Metaverse: Real questions about virtual future

Low investments in tech weigh India down, leaving a shortage of top talent

Just before Christmas, fabled Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen blocked Jack Dorsey on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, had been insinuating that the so-called Web 3.0, which is perceived to be the next stage of the internet, will be dominated by big venture capitalists, and end up being just “a centralised entity with a different label”.

Dorsey’s views appear to be aligned with those of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, but at variance with many other big names in the world of technology, such as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, whose parent company is now called Meta Platforms. The renaming, Zuckerberg said in a conversation on the YouTube channel of Gary Vaynerchuk, was in reference to the emergence of the metaverse as the next frontier in much the same way social networking was when Facebook was taking its first steps in 2004. 

As seen from today’s eyes, Web 1.0 was about websites, home pages, and banner ads, which were tantamount to mostly passive consumption by the users. Web 2.0 was about interactivity, social media, and streaming video, much of it riding on smartphones. Web 3.0 is described as something that can replace several in-person experiences and environments — for work, gaming, travel, and socialising through the metaverse, often through digital avatars.

The meta rush

The term metaverse is believed to have first appeared in a 1993 science fiction novel to describe virtual reality. It took 28 years to become all the rage in the world of technology. Meta’s attempt to become synonymous with metaverse, backed by billions of dollars, is not going unchallenged. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Valve, and many others are in the fray. As the road gets paved by the big guns, there will be the inevitable rush of start-ups into this area.

The big push to metaverse came from the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the compulsions of remote work and online education and the growing importance of the digital world in economies, the obvious thing to do was to make the virtual world as real as possible. Gamers, of course, are the early adopters of metaverse, but they are not the only ones. 

Already, Sotheby’s has held a show in the digital replica of its London galleries. Singer Justin Bieber performed a live concert in the metaverse in November. The metaverse is already buzzing with sounds of advertisements and even casinos. A couple in Florida held their wedding on the metaverse, providing a nice symmetry to their first meeting, which was during a virtual event for the company where they both work. As others have pointed out, if you own cryptocurrency, you are already part of the metaverse.

Its patrons say users will be in control in Web 3.0, that its applications and services powered by distributed digital ledgers, of which the most popular is blockchain, will decentralise the internet. This will be in contrast with Web 2.0, in which technology giants hoard and control data in their centralised databases.

On December 8, at Meta’s second edition of Fuel for India virtual event, Zuckerberg said it will not be a single company or even a group of companies, but millions of individuals who will drive the next stage of growth for the internet. And he sees India playing a huge part in building metaverse.

That will take some doing.

Reality of virtual

On November 29, Dorsey stepped down as the CEO of Twitter and announced Parag Agrawal as his replacement. Agrawal joined a swelling group of Indian-born CEOs running top technology companies in the United States. While we celebrate that, closed-doors conversations with a number of Indian technology companies reveals a shortage of top-quality talent in India. 

After the employment bloodbath of 2020, forced by the pandemic, companies including start-ups are looking to hire in big numbers, and they are, but some of the most critical positions go abegging for want of the right candidates. Many IIT professors rue the migration of their best students to the United States, where the opportunities are far more attractive.

The opportunities in India could become more attractive only if there was more investment in the higher echelons of the technology value chain. At the Fuel for India event, Zuckerberg said his company would train a million Indian teachers and 10 million students in virtual reality and set aside $150 million to train the next generation of creators to build this immersive learning content and increase access to devices. Other reports say Meta is likely to invest at least $50 billion over time to realise its vision of virtual reality. If that is true, this India investment is a fraction that’s not worth calculating. 

Facebook’s investments in India will undoubtedly grow and it should not be singled out. The overall investment in developing high-end technologies in India is low. The biggest and richest corporate groups in the country are not doing that. Start-ups that want to operate at the cutting-edge of technology find it difficult to raise funding. The biggest VC funds are based in the United States and they invest in Indian companies that are geared towards benefiting from the country’s large consumer market, not necessarily pushing the frontiers of technology.

So, as Jack Dorsey debates the nature of Web 3.0 and who controls it, India’s best bet would be if his replacement at Twitter found it worth his while to return to the country of his birth.