The Metaverse Is Dead, and Meta May Be Next

The Metaverse still exists, but Ed Zitron at Business Insider has written an obituary for Mark Zuckerberg's brainchild. Literally: "The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world," Zitron begins. "It was three years old." The tech has never quite worked, and, more importantly, Zuckerberg has never been able to articulate a vision for the Metaverse that went beyond "vague promises" of a brave new world in which businesses could flourish. Zuckerberg and his Meta company have now made clear that their big new focus will be on artificial intelligence, not the Metaverse.

The latter is "headed to the tech industry's graveyard of failed ideas," writes Zitron. It was always a "half-baked idea," but Zuckerberg used his massive wealth and clout to get others in the tech industry to buy into the hype. Those who did should be embarrassed, and Zuckerberg himself would be fired from Meta if the tech world made any sense. He "misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street," writes Zitron. Zuckerberg has no business running a major company, he adds, predicting that Meta is doomed to follow the Metaverse "into the proverbial grave" if Zuckerberg remains in control. (Read the full essay.)