Better Offline - The Metaverse: How Mark Zuckerberg Lied To The World

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, claiming that it was now a "Metaverse company," throwing the entire tech industry into one of its most specious hype cycles. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the tech industry wasted nearly two years chasing a concept that nobody could define, burning billions of dollars on an idea that would cost thousands of people their jobs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Today's episode is about how one man tricked the entire tech industry. into burning billions of dollars based on nothing. You may remember a time in 2021 when everybody was talking about the Metaverse, the so-called successor to the internet that was used by Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook, taking the heat off of a name associated with abusing its customers and misusing their data.

It was meant to be a completely digital world we lived in. Oh, maybe it was a VR space that we socialized in. Was it a VR space we worked in? Was it a virtual world? wasn't there something to do with crypto? If you're finding all of this confusing, we have something in common. We need to go back to 2021 to really work out what the hell went on, though. Interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for the verge in July 2021,

Casey Newton referred to the Metaverse as a maximalist interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi. Again, that means nothing, but nevertheless, that's what he chose to publish. A few months later, when renaming the company Facebook to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg referred to the Metaverse as a more immersive, embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it. In the multiple interviews he's given since, Zuckerberg has spent thousands of words vaguely suggesting the Metaverse is everything from a chat room to virtual reality

to, and I quote, a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but in an environment where you're embodied in it. In fact, at one point Mark Zuckerberg said that meta would transition from being seen as a social media company to being a metaverse company, all without ever saying really what the metaverse was. And his descriptions veered from saying it was a social network to a virtual reality game to something that was part of Web3, which was a term used by cryptocurrency con artist to sell you some sort of decentralized blockchain-based. thing. In reality, Meta's Metaverse was far more boring. They would only ever release two mediocre virtual reality experiences for their quest and Oculus headsets, one for socializing

called Horizon Worlds, and another for work called inventively Horizon Workrooms. It all kind of felt like a con, yet the media and the tech industry crystallized around it with this strange, frenzied excitement. Look, at the time, I didn't know you. You weren't listening to to this podcast. But if you felt like you were being swindled, you should have been. Believe your ears. Believe your eyes. Mark Zuckerberg renamed a trillion dollar company and hyped an idea that he could not describe. And then he sent the entire tech ecosystem into a years-long panic attack that resulted in billions of dollars being wasted on non-existent ideas. At the time, I was one of the lone voices decrying the made-up metaverse, I was screaming into the void that despite all of this press,

all of this hype, nobody, not the journalists, not the investors, not Mark Zuckerberg, could actually describe what the metaverse was. Zuckerberg would go on to burn tens of billions of dollars, investing in research and development, allegedly building the metaverse, and multiple startups would claim that they'd now entered the metaverse, only to end up ditching the idea toward the end of 20, 2022 and early 2023, as interest rates tightened and tech stocks began to suffer, eventually entering what Zuckerberg would call the year of efficiency, which was code for laying off thousands of people and refocusing meta on artificial intelligence

after seeing how well-chat GPT was doing. I've always been anti-metaverse, mostly because nobody could tell me what it was. In fact, in May 23, I wrote a piece for Business Insider, declaring the MetaVe verse dead, something which pissed off Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite, who then quote tweeted it with this kind of sarcastic indignation. I will now attempt to do Tim Sweeney's voice. The Metaverse is dead, wrote Sweeney, who was definitely not upset with me. Let's organize an online wake so that we 600 million monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PubG, G, sandbox and VR chat can mourn its passing together in real-time 3D. I think that's how he sounds.

Look, Tim, you're wrong, I'm right. The Metaverse was dead. And by Metaverse, I mean the ugly, butchered, usurious scam perpetuated in public, where companies, like Epic, slapped a new logo on something old and tried to claim it was the future. What Sweeney is describing are actually video games, video games that have existed for upwards of a decade that were never once referred to as part of the Metaverse, despite this being a 90s term from a... book, and it's just ridiculous because these people never used this term before, until it helped them sell crap to investors. Whether or not the metaverse may actually exist one day is immaterial to the fact that this was one of the largest and most conspicuous cons I've ever seen, and nobody

has been held accountable. Nevertheless, the metavus does actually mean something. It's just kind of a pain in the ass to explain. Even for the truest of Metaverse believers, it isn't really an easy thing to define. In 2022, I, of my own volition for whatever reason, decided to travel to Santa Clara, California to attend the Augmented World Expo, a tech conference about mixed in virtual reality and, of course, now the Metaverse. This conference had existed for quite a long time. I had been before, but before it was around things that existed, like AR and VR, and VR augmented reality, meaning that something you put over your face, perhaps, like the Vision Pro, or VR, like the Oculus headsets and Quest headsets, that Meta was already selling without

mentioning the Metaverse. And I remember, despite spending days surrounded by people discussing the Metaverse, talking about the Metaverse, walking around boots that said Metaverse on them, trying products that were apparently the Metaverse. And having dreary conversations about what the Metaverse could be, I couldn't get a consistent or compelling definition of what a Metaverse actually was. Okay, let me give it a go, though. Depending on the person, the Metaverse is a virtual space where you live, or it's a video game, or it's a virtual reality experience,

or it's a filter on your camera that makes you look like a dog. This is how varied the media's description was of what the media. Metaverse was. It was basically anything that involved the real world being kind of masked by digital things. If you watched Mark Zuckerberg's October 2021 video, you might believe it's a virtual world that encompasses your senses. A fully sensory experience, the kind you'd find in Ernest Klein's horrible book Ready Player 1. Now, you may be thinking, Ed, that's not technically possible, and you'd be completely and utterly right. The conceptual ambiguity, of course, and the fact that a lot of the stuff people were talking about just wasn't possible and still isn't today, didn't stop many, many companies from cashing in, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors to build products that did not and probably could not exist in an industry called the metaverse that nobody, not the investors, not the founders could actually describe.

Let me give you some examples. Bud. They're a company that raised over $60 million that, according to TechCrunch, did so to create a Metaverse for Gen Z to play and interact with each other. I've downloaded Bud. I've looked at what Bud is. They don't mention the Metaverse anymore. It's actually a microtransaction-riddled iPhone app that lets you visit other people's very generic-looking spaces. I used to review massively multiplayer online RPGs, like World Warcraft and Things. things like that. I've seen a hundred million of these things. Versions of what Bud does have existed for a long, long time. Then there's another company, Tripp, that's TRIPP, because

why name things normally? They raise $26.3 million to create apps that, and I quote, power a mindful metaverse. And said metaverse is community driven. In practice, it's a virtual reality app that shows you these weird trippy visions that you would imagine seeing in a PSA for drug abuse in the 90s. They cost $10, $20. It's very strange that this company raised that much money and nobody has done the due diligence to actually follow up with them and ask them what the hell the Metaverse was and why it justified these massive valuations. Each one of these Pablam-filled multi-million dollar

metaverse companies was incapable of describing themselves outside of using concussion-grade buzzwords. They had good reason to, though, if they used real words that meant things, you might catch on, and indeed their very stupid investors might catch on, that they were trying to sell you things that already existed.

And I think that that is really at the heart of the metaverse boom. and why everyone is so, so vague about the definition of the Metaverse. Because being specific reveals that it's a huge con, used by the tech industry to pretend that they're innovating. For starters, for any definition of the Metaverse to make sense or to have any actual value, you really have to remove gaming entirely from the conversation,

otherwise you're kind of cheating. If you're going to consider Fortnite or Roblox, quote, the Metaverse, you kind of have to consider World of Warcraft and Ultima Online or any other avatar-based game that's ever existed part of the Metaverse, at which point, isn't the Metaverse just chat rooms? Isn't the Metaverse just computer games? If that's the case, how is this a multi-trillion dollar industry? The metaverse isn't the future if it's just different iterations of talking to people using a digital avatar.

That's the actual present. Sure, maybe it's worth a trillion dollars or $3 trillion or however much the video game industry is. But that's a ridiculous way of looking at this. If the metaverse exists in the way they say it does, it already existed decades ago. What's interesting about this is, despite all of the world, of the conversation about the metaverse being this giant interconnected world, where people can get together and they don't look like themselves, maybe it's pseudonymous. Despite all of that rosy, McKinsey-grade bullshit, there's been worries about the massively

multiplayer online RPG industry, which is World of Warcraft and its ilk, declining for quite a while. In fact, it has been, slowing down, overtaken by a number of different free-to-play games on phones and consoles. It's still going, though. There are still tens of millions of players playing these games. But if you're saying the Metaverse is talking to friends on Fortnite, then really, Twitter and Blue Sky are the Metaverse too, because I talk to friends on there all the time, and some of them have pictures that aren't of their actual faces. And that's the thing. If your definition of the metaverse is whatever's useful at the time, you're just a politician.

You're not a software developer. You're not a tech founder. You're a fucking liar. In early 2022, people were calling Microsoft $75 billion acquisition of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft developer Activision Blizzard, quote, metaverse related. Now, this was really frustrating. because it's kind of like saying that piss is a competitor to Diet Coke because both of them are liquids. You can't just say something is like the other thing because you want it to be that way.

You actually have to prove it. The existence of interaction in a virtual world wasn't the metaverse before, but it got termed as such because, and really, only because billions of dollars got invested in the metaverse and they needed something, anything to point at and say, look, look, this exists, this is real, it worked before, please don't ask too many more questions. Tim Sweeney of Epic's argument, the one I previously referred to, that the metaverse isn't dead because people play Roblox or Fortnite, only makes sense if you define the metaverse in the broadest way possible. And it's an argument that, I hate to say, kind of has some weight, considering the definitional fuzziness of the metaverse. But that also allows people who backed the

metaverse to point to literally anything and call it the metaverse, and then use that as proof that the metaverse is destined for greatness. Is IMessage the Metaverse? Was IRC the earliest chat room function of the internet, the Metaverse? Was AIME? AOL instant messenger. Was that the Metaverse? Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob O'Boh. to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

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At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What the hell is the Metaverse? It just all kind of feels like bullshit. Fortnite and Roblox have succeeded not because they're both enjoyable spaces. to hang out in, but because they're accessible, they're easy to play. You don't need a convoluted tutorial. Your friends can tell you how to play or you can just work it out, as kind of demonstrated by their extremely young demographics. Now, it's kind of hard to find verifiable age data for these titles,

but one survey published in 2021 said that the 10 to 20 age group has the highest percentage of people that have played a proto-metaverse game, which includes titles like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. Now, you may hear stats like that and think, gee whiz, this might be the future. This is the present. This shit has existed for five to ten years. Anyone telling you the meta versus the future is just trying to pretend they were part of the past, laughing their faces and give them the finger. And I fully disagree that Fortnite is a space for hanging out. It's a game. It's a game that's simple enough to play that you can play around in it and have a conversation. And if you weren't playing it, you'd probably call the people or FaceTime them

or some other form of thing. There were some spurious articles around the time of the Metaverse about Fortnite being the new place where kids hang out and play together. And what pissed me off about that is the same thing that pisses me off about the Metaverse in general, in that kids have been playing video games online a while. They've been using headsets a while. These things already resisted, and Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies, Satchindadella of Microsoft as I'll get to, Tim Sweeney of Epic, all of these people trying to claim that this was the future and that they were part of it, they were doing so to pump up their stock values, to make it easier to sell their stock in a case of Epic. It's all quite laughable, and it's extremely cynical.

Now, Fortnite, of course, had a concert in it from performer Travis Scott, and when I say it's a concert, I kind of mean it's this weirdly rendered 3D version of Travis Scott, looks like an Xbox 360 game, and it was performed to 12.3 million players at once. It was defined as a breakthrough moment for the Metaverse, and allegedly it was a demonstration of its potential in the entertainment space. Except that's really just an online game, an online game with instances, because you didn't have 12.3 million people in one place, you had groups of them, in the same way that Fortnite did the announcement of a new Star Wars movie involving a plot point that you needed to make sense of the third new Star Wars movie. It's quite messy. But in both of these

cases, these were just 3D art exhibits. Watching this live kind of had no point to it. You weren't interacting with Travis Scott. You weren't flipping off the emperor. I guess you could, but it didn't do anything. These were just rolling demos where you happened to be surrounded by other people who didn't know what the hell to do with themselves. These things, these experiences, are immersive in the same way that most video games are. You're focused on a point, and you're not really doing anything else. And past that, it's just fucking drab. This is the future?

Going through a weird warp hole to watch Travis Scott with a bunch of people jumping up and down, trying to work out what the hell they're doing there? This is the future? This is the Metaverse? Being able to watch weird stuff fly around you in a video game? Cool, I guess. Kind of feels like the present, though. Kind of feels like shit.

And the problem was that the majority of these Metaverse companies just seemed totally lost as far as what the Metaverse was and why a consumer should use it, and in many cases, how they should use it. Yeah, in 2021 and 2022, these companies got billions, of dollars of funding by slapping Metaverse or decentralized on everything. Decentralized in this case referring to using a blockchain decentralized to do a thing usually worse. This is how companies like Sky Mavis's Axi Infinity raised $152 million at a $3 billion valuation

for a cryptocurrency-powered browser-based Pokemon clone that costs hundreds of dollars to play. And then they invented a new kind of loan shark where people would loan you the money to buy your Axy to start the game, and then you'd be some kind of servant for them. They then got hacked by North Korea. This will be a future episode, don't worry. Companies like Sky Mavis are not the only ones. This metaverse boom started in October 2021, which was the thick of the post-lockdown cryptocurrency boom. And they took advantage of the metaverse's general fuzziness to con people.

into investing in more cryptocurrency bullshit. The blockchain and the associated Ponzi scheme nonsense that followed was a recurring theme within many of the first Metaverse companies. Non-fungible tokens, NFTs, as you might know them, were essentially a mechanism that claimed to demonstrate ownership of a digital asset. And they were touted as a way to handle virtual real estate during this Metaverse boom. There were tons of articles about this, claiming that people were, selling $50 million of Metaverse real estate.

Nobody cares anymore. It's all disappeared. And indeed, many other Metaverse companies were also decentralized, quote, Web3 Businesses, a spurious name for decentralized blockchain software that barely worked. And these companies just printed money. No, literally, they minted their own cryptocurrencies, which they then put Metaverse on top of, which conned retail investors into purchasing these things, things like virtual land and virtual homes and virtual items to put in their virtual homes. This all sounded stupid at the time, yet places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

were doing whole articles about how important it was. In reality, the Metaverse was a cynical con that helped rich people get richer, at times off the back of retail investors that still believed that cryptocurrency was meaningful and would never crash again. Yet the entire tech industry worked to proliferate the term metaverse in a way that kind of echoes the empty hype you're seeing around artificial intelligence today. And it kind of operated in the same way too. They took a technology that already existed and then they massively overstated what it could do in the future. And I haven't even got to meta or the general state of virtual and mixed reality.

Nowhere was the con more on, I guess until it wasn't, than at one hack away, where I believe Mark Zuckerberg lives. In early February 2020, the Wall Street Journal pointed to Meta's healthy Q4 numbers, where its stock price jumped by 20%, thereby reinstating its membership in the club of companies with a market capitalization over $1 trillion, as proof that Meta had, and I quote,

finally figured out how to sell the Metaverse. The journal pointed to Meta's reality labs, which houses the company's Metaverse efforts, which made over $1 billion in revenue for the first time, driven primarily by healthy holiday sales of Meta's Quest 3 virtual reality headset. That was the big sign that the Metaverse was fine, except it wasn't. That's a 40th of Meta's $40 billion Q4 revenue. It's also roughly a sick of the amount of money that Reality Labs burned, with the unit making a $4.65 billion loss, which was its highest on record.

And in the case of virtual reality in general, it's still a very early stage technology. Most headsets, including the latest Oculus and Quest devices, which meta, of course, makes, are still uncomfortable, clunky and still buggy, more so than the Vision Pro. They're not immersive, and they routinely make people feel a kind of physical sickness, which is not ideal. And Meta's flagship Metaverse title, Horizon Worlds, is still ugly and awkward, and nobody uses it. Multiple articles have now come up where people just can't find other people to meet in Meta's Metaverse. It's all so confusing.

And Horizon is so obviously inferior to Zoom or Microsoft Teams or any other form of modern communication, that the only reason to use it is to be upset or get sick or nauseate your colleagues, which I can do for free using my webcam over Zoom. And of course, meta obviously knows this, because in early 2023, leaked documents obtained by the Verges Alex Heath revealed that only one in 10 Horizon Worlds users returned after trying the title for the first time. Since its launch, Horizon Worlds, and I reiterate, This is the flagship Metaverse title from the world's most vocal Metaverse company called Meta

that renamed itself to Meta because of the Metaverse. Horizon Worlds has continued to shed its monthly active users to the point where it just kind of feels like a mass market open grave. Nobody is there. It's worse than an empty mall because you can kind of see what people would buy there. It's just negative space. And all of this is just a stunning fall from grace considering the capital, both reputational and monetary, that Zuckerberg pumped into it. When Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2021 that Facebook would rebrand to meta, he claimed that the metaverse would be the future of the internet.

The glitzy, spurious promotional video that he used alongside the name change. Describe this future where we would be able to interact seamlessly in virtual worlds. users would make eye contact and feel like they were in the room together. The Metaverse offered people the chance to engage in an immersive experience, and this was what Mark Zuckerberg promised. And these are bold claims that are, of course, totally unfulfilled. And I'd argue they're never going to be. A functional business proposition requires a few things to thrive and grow.

First of all, a clear use case. Then a target audience. And then, of course, the willingness of customers to adopt. the product. Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the Metaverse as a vision that spans many companies and claimed it was the successor to the mobile internet. Yet he failed to articulate basic business problems that the Metaverse would address. Absolutely nothing underpinned Mark Zuckerberg's promises about the Metaverse. And it's still as ill-defined then as it is now. And yet executives and investors decided that it just didn't matter that the Metaverse didn't mean anything, because, of course,

money could be made. Microsoft's CEO, Sachi Nadela, would say at the company's 2021 Ignite Conference that he, and I quote, could not overstate how much of a breakthrough the Metaverse was for his company, the industry, and of course the world. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft's $75.4 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard was described by Microsoft in interviews as a Metaverse play, rather than a major player in the gaming sphere, acquiring some of the world's most beloved and profitable franchises, like Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, World of Warcraft, Diablo, and many others created by Activision Blizzard.

Roblox, an online platform that I mentioned earlier, one of the most popular with kids in the world right now, up there with Fortnite, has existed since 2004, but rode the Metaverse hype wave to take itself public. Their IPO raised at a $41 billion valuation. At the time of writing this script, its market cap is now $27.63 billion, a far cry from its debut and a fraction of its pandemic-era peak

when the company was worth $78 billion. Important note about Roblox, by the way. They've never made a profit. Kind of a big problem in the business industry. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. The story I've told myself about love, or relationships can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown

and explore the journey of healing, self-discovery, and returning to yourself. We explore higher consciousness, emotional well-being, and the practices that help you find clarity, peace, and self-mastery in a world that can feel overwhelming. The world is becoming lonelier. We're not becoming more social and connected. We're becoming more individualized, but we actually need people in connection. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more.

Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Even businesses that seem to have very little to do with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse by creating a Roblox experience that they would eventually shut down less than a year later. Disney created their own Metaverse division in early 2022, only to lay them all off in March 2023. In 2024, Disney would then invest $1.5 billion into Metaverse lovers' epic games.

You know, the makers of Fortnite. And I quote, they did so to collaborate on an all-new games and entertainment, universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences in Epic's Fortnite. The word Metaverse is never used. In 2022, the consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least an hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. A year later, they changed their tune, publishing a document that described in stark

detail both consumer and business apathy toward the Metaverse, as well as its fundamental technological limitations, which it said couldn't be remedied in the short term. At least Gartner wasn't alone. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse could change the way we work forever. The global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that the Metaverse could generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, adding that around 90% of business leaders expected the metaverse to positively impact their industry within 5 to 10 years. Not to be outdone, City put out a massive report that declared the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity by 2030. I must be clear, most of these reports are bullshit.

Most of them are based on them just guessing. They will fudge these numbers to mess with you. They are lying to you. If you see a McKinsey-Rogana report and it's quoting an X by Y year thing. A $13 trillion by 2030. Laugh it up. Walk away. They are fucking with you.

They're doing this to con investors and by proxy, you. And despite all of this hype, the why was always absent from the discussions of the metaverse's potential, particularly when talking about anything that wasn't a video game. While I failed to see the distinction between an MMORP like World of Warcraft or EverQuest and a so-called metaverse game like Roblox or Fortnite, I can kind of begrudgingly concede that a virtual workplace is conceptually distinct enough to have its own name. That doesn't mean it's a good idea or worthwhile, though. In many respects, all of this metaversal hype illustrates a detachment of the C-suite

from the people who actually do work. The fact that both Satchin Adela of Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta believed, or would have had you believe, that ordinary office workers want to hold meetings in virtual rooms while wearing a VR headset, strongly suggests they haven't met a person in quite some time. Billions, literally billions of dollars could have been saved by Mark Zuckerberg asking one of his programmers or one of his ad salespeople if they wanted to go work in a kind of low-rent copy of second life that sucked even more. And then they would have said, no, Zuck, you're mental. Except we all know the truth. Mark Zuckerberg didn't give a shit about anyone actually using this,

he needed some air cover to get over Facebook's grisly history, and he knew that the media and investors would drink down whatever slop he had prepared for them. I'm not sure if you remember in 2021 and 2022, money was much easier to find. Consumer spending was up, every stock was up, everything was selling, everyone I knew was doing pretty well, unlike 20203 when everyone kind of crashed back down to Earth, I actually think the Metaverse Com would have gone a lot longer, had the zero-interest-free economy, which I'll attack in a later episode, not falling apart.

In short, though, there was a time when investors, in particularly venture capitalists, could get money at much, much lower rates. One might even say zero percent. Sadly, reality would come for the markets, and in turn would kill investors' spurious dreams of the Metaverse. Early 2023 was a rough time for everybody.

Microsoft shuttered its virtual workspace platform AltSpace VR in January 2023 and then laid off the 100 people who worked at the Industrial Metaverse team at Microsoft. They then made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team, which was their augmented reality glasses thing that most people have kind of forgotten about. In September 20203, Mr. Metaverse himself, Tim Sweeney and Epic would lay off 830 people, attributing it to their, and I quote, unrealistic Metaverse ambitions.

Several months after my article, I should add, the billions of dollars invested around this half-baked concept led to thousands, if not tens of thousands, losing their jobs. And the Metaverse's saviour would also be the one to ultimately kill it. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg would declare in a March company update that Meta's single largest investment would be advancing artificial intelligence and building it into every one of their products. Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Boz-Bosworth, told CNBC in April 2023 that he,

along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on artificial intelligence. The company even stopped pitching the Metaverse to its advertisers, despite spending more than $100 billion in research and development on its mission to be, and I quote, Metaverse first. While Mark Zuckerberg sometimes suggests the Metaverse isn't dead by limply telling you that they're developing things for their headsets and that people are making games for the quest, the writing's on the war. Meta's done with the Metaverse.

I don't believe, for a second, that Mark Zuckerberg ever really had any interest in it either, because he never seemed to be able to define the Metaverse beyond a slightly tweaked Facebook with avatars and cumbersen hardware. The Metaverse was a means to an increased share price, rather than any real vision for the future or the future of human interaction. And Mark Zuckerberg used his outsized wealth and power to get the whole of the tech industry and a good portion of the American business world in line behind him and behind this half-baked con. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the Metaverse is a fairly damning indictment of everyone who followed him, and anyone who still considered him. him a visionary tech leader. It should also be the cause for some serious reflection amongst the venture capital community, which recklessly followed Mark Zuckerberg into blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded on the flimsyest possible press release language. In a just world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta, yet in the real world, this is literally

impossible due to the corporate structure of the company. Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to this stupid obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street. There's no reason that the man who has overseen the layoffs of tens of thousands of people should run a major company. And there is no future for Meta with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. Mark my words, it will stagnate. The time has come for online advertising,

and for Facebook's only way of making money. And then it will die and follow Metaverse into the grave that Mark Zuckerberg dug it. While the idea of virtual worlds or collective online experiences may live on in some form, and actually exists already, the capital M Metaverse is quite dead. And its death should be remembered as arguably one of the most historic failures in tech history. An historic global con that contributed to society's mistrust of the tech industry at large. The metaverse has always bothered me. It bothered me back in 2021, and it bothers me today. It was so clearly specious.

Reporters talking to Mark Zuckerberg ate up this slop and indeed helped him fill in the gaps when he clearly had not thought about this concept much further than he needed to to give a corporate demonstration of nothing. The metaverse is an example of media's weakness when it comes to the powerful. These people have to be treated with suspicion. When they can't fill in the gaps, you shouldn't fill them in for them. In fact, you should push them further and further and further. Every interview with Mark Zuckerberg should be uncomfortable. It should be inhospitable.

Right now, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell the vision that Meta is an artificial intelligence company. Multiple reporters have talked to him about this. And I'm calling upon members of the media to stop giving him interviews like this. It's time to push back. It's time to push back on people like Mark Zuckerberg that cannot tell the truth, that cannot reveal their actual agendas. If we, people speaking into microphones, into people speaking to the powerful, into people who have to know this industry and tell other people about it, if our job involves talking to these powerful, ultra-rich, ultra-influential men, our real job is to ask them questions that are simple, like, hey man, you renamed your company, you renamed it because of this one thing. What is that? What does it mean?

And when they fail to give a cogent answer, the response should be venom. It should be discussed. It should be, perhaps not an obscenity, but something adjacent to one. There is no space to give people like Mark Zuckerberg further power. They don't need further fuel. They already have it. The metaverse was the creation of Mark Zuckerberg's power, that he could say one vague thing, and billions of dollars would follow.

As a result, we must criticize these people. We must do so loudly and proudly and aggressively. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattersowski.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or check out Better Offline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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