook, Form 10-k for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020,
http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/4dd7fa7f-1a51-4ed9-b9df-
7f42cc3321eb.pdf)

As Facebook’s advertising revenue largely depends on the number of actions taken by users,
so Facebook  does not show ads to its user randomly, it tries to show ads to the group of people
for whom the ad is most relevant and who is most likely to respond or click on that ad. That’s
why, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has also acknowledged, Facebook needs to “understand
their(user) interests. So based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals,
we create categories—for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain—
and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category. Although advertising to specific
groups existed well before the internet, online advertising allows much more precise targeting
and therefore more-relevant ads.”(emphasis added) (source: Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Understanding
Facebook’s Business Model’, January 24, 2019, link
https://about.fb.com/news/2019/01/understanding-facebooks-business-model, accessed on 16
Nov 2021)

To target the users ever more precisely, elaborate mechanisms are established to keep the
users hooked, share more information and emotions in Facebook’s platforms using which
Facebook can extract more and more surplus data. As Jamie Bartlet has shown, “Nothing is left
to chance, since even the smallest improvement can be worth a fortune. Tech companies run
thousands of tests with millions of users- tweaking backgrounds, colors, images, tones, fonts
and audio- all to maximize user experience and user clicks. Facebook’s homepage is carefully
designed to be full of visible numbers- likes, friends, posts, interactions and new messages (and
always in red! Urgent!). Auto play, endless scroll and reverse chronological timelines are all
sculpted to keep your attention… Similarly the introduction of a ‘like’ button in 2009 came from a
much older subfield of- yes, this really exists- Liking Studies, which has long shown that likability
is an advert’s most potent characteristics. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, recently
called the ‘like’ button ‘a social-validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing that a hacker
like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’.
He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and the others understood this, ‘And we did it anyway’ “.
(source: Jamie Bartlet, The People vs Tech, Ebury Press, 2018, London, page 15-18)

Shoshana Zuboff draws attention to a study of a Dutch privacy researcher Arnold Roosendaal to
elaborate how this ‘like’ button introduced by Facebook in 2010 as an emotion expressing
communication tool among friends, actually is designed to hunt and extract surplus. Roosendaal
in his study demonstrated that “the button was a powerful supply mechanism from which
behavioral surplus is continuously captured and transmitted, installing cookies in users’
computer whether or not they click the button… Roosendal discovered that the button also
tracks non-Facebook members and concluded that Facebook was potentially able to connect
with , and therefore surveil, ‘all web users’.” (Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by
Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page 159)

So, whenever a surveillance capitalist corporation like Facebook or Google introduces any new
services or a new feature or functionalities in existing services, no matter how beneficial the
services or features might be, it is obvious that their ultimate objective is to capture more data
and convert these into for-profit prediction products. Facebook’s latest initiative like “Metaverse”
needs to be assessed and analyzed in this light. Mark Zuckerberg has mentioned in his Connect
2021 speech that ‘Screens just can’t convey the full range of human expression and
connection.’ But Avatars- the living 3D representations of people in Metaverse will be the source
of more details of people’s expression and gestures in different situation. (Mark Zuckerberg,
Meta (Facebook) Connect 2021 Metaverse Event Transcript, Oct 28, 2021

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/meta-facebook-connect-2021-metaverse-event-transcript).

Metaverse will open new frontiers of behavioral surplus extraction by bringing the aspect of
people’s life under the radar of surplus extraction-machineries which were previously beyond its
reach. When people are deeply engaged with there office works, business, playing, visiting
friends and family, gossiping in the offline world they do not use Facebook, even if they use,
they do not perform these activities through Facebook, so Facebook do not have much data
point on people’s interaction with each other in the offline world. Now if Facebook can bring
these hitherto offline activities into online or virtual world and lure people to perform these
activities using the virtual infrastructure built by Facebook (be it Metaverse or any other
platform), then all those aspects of people’s life, which were previously beyond the reach of
surveillance capitalism, will now become ready for surplus extraction! That’s why if someone
sees eerie similarities between Hiro Protagonist’s capture of user data from the Black Sun
System and sell it to the Central Intelligence Center’s library for profit and Facebook’s business
model, this should not be surprising at all! Similarly, if anyone starts to compare Facebook or
Meta with ‘Global Multimedia Protocol Group’ of ‘Snow Crash’ which is the de facto controller of
the infrastructure of Metaverse, this also should not be surprising.

Conclusion:

Like water to fish, Meta wants to become the imperceptible medium that permeates our entire
existence. It will no longer be a choice you make but rather the space within which choices are
made available to you. In other words, it’s not the company sponsoring the event, it’s the stadium
in which it’s held. The idea is that Meta will be a holding company in charge of a thriving
ecosystem of interconnected products and services, all seamlessly integrated into a hybrid world
able to effortlessly extract profit at every point in the system. -- JAMES MULDOON, Facebook Is
 Now Meta. And It Wants to Monetize Your Whole, Existence, Jacobinmag, 28 Oct 2021;
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/mark-zuckerberg-meta-facebook-rebrand-metaverse

The Metaverse, if realized as envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg, undoubtedly will be the greatest
source of behavioral surplus for the corporation Meta. And with the expansion and
intensification of surplus extraction, not only the existing adverse impacts of surveillance
capitalism will be amplified, new depth and dimension will be introduced. More surplus will
create more prediction products which will be used for even more personalization to extract
more surplus to be used for more prediction products and the cycle will go on. And this can be
used more effectively not only for targeted commercial adverts, but also for targeting the
potential voters with narrower personalized political promises and pledges. Existing practices of
categorizing people into different ‘bucket’ or ‘universe’ based on their likes and preferences and
bombard them with hyper-personalized promises (source: Jamie Bartlet, The People vs Tech,
Ebury Press, 2018, London, page 72-89), can be expanded in an unprecedented scale and
dimension with unforeseen impact. As the business insider has aptly predicted, “Mark
Zuckerberg's metaverse could fracture the world as we know it — letting people 'reality block'
things they disagree with and making polarization even worse.” This is because, the current
social media business of allowing third parties to mediate our lives through targeted news feeds
and targeted advertising based on the massive personal data that the corporations extract from
us, will be intensified in an all-encompassing virtual world like Metaverse, where third parties
would dictate what we see in our home, on the street, and at work. And this would make it more
difficult to identify misinformation and create more divisions and polarization among the people
thanks to narrower virtual world view or echo-chamber:

In the metaverse of the future, two people could be walking down the same street and see very
different things thanks to the AR glasses they're wearing.

One, who may lean conservative, could "reality block" out aspects they've been conditioned to
oppose, like a fertility clinic. The other, a liberal, could walk by a gun store and not even know it's
there.

Others could have paid for a third-party "app" that lets them instantly know identifying traits about
people they pass on the street thanks to the data that Facebook, now Meta, has collected on its
users. The word "Republican" hangs over the head of one passerby in big block virtual letters, for
example.

The result is these two people believing that they're seeing the same street, only they're not —
they are existing in diverging realities within this virtual overlay of the real world.

(source: Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse could fracture the world as we know it — letting people
'reality block' things they disagree with and making polarization even worse.

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-meta-metaverse-splinter-reality-more-2021-11

As Shoshana Zuboff has shown, early incursions of Google, Facebook, and other surveillance
capitalist operations could not be resisted because it was unprecedented, the basic operational
mechanisms and business practices were so new and strange that the real significance could
not be grasped. Surveillance capitalism plunders us by meeting our needs- ‘the precise moment
at which our needs are met is also the moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral
data and all for the sake of others’ gain.’ (Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana
Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page 53, 341) Now that many have come to realize the real
motivation of surveillance capitalism and its impact on human society, it is high time to resist further
attempts to colonize our minds. Echoing Zuboff (Source: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by
Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books Ltd, 2019, London, page 344), let us demand appropriate laws, rules and
regulations to stop illegitimate rendition of human experience as behavioral data, the use of behavioral
surplus as free raw material, extreme concentrations of the new means of surplus extraction, the
manufacture of prediction products, the operations of the means of behavioral modification, the
accumulation of private exclusive concentration of knowledge.