Facebook acts like a small child who falls in love with
a new Lego set but then grows bored. It is up to users and business partners to
pick up the mess.
اضافة اعلان
Six years ago, Facebook said its next big thing was robots in
its
Messenger app that send texts to help people order flowers or figure out
which pair of jeans to buy. This idea is not a dud, but I’m guessing that a
Messenger bot does not pick out your pants.
The company also went hot and then cool on a feature that let
people broadcast live from their phones, and on a TV-like video hub called
Facebook Watch. On January 31, Facebook threw in the towel on its planned
digital currency, a project that forced financial and government establishments
to respond, but that was half-baked from the start.
Experimentation and failure can be healthy. For Facebook and
other corporate titans, flops or short-lived whims usually don’t do much harm.
(The company has renamed itself Meta, but I’m sticking with Facebook.)
But for the rest of us, Facebook’s stumbles can linger. Ask any
business partner that remodeled its customer service teams for Messenger bots,
or spent its limited resources making videos for Facebook Watch, only for
Facebook’s zeal to fade.
This pain might be the inevitable cost of invention. But
particularly now — as Facebook bets the company on a more immersive future of
the internet, called the metaverse — it’s worth asking what we gain and lose
when companies with Facebook’s power and influence persuade the world to follow
them to a future that never arrives.
In a way, it’s adorable how often Facebook becomes excited about
a new idea and then — well, moves on to a different shiny object. Live video
and Facebook Watch still exist. They’re just not the high priorities they once
were.
Other Big Tech companies lose interest in things they once
loved. But perhaps no other company has the combination of Facebook’s sprawl
and its willingness to declare this is going to be huge, persuade people to
come along for the ride, and then … shrug.
It’s fine, at least for Facebook. But there can be a collective
cost when companies and institutions respond to Facebook’s unpromising ideas.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t have infinite time and resources to
study what turned out to be the Betamax of
cryptocurrency. News organizations,
government institutions and most businesses have limited resources — imagine
what else they might have done if they had not responded to Facebook’s latest
obsession.
Even for Facebook, could the staff and energy that it is pouring
into the metaverse be better spent doing more to ensure its apps don’t spread
election misinformation or allow authoritarian governments to misuse them?
I don’t know if there’s a fix for the collateral damage of
Facebook’s whims. Maybe for a start, it would be helpful if Facebook presented
its new projects as hypotheses to test, rather than firm and permanent
declarations of its priorities.
Facebook’s fixation on the metaverse is different from
its past short-lived projects. For one, Facebook is not alone on the bandwagon
trying to pull us toward a more immersive internet that further blurs the lines
between digital life and the real thing. And at least for now, this change of
direction is a riskier bet for Facebook than for the company’s users or
business partners.
But I can also understand the inclination for Facebook to
believe — even briefly — that it can will its visions into our reality. That is
the power of Big Tech.
Technology from
Apple and Google effectively dictate how any
company reaches potential customers online. When Amazon made fast shipping
free, Americans came to expect it from everyone. America’s internet is turning
into QVC because tech giants want it that way.
We live in
Big Tech’s world. Sometimes that brings us handy maps
on our phones and online spaces for neighbors to gather. The flip side is that
when tech giants like Facebook give up on their dreams, everyone else is left
to pick up the pieces.
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