The year is 20XX. Your first born child is attending their first concert. Their friends have each spent about 120 inflation-adjusted dollars on tickets. They don’t have great seats, but luckily, they were able to all sit together. After an hour, the set is over, they all take their VR headsets off and head to bed without even a drive home.

Billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg made headlines recently when he announced that Facebook would rebrand to reflect their new mission: to pioneer The Metaverse.

The “metaverse” is an interesting concept (understatement), but it’s bound to become a useless buzzword if we don’t take the time to understand it. What is the metaverse, exactly? Quite literally, the metaverse is a sort of mini landscape (or “universe”) that would exist within the universe we live in now. The plan is for everyone to be able to access the metaverse using virtual reality headsets or augmented reality eyewear, with these technologies eventually being as accessible to all as today’s personal computers and smartphones.

How would the metaverse function in everyday life? In many ways, we are using a primitive version of the metaverse today. Today’s internet behaves as an addition to everyday life.

There are plenty of aspects of life the metaverse would seek to remedy. In an increasingly online world, there have been tremendous changes in the way we communicate with one another. Friendships forged before the pandemic clung to life online through late night Discord calls and FaceTimes; but unfortunately, the pandemic lasted longer than lots of friendships. It would be naive to assume that one could go so long without making new friends, and there are major flaws in our current methods of online interactions that stand in the way of blossoming friendship.

Even on platforms with video and audio, conversations are missing body language, facial expressions too subtle to show up on camera, and the physical space that these conversations take place in. In a call of 10 people, each person must take turns chatting with no opportunity for small side conversations. Additionally, it’s just exhausting to keep up.

Steve Cranford, Editor-in-Chief of the science journal Matter writes that “[w]hat once used to be a ”drop by your desk” chat has turned into ”schedule a 30 min Zoom”. And since the agenda is attached, and everyone has the next Zoom to attend, these meetings seem more hyper focused than their in-person equivalents; they force us to concentrate more intently on conversations in order to absorb information and feel like constant surveillance through a modern telescreen”

This desire to break free of the constraints of Zoom was a popular feeling during the lockdown. However, whether it was an issue of accessibility or necessity, it really failed to take off in a comparable size to the traditional video conference format. To start, predating the beginning of the pandemic by a couple of years, VRChat took the world by storm as a new kind of immersive chat room experience. Although also available to non-VR headset users, VR Chat was a venue where informal conversations blossomed, and with much of the intangible atmosphere that in-person events boasted.  Only rather than chatting with coworkers, you might be chatting with Homer Simpson and Hatsune Miku.

Mozilla, the company behind the popular web browser Firefox, similarly attempted  revolutionizing this online space. With simplified design and easier accessibility, Mozilla Hubs requires no download and allows you to enter a virtual space meant to simulate a learning environment. Instead of just using screen share to watch videos and look at pictures as a class, groups can gather around a screen in what is essentially the videogame version of a movie theater.

Zuckerberg makes the connection between “teleporting” through the multiverse and clicking on links in the current internet. It even includes proximity-based voice chat, so peers can chat with each other without interrupting everyone, just like in real life, and just like Cranford described in his explanation of a zoom “virtual lobby” to supplement the online conference experience.

A primitive version online concert experience is already here as well. While Coachella was postponed from April 2020 to October 2020, and again to April 2021, and then finally being wholly canceled for two years in a row. Meanwhile, PC Music, the coltish British record label held an online music festival, “Live at Appleville”, advertised in a similar fashion to a traditional one. The label’s largest artists Charli XCX, Kero Kero Bonito, Clairo, and more headlined, while smaller, burgeoning artists were peppered in between. The show was held as a live stream, with artists free to submit raw, recorded performances from their houses, or original music videos to air exclusively on the label’s stream.

With a purely video format like Appleville’s, the performances of the stream can exist as videos much in the same way as they did live, missing only the live chat off to the side. But what aspects of the concert experience are missing from the video-only format, even if the visuals are somewhat salvaged? To put it simply, the two things that are really necessary to differentiate between a music video and a concert are nowhere to be found: The stage and the crowd.

How is this to be remedied? Is there a way to jump around in a mosh pit like before the pandemic, without breaking any of the guidelines for social distancing? Zoom wouldn’t work for this – if anything, attendees could look at the rest of the audience, but that hardly simulates the feeling of standing with hundreds of people all watching the same thing.

This is precisely what Laura Les and Dylan Brady of 100 gecs realized before putting together their totally online “concert”: “Square Garden.”

Square Garden is technically a prerecorded stream of artists – not a concert. There are no visuals like there were for Appleville. Instead of having artists submit videos, they set up a Minecraft server as a digital venue. Attendees would load up the website in the background and could explore a giant treehouse full of easter eggs. At the center of the tree was a stage and mosh pit for players to watch the artists in. When an artist’s music came up on the stream, they would log on and run around on stage and dance around. The experience was primitive, but the concept was there, and it had merit.

An extremely small team put together Square Garden; some studios have entire teams dedicated to these digital experiences. Travis Scott and Ariana Grande have both made their Fortnite debuts, and Lil Nas X gave a performance in Roblox as well.

What comes next is what Zuckerberg is working on.

Twitter is already selling tickets to ticketed Spaces, scheduled, audio-only online events that can only be accessed by paying up. You can sell tickets to online concerts, but what about charging different prices for different seats? What are the ethics behind selling access to spaces that don’t exist physically?

There are going to be countless discussions on the implications of NFTs and private corporations controlling such a boundless reality. Will the metaverse be a public space, or a corporate-owned service?

Zuckerberg wants to be known for creating the metaverse, but if we look around us, a lot of it already exists. With his selfish and grandiose attempt to take credit for what’s already happening, it seems as if his real intention is to monetize it.