A journey into Meta's Horizon Worlds to find friends and metaverse true believers, raising questions about Zuckerberg's vision of the internet's next iteration
New York MagazinePaul Murray
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third major journalistic immersion into Horizon Worlds in under a year and a half: New York Times reporters spent time inside Meta's VR social network in October 2022, profiling its early adopters — preteens, parents, insomniacs, gamers, and aspiring comedians — and New York Magazine now returns to ask who these true believers actually are. The piece lands two years after Zuckerberg told The Verge the metaverse could 'further splinter our sense of shared reality,' a framing he set out himself in his 2021 Q&A on the metaverse's promise.
What makes the timing pointed is the surrounding skepticism: The Atlantic argued back in late 2021 that Meta's promised metaverse would be boring and serve mainly to distract from the world Facebook helped break. A fresh on-the-ground portrait forces the question of whether the user base matches the scale of the ambition.
First-order effects
Zuckerberg's next-iteration-of-the-internet pitch is again being evaluated against Horizon Worlds' actual population — a niche community of preteens, parents, insomniacs, and hobbyists — rather than against the roadmap he described in his own Q&A.
Meta gets another round of coverage where the product's social reality, not its marketing, defines the metaverse narrative.
Second-order effects
Persistent thin engagement strengthens the internal case for redirecting capital toward Meta's demonstrably funded priorities: the company has raised roughly $62 billion in debt since 2022 — much of it tied to the Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, partly via off-balance-sheet SPVs — all aimed at AI infrastructure rather than VR.
Meta's acquisition of Manus, intended to deliver agents across products including Meta AI, signals that the company's 'next platform' energy is flowing toward agents and possibly cloud offerings, leaving VR social competing for the same strategic attention.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the metaverse recedes from 'the internet's next iteration' to one experimental surface among many inside Meta, while AI agents become the successor narrative — a shift investors and regulators will track through where Meta's debt-financed capex actually lands.
For the broader industry, Horizon Worlds becomes the reference case for the gap between a founder's platform-scale vision and the organic community a VR social product sustains, raising the bar of proof for any future 'next internet' claim.
The trend: Meta's center of gravity is shifting from the metaverse vision Zuckerberg staked the company's rebrand on toward debt-funded AI infrastructure and agents, leaving VR social platforms like Horizon Worlds as evidence in an increasingly skeptical verdict.
“...the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how ‘legs are coming,’ like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that ‘Aslan is on the move.’” https://nymag.com/...
@Choire Choire, I will gift you a copy of Walkabout Minigolf and three DLC courses of your choice, if you will promise to just stop listening to anything Mark Zuckerberg says when trying to assess the pretty good gaming console he has accidentally funded.
I've specialized in tech for business, yet was thinking today that technology peaked at least 15-20 years ago... Good piece on Zuck's Metaverse. “Second Life,” but seedier and more depressing. https://nymag.com/...
this piece is so, so, so good. particularly if you (like me, and the writer of this article) moved to america, leaving all your family and friends behind. also? depressing! https://nymag.com/...
the best part about this takedown of the metaverse bullshit is that at the end of the day it's exactly like every other virtual space: bored, annoying teenagers. It's exactly like Second Life https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
really enjoyed this quietly moving essay on life, or what passes for it, in the metaverse. also: impressed that murray is speaking zuck's language https://nymag.com/... https://twitter.com/...
gonna schadenfreude-read the rest of this later but “lo-fi” is a gracious understatement for the supreme lack of give-a-fuck on display here lmao https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
shocking that Meta's Reality Labs lost $13.7 billion in VR/AR projects last year when this is the quality you get on the platform https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
This is well-observed and etc., but it's hilarious that literally the ONLY people I know who've bothered with Horizon Worlds for more than 2 minutes before switching over to Walkabout Minigolf or Eleven Table Tennis or Pop One or something FUN are journalists writing a piece. htt…