"I know it's not chic to be the last person at the party. But I think I hate going home."
I don't think Charli XCX was talking about the Metaverse in the Moment, she is one of the stars who has performed in the Quest headset. But when I last headed into Horizon Worlds, the Meta metaverse that it announced recently it would shut down and then took it back, there were plenty of people in danger of being the last person at the party, but hated going home.
Horizon Worlds was supposed to be Meta's example of what the Metaverse could be: a social space, filled with people in headsets from across the real world, navigating their avatars inside of a virtual one. Now, it's less social, with far fewer avatars; it's mostly empty. But, during my most recent visit, those remaining avatars were keen to stress that the world wasn't dead: there's not many of us here, but it's great, they would insist, with enough confidence and force that I half-believed their chattering avatars.
In a way, those remaining defenders of the Metaverse got their way. When Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth announced that Horizon Worlds wasn't actually being turned off, it was in response to an outraged and "heartbroken" comment from a user who was distressed about it being shut down. In the same Instagram session, Bosworth said that there was a "lot of misinformation" about the death of the universe, and that "VR is not dead. We're continuing to invest tremendously".
And what a lot of investment it is. Meta Reality Labs – the subdivision that makes the Quest headsets but also other products such as the AI glasses it sells with Ray-Ban – has lost more than $80 billion since it was set up in 2021. You can say many things about the Metaverse, but you can't say that Meta hasn't given it a good try.
But giving it a good try isn't always enough; you can spend as much as you like on your party, it doesn't matter if nobody turns up. It's been more than four years since Facebook rebranded as Meta, in part to shed its ties to the ever-controversial blue app but also to highlight its new focus on virtual and augmented reality. "The metaverse will eventually encompass work, entertainment, and everything in between," it said at the time. Eventually might be doing a lot of work.
The trouble of course is that Meta was so insistent, in this quote and so many others, that it was throwing a great party, or would be soon. And we could hear, through the walls, the thud of other people having fun; not in the metaverse, but with the money they were generating by talking about it so much.
This of course has been the pattern of technology in recent in recent years; so many parties, so much money, but the fear that you're never quite welcome there. As I've written before in this newsletter, the pattern makes each future invitation less inviting: once you've seen cryptocurrency, the metaverse, Web 2.0, and whatever else fizzle out, it's hard to get as excited about new things such as AI.
But – as there probably eventually will be with AI – maybe there was something in the metaverse all along. Not the clunky headsets at chunky prices, or the strange avatars you were asked to inhabit. Instead, the slight glimpses we get at it already: existing things such as tiny earphones that really do augment your reality, to not-so-distant visions such as the option to have information overlaid into your glasses.
Amid the schadenfreude about the apparent death of the metaverse, these ideas might disappear too. The metaverse party was not only a disappointment but could have left the house all smashed up.
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