Author’s note: Originally, I was going to title this article ‘The Fall of the Metaverse’. I decided this title was inappropriate given that in order for something to fall, it must first have risen. In the case of the Metaverse, that rise never took place.
The Jewish lizard man, founder of Facebook, and CEO of Meta Platforms Mark Zuckerberg was in the news again this past week as his company launches yet another social networking service.
This time, his new platform, known as ‘Threads’, is a Twitter clone, hoping to draw off on the success of the anger-inducing, attention-span-destroying, dopamine-administering bird app which Elon Musk acquired last year. Twitter has already threatened legal action against Meta Platforms on the grounds that Threads was developed using trade secrets.
This tweet by The Spectator Index features the Zuck’s career highlights from the founding of Facebook in 2004 to the founding of Threads this month. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice a major omission on the timeline from 2021. In a video released on October 29th, 2021, the reptilian technocrat himself announced the focus of his company going forward would be developing the Metaverse, a fully immersive virtual world and the rebranding of Facebook Inc. to Meta Platforms.
In September 2021, the Facebook brand had taken yet another hit to its reputation following the leak of damning internal documents to the public. While the rebrand could’ve been seen as an attempt at damage control, making the Metaverse the focal point of the new brand (and the amount of money they would sink into this) shows just how serious Zuckerberg was about the project. While they didn’t make as many headlines, other mega corporations such as Disney, Microsoft, and Walmart began development of metaverse technologies following Zuckerberg’s 2021 announcement, seeing virtual reality as a new tech frontier.
The Metaverse instantly became both a subject of ridicule on the internet and the basis for thought experiments on potential dystopian technocratic futures for the dissident right. The very idea of the Metaverse itself was disconcerting. Firstly, as if we aren’t already subsumed enough by the hyperreality of social media, the Metaverse was supposed to create an even more subsuming virtual world. Have you ever wanted to feel like you’re physically living inside Facebook? Well, then the Metaverse is for you. Secondly, what was supposed to be the appeal of such a platform? The message of this disturbing Superbowl ad featuring an animatronic dog is that your real life might be miserable, but the Metaverse will offer you a virtual fantasy world where you can escape the pain of reality.
The Metaverse was announced during the heyday of COVID, when technocracy was the hot topic of the online dissident sphere. Given what we were being put through at the time, the implications of this technology and what it could become in the future were bleak. The Metaverse became a running theme in my Classic Movies series. Morgoth and I spoke about it in our stream on Soylent Green and our stream on Inception. We both envisioned a future with miles and miles of towering skyscrapers filled with people in shoebox sized pods, hooked up to the metaverse. Thankfully today, that future seems less likely than it did back in 2021.
Have you ever heard of Horizon Worlds? Probably not. Well, that is the actual name of the platform developed by Meta, released in December 2021. The Metaverse is just a blanket term for a 3D virtual reality in which users can interact with one another. What Zuckerberg meant in his video raving about the Metaverse was the dream of multiple platforms from a variety of companies integrated into a single virtual space. Meta does not actually provide a service called the Metaverse.
No one has ever heard of Horizon Worlds. They just refer to the product they’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg is developing as “the Metaverse” and the only thing they know about it is that they want nothing to do with it. That’s one indicator of just how poorly this product has been received. But it gets worse. A lot worse.
According to Business Insider, Meta has spent over $100 billion on research and development for the Metaverse, but as of April 2023, they’ve reportedly stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers in meetings. This comes only a year and a half after the release of that uncanny announcement video where Zuckerberg declared that the Metaverse was the future of his company and of the internet itself. Microsoft, Disney, and Walmart have all ceased development of their respective metaverse projects this year as well and fired staff working on them.
What does Meta have to show for its gargantuan investment into the Metaverse. Their goal for the year 2022 was 500,000 active users of Horizon Worlds. Business Insider reported that the platform had only 200,000 active users as of October 2022, which was a decrease from its peak of 300,000 in February 2022. It has also been reported that most users abandon the platform within a month of joining, once the novelty wears off. Horizon Worlds is played on the Meta Quest 2 headset. While Meta has sold 20 million units of the headset (Horizon Worlds isn’t the only game available), over half of the units sold are reportedly out of use within six months.
What can users expect from the Metaverse? I’ve never had the misfortune of actually playing Horizon Worlds, but it’s reportedly an awkward and depressing experience. Despite Meta spending more than the GDP of Bulgaria on developing metaverse technology, their only product which they’ve actually released is less impressive than the game Second Life from 2003. The graphics look like something from the Nintendo Wii. But it’s even worse than that. The avatars don’t even have legs. What could be more “immersive” than amputated cartoon character floating around a world which looks like it was created for a middle schooler’s digital art project?
So, why was the Metaverse such an absolute disaster? A large part of its failure has to be attributed to its dreadful execution. While I may distain the very concept of the Metaverse, it most certainly would’ve had much wider appeal if it had been done better. Despite the unfathomable amount of money spent on it, Horizon Worlds is worse than previous iterations of the same idea from years ago such as Second Life, the Miiverse, or PlayStation Home.
However, Horizon Worlds is just one poorly executed platform. As I mentioned earlier, the Metaverse wasn’t simply intended to be one platform, but an amalgamation the entire virtual space on the internet. Other attempts at developing metaverse technology have also failed and the initial groundswell of interest in the idea within the tech world following Zuckerberg’s 2021 announcement has died off.
One cited cause of this is the explosion of interest in AI at the end of last year. Launched on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT took the tech world by storm. Companies have since shifted their focus to the development of AI services such as chatbots or AI art generators, leaving very little interest in the further development of metaverse technology. Likewise, discourse within our sphere of politics surrounding technology shifted from imagining dystopian futures created by VR to imagining dystopian futures created by AI.
This definitely had an impact on the sudden drop in interest around the Metaverse in the present, but this isn’t the first time that this idea has failed to take off. The concept of virtual reality has been around for decades. Nintendo released a virtual reality game console called the Virtual Boy in 1995. It was a critical and commercial failure and was discontinued only a year later. Oculus Rift was developed more than a decade ago, which was primarily used for gaming, but had other functions too. While it had some success, it didn’t revolutionize gaming.
Video games are still primarily played on flat screens. VR headsets remain a niche accessory which some gamers use, but most could do without. I tried Oculus Rift once (though I can’t remember the game). While it was kind of a cool novelty, it gave me motion sickness within 10 minutes, and I was constantly afraid I was going to knock something over in the room. It goes without saying that I’m not going to be purchasing a VR headset anytime soon.
Likewise, as I mentioned earlier, the social aspect of the Metaverse has been done numerous times before too with aforementioned games like Second Life, the Miiverse, and PlayStation Home. These had moderate success (a hell of a lot more than Zuckerberg’s pitiful attempt), but they never became a mainstay in modern life. They haven’t even replaced conventional social media sites like Facebook or Twitter as Zuckerberg predicted they would in his announcement video. In fact, Meta’s recent launch of such an obvious rip off of Twitter is evidence that even they no longer believe social media is moving in this new direction.
So, it’s not like the concept of the metaverse hasn’t been tried or that the technology simply isn’t there yet. It has been tried. It just hasn’t caught on. There are two possible explanations I could think of as to why there is so little interest in the Metaverse. One is really black pilling, the other is really white pilling.
The first possible explanation is that the population has been dumbed down to such as degree that a fully immersive virtual world is simply an inefficient way to keep us distracted. Why go through the effort to buy and hook yourself into an expensive and complicated VR setup to immerse yourself into hyperreality when 10-second TikTok videos can do the same from the screen of your smartphone? It could be that the Metaverse won’t be necessary to placate the masses who already have enough technology to keep them glued to their couches.
The second possible explanation is that we could be experiencing burnout with the encroachment of computer technology into every aspect of our lives. The failure of the Metaverse could be a sign that people have had enough. As our lives have become increasingly dominated by the screen, we feel a deep sense of emptiness and longing for a more authentic life. Not one lived in a virtual fantasy world, but in the real world.
I regard virtual reality as potentially one of the most dangerous innovations of the future because it has the potential to totally sever humanity from the physical form. VR removes us from the physical world and puts us in a world which is totally artificial. The purpose of the Metaverse is to kill off genuine human social interaction and transfer it into the artificial virtual realm.
This prospect becomes all the more worrying when you consider Agenda 2030 and the future the globalist elites have planned for us. A drastic reduction in quality of life and personal liberty is in the cards. The meme “Live in the pod and eat the bugs.” has become a mainstay in public discourse over the past few years because it perfectly describes the nightmarish future which Agenda 2030 would have in store for us. What better way to placate the masses than the Metaverse? To give them the technology to pretend they are living a fulfilling life as they are imprisoned in the digital gulag. And if everything meaningful to one’s life was relegated to the Metaverse, would it even matter if their physical form ceased to exist all together?
VR is alluring because it offers the dream of living out one’s fantasies which they have no hope of ever doing in reality. Even more so if you consider where society is going. But as we’ve seen time and time again, the hyperreal man-made copies of the things we desire have never been able to satisfy the human soul the same way as those bestowed upon us by our creator. Beyond Meat™ is not meat. Trans “women” are not women. Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. And virtual reality is not reality.
Imagine an existence trapped in a virtual fantasy realm as your physical body rots away, alone and uncared for. The world you inhabit is never enough to give you a fulfilling life, but just enough to wish that you could live one in the real world. The only thing worse I could imagine is if that artificial world you were trapped in was designed by Mark Zuckerberg. But thankfully, it looks like that’s never going to happen.
This is excellent.
Suckerberg? Just no. Every time.