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Lessons from the Catastrophic Failure of the Metaverse
I've been spending too much time on Twitter lately. It feels a bit like watching the last few seconds before a catastrophic trainwreck. One of the articles on my timeline last night was a piece in the Nation, talking about the extent to which Meta manufactured (with the breathless, complicit help of tech journalism) the narrative of the Metaverse, and the extent to which they deceived us.
It's a good article, but to cut to the chase:
The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that one of the features designed to reward users in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally.
Like, let's be clear. The MUD I play on, which admittedly is still fairly active for a text-based game, almost always has in excess of 200 players. Not total per day, but online at any given time. I don't have numbers on how much they make during their usually biannual donation drives, but it's certainly enough to cover costs, and then some. Well in excess of $470.
And that's a MUD! The world moved on from MUDs in 1999!
The metaverse was a scam, but we knew that; I think anyone with half a brain understood that Meta would not only lie, they'd happily wreck people's lives in service of such. Remember all the media organizations decimated by "pivot to video"? All the writers laid off because their executives were told that not only were people wanting video, they were watching them to completion on Facebook?
Of course that was a lie and of course it eventually came out, but that didn't help the people who lost their jobs, defaulted on their mortgages, were plunged into family crises because the dead-eyed Creep For Life at the top decided Facebook was so big it could dictate reality.
If he were smart (perhaps, more accurately, reflective), there'd be an understanding that even an organization the size of Meta can't do whatever it wants. Sure, it can create the narrative of a "metaverse", which is a great term but stolen shamelessly from Stephenson and others; sure, they can funnel billions of dollars into their Lysol wipe'd Wii-ass vision of the future. But they found out the hard way that they can't actually make people want what they don't want. And people laughed at them, at the vision. The Emperor truly has no clothes.
But with regards to the Metaverse, they were able to drag along a lot of people and organizations that should've known better: McKinsey, top architecture firms, etc the latter talking about "building in the metaverse" as if there an accepted analogy between buildings in the physical world and the virtual spaces. Second Life existed (exists). VRChat exists. People do just fine. Nobody needs to pay $10k for floor plans.
$470. Not million, not even thousand. Jesus. Like, I knew it was bad, but my own game, which I sell on itch, has made almost that much, and I'm a nobody, an old internet crank, writing gemlogs in vi over ssh.
In any sane world, Zuckerberg would be fired, would be run out of town, his family forever forced to live with the fact that daddy was a huckster who got lucky, his student-rating website catching fire at exactly the right time. To initiate a great deception that decimates an entire industry is shameful; but, twice?
But he's safe. Capital loves capital, and capital protects its own. He's smart enough that when Facebook went public, he was basically made Dictator for Life, unable to be removed from his position. And even now, the media has moved on, talking about Instagram's hastily-rushed Twitter alternative, Threads. It is, by most accounts, shit. Like Facebook, like Instagram, there's no chronological timeline, arguably the core feature of Twitter. There's an old dril tweet that goes:
ME: please show me the posts in the order that they were made
COMPUTER: thats too hard. heres some tweets i think are good. Do you like this
Meta claims they've got 10M users already. Is it true? Who knows. Does it matter? Probably not. Because most media outlets have shown a remarkable lack of thoughtfulness when it comes to the claims of Meta or of its leader. And whether it's true or not, it doesn't really matter, because Meta isn't even in the platform business anymore, they're in the data business. And millions (or thousands) of users using a new platform for a week, a few months, however long this lasts, is just more data points they can charge for. At some point, probably next year, they'll switch to the next shiny thing. Threads will flop; "Twitter, but made by Instagram" is 100% not the selling point they say it is. "Twitter, but made by Facebook" is even worse. And after another division's laid off in the name of Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" (funny how these conversations never start with him, with his decision making), the rest of us will once again be left holding the bag, wondering at just what point this man will be held to account, at what point this self-styled genius will finally fail.