Meta's promised metaverse is going to be boring and is meant to distract us from the world that Facebook helped break
In a booth at Ted's Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse. It was November 1994, just as the graphical web …
The AtlanticEthan Zuckerman
Context & Ripple Effects
The story arrives as Meta’s metaverse narrative was already being measured against platforms with established social and VR experiences; related coverage characterized Meta as catching up to Roblox, Steam VR, and VRChat. The article’s critique therefore matters less as a product review than as a challenge to whether a new virtual-world vision can redirect attention from Facebook’s legacy problems.
Meta’s metaverse positioning faces a credibility test in which its promised experience is judged alongside Facebook’s unresolved social harms, rather than as a standalone new category.
Roblox, Steam VR, and VRChat gain a clearer comparative advantage in the debate because they are presented in related coverage as existing metaverse-like experiences rather than future-facing promises.
Second-order effects
Meta’s public demonstrations and VR messaging must do more work to establish a distinct reason for users to participate, especially as Horizon Worlds coverage centers on finding an active community.
Critical reception raises the cost of using the metaverse as a corporate reframing device: product adoption and social value become more consequential than the breadth of the vision.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, virtual-world competition will favor platforms that can show durable communities and useful experiences over companies relying primarily on a top-down rebrand.
The broader shift is from treating the metaverse as a singular future internet to judging it as a contested set of social platforms with different levels of user traction and trust.
The trend: The metaverse is moving from an aspirational branding project toward a test of whether VR platforms can demonstrate real communities, differentiation, and credibility.
@Moonalice ... Interesting read be he seems to miss that timing is everything. Yes 26 years ago, metaverse was going to fail. And 10 and 5. Because the technology wasn't there. But an immersive VR experience is coming. Facebook is the last company that should be building it...
A lot of the commentary on Facebook announcement boils down, “it looks like shit.” But I mean, so did the internet in the 80s. Takes a lot of patient funding for technologies to achieve liftoff, which is historically been DARPA's role
@EthanZ's article on Metaverse building details some of the pertinent issues in the second half of the article. However, the biggest issue is left mostly unexplored - who is building it and how it will be built. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
“Facebook can claim originality in at least one thing,” @EthanZ writes. “Its combination of scale and irresponsibility has unleashed a set of diverse and fascinating sociopolitical challenges that it will take ... at least a generation to fix.” https://on.theatln.tc/z9GzZ9P
@Moonalice ... ...an open, standards-based metaverse is really the best chance we have for something less destructive to society than facebooks vision.
“The metaverse Zuckerberg shows off in his video doesn't have to solve those problems. He's promising future technologies that are five to 10 years off. But it still looks like junk.” — @EthanZ: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
It's true that metaverse-ish stuff has existed before: VR, SecondLife, etc. But Facebook is essentially a state, with state-like resources at its disposal. If DARPA could summon the internet into existence, why can't Facebook do it with the metaverse? https://www.theatlantic.com/…