It’s just over four and a half years since one of the biggest rebrands in Big Tech history took place. On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook, Inc. would become Meta, and that the focus for the company would be on building a new virtual world where humans would work, socialize and play.
In 2026, after enough investment to rival the GDP of a small country, the metaverse is more or less dead. Meta is stuck (for now) with the nomenclature that reflected its pivot in 2021, but it remains a social media company that makes the vast majority of its revenues through advertising. Zuckerberg has now moved on to artificial intelligence as the existential driver of the company’s investments. Meta still sells VR/AR equipment, but it is focused on a niche area of gaming. The company is still massively profitable, so investors don’t hold too many grudges about the metaverse misadventure.
The timing of the metaverse announcement was no coincidence
Was it doomed to fail from the start? When you think about, the timing of the announcement of the metaverse was no coincidence. In October 2021, we were all still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were still occurring in countries across the globe. We were told that virtual activity was the future. The companies that were the darlings of the stock market in that period – like Zoom and Peloton – reflected that outlook. Those companies’ stocks have struggled in the post-pandemic era.
Perhaps one of the most important areas was that the idea of the metaverse – providing interactions in virtual worlds – either felt unnecessary or simply not possible. Work meetings, for example, can be conducted over the phone or through video calls, and the benefits of meeting in a virtual space are negligible. Entertainment, too, was a difficult sale. You can play live dealer casino games with real croupiers on a smartphone or PC today, and could do so long before anyone had heard of the metaverse, but you don’t need to strap a computer to your face to do it.
A boom in in-person experiences
Humans crave physical interaction. It’s arguably one of the biggest lessons learned in the post-pandemic world. There was a kind of rejection of the virtual experience. Yes, we are still glued to our smartphones and plenty of people still work from home, but there is evidence of an embracing of physical experiences. Global tourism, for example, is surging, up in recent years and (most importantly) from the most important year for comparison, 2019. There is a clamor to be present for in-person experiences, exemplified by people willing to pay exorbitant prices for tickets, from the World Cup Final to Coachella.
In theory, the metaverse did have some areas where it could deliver. You can appreciate, for example, a scenario where you would walk into a virtual clothes store and ‘try on’ items before you buy. Moreover, you might even be more comfortable meeting a therapist in a virtual space, and this could be a lifeline to some people. Yet, you will not be able to know how those clothes feel when you try them on. And a majority of therapists claim that online sessions, while useful when no other alternative exists, are not as effective as meeting in-person.
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None of this means that virtual reality tools won’t have an important part in future societies. Just recently, a surgeon announced the world’s first cataract surgery had been performed using the Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headset, though Apple’s device is what we would consider metaverse-lite. Nevertheless, the push to have us all meeting and socializing within virtual spaces is, and always was, contradictory to the human condition. Useful in certain contexts, sure, but as an all-encompassing mirror world to our own, it feels like Meta made the right decision to quit on the metaverse.
