In 2021, Facebook renamed itself “Meta” because it was the first part of the word “metaverse.” This is fitting because “leg” is the first part of the word legacy, and the absence of legs will end up being the longest-lasting legacy of Meta’s failed metaverse experiment.
Hear me out: This is a bad thing. We should all mourn that the metaverse didn’t work out as the future of the internet because the thing that ended up replacing it — the AI slopiverse — is far worse.
To be fair, rumors of the metaverse’s death are somewhat exaggerated — Horizon Worlds, the main metaverse experience owned and operated by Meta, will continue on as a mobile game. After fan response to the announcement that it would shut down the VR version, Meta announced it would keep it up. There are still games out there for the Quest headset, and “the metaverse” as a concept of a digital place where your avatar can spend real money on fake digital items thrives (for better or worse) on Roblox. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who previously ran the VR/AR division, posted to Threads:
I’ve actually spent some time in Horizon Worlds in the last year, and I can confirm that it sucked. Most of the other users I encountered seemed to be children (based on their voices), and I felt deeply uncomfortable as an adult talking to strange kids without their parents knowing, and my own real identity was obscured. It was also just … boring. I didn’t want to talk to these strangers, and there wasn’t much to “do.” I spent some time in the “comedy club” where users could sign up to go onstage like an open mic night. It may not surprise you that there wasn’t much comedy happening; the stage was often taken over by what sounded like an 8-year-old kid who just wanted to sing Taylor Swift.
Meta’s metaverse was always a punchline and a joke. Its product demos were likely among the most humiliating moments for Mark Zuckerberg, who sweated through his T-shirt onstage. It became a meme how bad this whole thing looked.
Most everyone thought this looked corny and bad, just like most everyone thought NFTs looked scammy and bad, and everyone is quite happy now that we turned out to be right. That’s partly because it feels good to be right, but partly — for those who are highly skeptical of the tech industry — out of a deluded idea that AI is going to turn out to be a dud, just like NFTs and the metaverse. But that last part isn’t true; AI is going to happen. (It already is!)
And that’s actually why you should feel sad the metaverse didn’t work out. It was actually a beautiful idea — a vision of the internet based on human connection and wholesome leisure activities like going to a comedy club or playing a video game.
What did we get instead of that? We have the internet we’re stuck on now, full of misery and sloppified out the wazoo. Did you know that Coldplay played a concert in Horizon Worlds? Of course not because it didn’t lead to a weekslong social media pile-on of two concert attendees who happened to be shown on the Jumbotron. Would’ve been safe to canoodle in the metaverse!
Consider what Meta has launched since it’s been winding down its metaverse ambitions and ramping up its AI ones: a garbage chat feature that will talk dirty to you in John Cena’s voice, and a stand-alone AI video slop feed that also had its own privacy crisis.
Meta is chipper about our AI future: “Soon, you’ll open our apps, and you’ll have an AI that understands you, and also happens to be able to show you great content or even generate great personalized content for you,” Zuckerberg said in a recent earnings call.
But look at this tweet and tell me you wouldn’t rather have giant goggles strapped to your face, jamming out to “Viva la Vida” right now than bearing witness to whatever AI-fueled degradation is happening to the internet?
I won’t deny that it’s funny to snicker at how Mark Zuckerberg was obviously wrong when he thought that legless avatars were the future. Sure, that was obviously not going to happen. But from where I sit, legs and all, that was the preferable “Sliding Doors” option to whatever slop hell I wade through now.
Rest in peace, metaverse. You were too beautiful for this world.
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