Oh no how what will happen to my pretend-mansion now? Will I have to close my eyes and imagine it instead?
The Metaverse future has been dead for awhile now. But it is dead-dead now. Zuckerberg spent the past couple years propping the thing up, Weekend at Bernie’s-style. He poured over $80 billion into the effort, and all he has to show for it is a bunch of “this thing never had legs” jokes.
It was never gonna work. And yet I can pretty much guarantee that Silicon Valley will try to make it the future again within the next decade.
There are two points I want to make: (1) This was so predictable. I called it in 2021. (2) The analogy between the metaverse future and the AI future is interesting-but-inexact.
(1) This was so very predictable
Back in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg declared “over the next five years or so [Facebook/Meta] will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
That was <checks calendar> oh yeah, five years ago!
I remember that declaration well, because I had just drafted a piece for Wired titled “Virtual Reality is the Rich, White Kid of Tech.” I had to go back and update my lede to include his announcement. The headset-based digital future was already dated before Zuck decided to go all-in on the metaverse. The mid-2010s were full of confident predictions that Oculus Rift or Magic Leap headset was about to change the world. By 2021, it was already clear that the biggest hurdle for these products wasn’t on the technical side — it was a lack of demand.
Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists, it seems, are incapable of saying no to a fancy headset with a big dream. And this dates back 35 years—Jaron Lanier was the Palmer Luckey of the 1980s and early 1990s!
The technology is always about to turn a corner, about to be more than just a gaming device, about to revolutionize fields like architecture, defense, and medicine. The future of work, entertainment, travel, and society is always on the verge of a huge virtual upgrade. VR is a bit like a rich white kid with famous parents: It never stops failing upward, forever graded on a generous curve, always judged based on its “potential” rather than its results.
The VR/Metaverse crowd spent days yelling at me on social media when that piece was published. Palmer Luckey (who founded Oculus before he got into building AI murder-drones) got real mad at me. Rony Abovitz (who founded Magic Leap, and seemed like a nice guy fwiw) bet me a steak dinner that, within five years, the metaverse would have arrived1.
It also seemed like there was a real chance they would be right and I would be wrong. It’s one thing for the guy who reads all the old tech magazines to say “It has been seven years. Can we all stop treating VR headsets like they’re new and untried?” But when Mark Zuckerberg starts writing eleven-figure checks, you have to at least consider the possibility that all that money (and the engineering talent it buys) will have a material impact.
Just as the current billionaire space race is, at least in part, evidence that inside every tech billionaire is an inner child who dreamed of flying his own rocket ship, the VR arms race is premised on an assumption that mass adoption is inevitable—the only question is when that future will arrive, and which company will get phenomenally wealthy when it does.
But we ought to acknowledge by now that it might not be so inevitable. So far, VR has given us slightly fancier games (and slightly fancier porn). But it has hardly been revolutionary, because non-VR games (and non-VR porn) remain just as popular as they were before. VR and AR might ultimately be more like 3D movies and 3D television—a fun-but-expensive gimmick with limited mass appeal.
(…)
But the trouble circa 2021 is that VR’s technical problems have all basically been sorted out: The headsets are lightweight and affordable, thanks to massive investments from Big Tech, and there are hundreds of fairly successful VR gaming titles. (…) VR’s limiting flaw might instead be on the demand side—what I have elsewhere termed the “Field of Dreams Fallacy.” (“If you build it, they will come.”) Immersive VR gaming sounds neat, but it turns out that swinging a virtual sword gets tiring pretty quickly. The most popular games today aren’t the ones that fully immerse players in a virtual world; the screen interface isn’t a problem that particularly needs to be solved.
Beyond gaming (and, I suppose, porn—there’s always porn), it isn’t clear what other thirsts Virtual Reality are meant to quench. Immersive virtual gatherings could be a slight step above endless Zoom meetings. But, after this pandemic year, does anyone really want their Zoom meetings to occupy more of their attention? VR enthusiasts often talk about virtual vacations to exotic locales—strap on a headset and you can experience a visit to the Grand Canyon with your family. But this misdiagnoses the whole point of a vacation. A VR trip to the Grand Canyon is not a vacation. It isn’t even a trip!
(…)
I’m sure the rigs and goggles of 2026 will be better and more affordable than the ones we have today. I’m just not sure what else we will use them for. The problem isn’t the technology—it’s the vision. And the trouble with imagining the future through sci-fi action adventures is that it obscures the mundane everyday uses of technology.
Anyway, yeah. The rigs and goggles of 2026 are indeed better and more affordable than the ones we had in 2021. And we aren’t using them for much. The metaverse did indeed fall victim to the Field of Dreams Fallacy. People tried it. The novelty wore off. People dropped it. Even with $80 billion dollars, Meta couldn’t force its user base to congregate in a digital ghost town.
(2) The Generative AI analogy
For the past couple days, my Bluesky feed has been full of people saying some version of “they told us the Metaverse was inevitable. No technology is inevitable. Sounds just like Generative AI.”
I think that’s only partially right, though. If you just want to use the Metaverse hype cycle as evidence that no digital future is inevitable, then by all means be my guest. The inevitability myth is a big part of the Silicon Valley project, and we ought to take shots at it whenever we have the chance.
But I wouldn’t stretch the analogy too far. The problems with Generative AI are quite different from the problems with VR/AR/Spatial Computing/The Metaverse.
Generative AI’s main problems are (1) the (financial) math doesn’t math, (2) the products don’t work as well as their promoters claim, and are being pushed into areas where they are terrible-suited (3) it’s eroding a ton of public goods, including the web itself.
Those are all very real problems. But they aren’t Field of Dreams Fallacy-type problems.
People are getting addicted to these chatbots. Anna Wiener has a new piece in the New Yorker this week about AI companions (Y’all. Always read Anna Wiener). It’s a deeply reported, thought-provoking piece. It does not leave me feeling enthusiastic about the AI future. But it should not leave you thinking “Heh. Digital ghost town. Just like the metaverse.”
Liz Lopatto has a new piece covering Marc Andreessen’s introspection meltdown (Always read Liz Lopatto too. Surely you know this already.) I’m going to blockquote the most relevant bit:
If you stop using some skill, mental or physical, you lose it and its benefits. We’ve already seen signs of this with heavy users of AI, along with AI psychosis, which may occur because chatbots are too sycophantic. (I have pitched my editors on attempting to give myself AI psychosis, but they seem to think I am making a joke.) So I’m going to suggest that overreliance on AI is bad for you — which suggests a corollary: Whatever is happening to normal people as a result of AI overreliance has already happened to the ultra-wealthy.
I’m also going to include the Andreessen clip, because it is so gloriously funny to watch. I showed this clip to my students on Wednesday and I think it broke a couple of them.
Most of the problems we’re facing with the AI hype cycle are versions on AI overreliance.
-The companies are overspending at such an absurd rate that the whole economy might collapse when it turns out the finances don’t actually come anywhere close to balancing out.
-The companies are stuffing AI into everything, including medbots and lawbots and educationbots and therapistbots and militarybots and sexbots, and that creates a ton of social damage and lasting harms.
-Peoples’ brains atrophy when they lean on this stuff too much, and they end up losing their minds.
That’s all very bad. And we should not accept it as inevitable. But it is also very different than the metaverse circa 2021. Let’s not conflate the two.
1 I think it was a steak dinner, and I’m almost sure it was five years. But I nuked my twitter account and I’m not gonna go track the conversation down. Anyway Rony, if you’re reading this, I think you owe me food?