The big thing As much as I wanted to write several paragraphs on the juiciness that is Scarlett Johansson suing Disney over the release of Black Widow on Disney+, I will refrain and talk about something with potentially more relevance to the topics generally discussed in this newsletter. This week, I wrote about Facebook’s ambitions to become a “metaverse company,” something Mark Zuckerberg played up pretty heavily in his quarterly earnings call with investors and analysts. "I wanted to discuss this now so that you can see the future that we're working towards and how our major initiatives across the company are going to map to that," Zuckerberg said on the call. "What is the metaverse? It's a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think of this as an embodied internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at." I shared a few thoughts on the significance of this pronouncement in the story, but I’ve had some more time to stew on it since. I think in some ways, Zuckerberg distinguishing that he sees Facebook’s future as a metaverse company versus an AR/VR company doesn’t mean that much when it comes to what Facebook’s far-flung future might look like, it’s more impactful on the path to get there. Facebook has spent the past five or six years basically brute-forcing virtual reality on the market by spending a lot of money, its headsets seem to be selling well enough today despite lots of supply issues, but it’s also clear that Zuckerberg probably thought they’d be much further along by now. I think one of the reasons they haven’t advanced as much as expected is because there’s been such a huge divide between the experiences available on VR (gaming) compared to what Facebook’s core offerings are (news, community). There have been some efforts to bring more functional 2D experiences into VR but I think Facebook is realizing that to convince people that buying a VR headset is a logical thing to do, they’re going to have to make their mobile and desktop experiences more game-like. Facebook as Roblox is a very strange picture, so I’m kind of doubtful they’re going to fully commit to putting the entirety of their services into 3D space, but even capturing part of that experience on existing platforms could offer them an easier transition to AR/VR hardware down the road. The big question is whether Facebook is even structured to make a sweeping change like this at all or whether they end up pushing to buy their way into a metaverse future with a big acquisition. We shall see. | 
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