News that Facebook’s parent company Meta has scaled down its plans for its new European headquarters in Dublin will inevitably be viewed through the prism of its recent difficulties, with some 11,000 job losses announced globally, while it simultaneously pours billions into an attempt to establish a new artificial world to draw us all in.
Meta signed a 25-year lease on the former AIB HQ in Fibonacci Square, but has now instructed agents to sublet parts of it “as part of an ongoing review” of its sites. The company directly employs 3,000 people in Ireland, while a further 6,000 provide operational support services.
It has made a high-stakes gamble on people being willing to transfer themselves into a virtual reality life known as the metaverse, a 3-D community where our avatars can meet, talk shop, have some fun, and interact across the network.
Meta has spent some $100bn (€95bn) in research and development on this concept, $15bn this year alone. Meta’s share price has fallen by over 70% in 2022 and key services are losing market share. Staff are becoming disillusioned. One (anonymised) contributor to a company survey is reported to have commented: “The metaverse will be our slow death”.
While this online world is generally agreed to be the future of the internet, which already exercises a disproportionate impact on our lives, there is no consensus about the rates of adoption. While Meta has been boldly seeking first-mover advantage, there are scant signs that this strategy is working.
It’s nearly 40 years since author William Gibson, in his influential thriller , envisaged cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators”.
Nearly four decades later, few have the ability to “jack in” and become a sentient part of that network. Evangelists proclaim that it will represent a pivot point in history comparable to the development of writing and the invention of the computer.
For a company such as Meta, the questions are: Is that true? And how long can it wait?
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