Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on the metaverse. He renamed Facebook to Meta. He poured tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. He did interviews in virtual environments with cartoon avatars that haunted my nightmares. He insisted this was the future of human interaction.
Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. The metaverse was not a response to demand. It was one billionaire’s science fiction fantasy imposed on the rest of us.
And it failed. Spectacularly. Predictably. Inevitably.
The pitch made no sense
The metaverse pitch was that people would want to put on heavy headsets and interact with cartoon versions of each other in virtual environments. Instead of a Zoom call where you can see actual human faces, you would strap a screen to your face and see legless avatars floating in a virtual conference room.
This was presented as an upgrade. It was not an upgrade. It was worse in every conceivable way. More friction to start. More discomfort during. Less human connection throughout. The only benefit was the novelty, and novelty wears off fast when the experience is uncomfortable.
I do not know a single person who tried a VR meeting and thought yes, this is better. Everyone tried it once, maybe twice, then went back to video calls like normal people. The metaverse solved a problem nobody had by making communication worse.
The technology was not ready
Even if the concept was good, which it was not, the technology was nowhere near ready for mainstream adoption.
VR headsets are heavy and uncomfortable. You cannot wear them for long periods. They cause eye strain and motion sickness for many people. They require dedicated space. They isolate you from your physical environment, which is dangerous and antisocial.
The graphics were terrible. Horizon Worlds looked like a game from 2005. The avatars were disturbing. The environments were empty. The interactions were clunky. Nothing about the experience felt premium or futuristic. It felt like a tech demo from a decade ago.
Meta spent billions and delivered an experience that compared unfavourably to Second Life, a game from 2003. That is not a technology problem. That is a complete failure of product development.
Facebook’s brand was poison
Here is something Meta never acknowledged: a significant portion of the population actively dislikes Facebook. They associate it with misinformation, political manipulation, privacy violations, and the general degradation of online discourse. The company’s reputation was toxic.
Asking those people to strap a Facebook camera to their face and spend time in Facebook’s virtual world was absurd. The trust was not there. The goodwill was not there. Meta could have made a perfect product and people still would have hesitated because of who was making it.
The rebrand to Meta was supposed to help with this. It did not. Everyone still called it Facebook. Everyone still remembered the scandals. A new name does not erase a decade of reputation damage.
VR gaming works, VR everything else does not
The thing is, VR works for some things. Gaming is genuinely good in VR. Beat Saber is fun. Half-Life: Alyx is incredible. The immersion adds something when the activity benefits from immersion.
But most activities do not benefit from immersion. Meetings do not. Shopping does not. Socialising does not. The things Meta wanted people to do in the metaverse are the things that are worse in VR.
We already have a metaverse. It is called the internet. We can socialise, shop, work, and play without strapping a screen to our face. The internet is accessible, comfortable, and ubiquitous. The metaverse offered no improvements over the internet. It only offered inconveniences.
The pivot already happened
Meta has quietly pivoted away from the metaverse. The Reality Labs losses continue but the rhetoric has changed. Now it is all about AI. The metaverse is no longer the future. It is an embarrassing chapter they would prefer not to discuss.
Zuckerberg spent tens of billions of dollars on a fantasy. The money is gone. The talent is gone. The years are gone. All because one person with too much power convinced himself that his vision was inevitable.
This is the danger of founder control. When there is no check on leadership, bad ideas can consume entire companies. Anyone with product sense could have told Meta that the metaverse pitch was weak. But there was nobody in the room who could say no to Zuckerberg.
The legacy is a punchline
The metaverse is a joke now. When people reference it, they are usually making fun of it. The legless avatars. The empty worlds. The Zuckerberg interview in the virtual environment. These are memes, not milestones.
Meta’s attempt to define the next era of computing will be remembered as a cautionary tale. You cannot will a paradigm shift into existence. You cannot spend your way to adoption. Technology succeeds when it solves problems people have, not when it solves problems a billionaire imagines.
Nobody wanted the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg wanted it. That was not enough.
Tens of billions of dollars and the most powerful social media company in the world, and it still was not enough to make people care about virtual reality meetings.
Maybe the lesson will stick. Probably it will not. Some other billionaire will have some other vision and blow some other fortune trying to impose it on the rest of us.
But for now, the metaverse is dead. The headsets are gathering dust. The virtual worlds are empty. And the rest of us are fine because we never wanted to be there in the first place.