An Alternate History News Story

March 25, 2024

Oculus purchased Facebook today for a generous $10 billion, becoming one of the smaller and less outrageous of the company’s recent buyouts including, but not limited to: Intel, Panasonic, and Toshiba. Ten years ago, such buyouts would have been laughable, as Oculus VR Kickstarted its original concept at a measly $2.4 million, using crowdsourcing methods that it has since streamlined and perfected with its Ocul-Us network of real time project showcasing. Ocul-Us allows users to construct and demonstrate in virtual spaces where people can then donate to projects that they think are viable or simply cool. It is no small irony that Oculus rose from this exact same type of grassroots funding 10 years ago.

Facebook’s decline also began 10 years ago as research began to show an exodus among its teenager and young adult demographic. The company, which began in 2004 exclusively for university students, spent its formative years moving away from its original user base, eventually opening to the general public and incorporating games, ads, and ultimately data collection on a scale so massive that one historian recently offered to format all the user data in Facebook’s backup to be released in 150 years as a massive unedited biography of the human race during the early 21st century.

Today, Facebook exists mainly as an information gathering consortium, catering primarily to users age 50 – 85, declining in much the same way that the now forgotten AOL once carried the bulk of online traffic in the 1990s. AOL’s membership similarly dwindled, and the company held tight to an aging demographic that simply couldn’t imagine using anything else to access the internet. “Facebook exists as a monument. Growth means evolution, and evolution means leaving behind old methods and means,” an Oculus spokesperson said today. Facebook still integrates with many devices, including Oculus VR, and as data collection laws become more stringent, people will continue to sell their likes and locations for the often lucrative prices that companies like Facebook offer. Oculus executives see Facebook as remaining viable for another decade at least.

However, events could have been very different for the trillion dollar company.

Oculus sets are used for everything from law enforcement training to physics research and NASA simulations. Oculus sets are the playground for the new generation of social networkers, having heralded the end to webpage-based former titans like Facebook, with Oculus VR offering an interactive world where users can interface in countless ways that simply aren’t possible with flat screens and cell phones. It was once normal to type in, “I’m having a great day!” and label it as a status update to keep in touch with your parents and friends. Now you can construct a room and hang out with your friends, even if you are 5,000 miles away. Online bulletin boards and messaging mediums still exist, but for the most part, the forum has become an actual forum again.

While Oculus has been panned recently for purportedly giving information to Homeland Security groups, it can be in no way accused of the mass information gathering that once plagued other large media sites. Using fiber connections and harnessing the power of quantum network encryption, Oculus is on the forefront of information protection and security. Yet, many people have forgotten that just a decade ago when Facebook was still going strong, it offered to buy out Oculus VR even before it began, an action that would have set this company in a very different direction.

Dubbed by Internet historians as “the Internet rift,” the formative years of the social network medium were defined by what it couldn’t do, by the ways in which people hoped to connect one day. Users spent the collective sum of thousands of years staring at screens, leaving time-lapse messages (messages that would be read 5 minutes or 10 days later), splicing video, and generally ignoring the people around them. We walked around with our heads in our phones. Before Oculus-like tech brought people into the virtual ether, cell phone users were actually diagnosed with repetitive stress issues in their thumbs from typing too much.

And while it seems like a natural progression from flat screens to VR technology, one of the main roadblocks to our current style of living and connection is that old world type of data gathering where colossal businesses like Verizon and Facebook used to tell the user what they should want rather than sourcing out and embracing actual change. If Facebook had been allowed to dip into Oculus’s pockets 10 years ago, they wouldn’t have destroyed VR networking and development. They wouldn’t have even really hindered it. They would have usurped it during a time when the battle between the conglomerate and the indie developer raged, when big business and small business went at it in the political and business arena like lions and gladiators. It would have been the technological equivalent of the groundhog seeing its shadow, heralding another decade of backdoor buyouts, illegal and unethical auctioning of data, belligerent marketing that tells users what to buy, fees, Best Buy-ish (remember them?) methods of selling services, unresponsive and ill-fitting interfaces built buy the lowest bidder, and all the other impractical weirdness that comes with being at the mercy of mega corporations.

Now Oculus is a mega corporation. But it is one that has so far stayed true to its roots. While Facebook is hardly a footnote in history, we can rest assured that it will find its proper place in the infinite halls of the new medium. Its eventual end will hopefully not be as ignominious as one artist’s recent work called, “The Infancy of the Internet” which is a 100 meter tower built out of AOL CDs.