RIP Metaverse

Business Insider, May 8, 2023, by Ed Zitron. Written as an obituary: “RIP Metaverse, we hardly knew ye — an obituary for the latest fad to join the tech graveyard.”

The argument

The metaverse “has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old.” Born in 2021 when Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta; killed when the industry found a more promising trend in generative AI. Zitron’s diagnosis is that it never had the things a business proposition requires — a clear use case, a target audience, and willing customers — and that Zuckerberg never articulated the problem it solved.

The numbers, which are the reason to keep this

The forecasts issued for a product nobody could define:

• Gartner: 25% of people would spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse by 2026.
• McKinsey: up to $5 trillion in value, with ~95% of business leaders expecting a positive impact on their industry within five to ten years.
• Citi: a $13 trillion market.
• Roblox rode the wave to an IPO at a $41 billion valuation.
• Microsoft’s Satya Nadella said he couldn’t “overstate how much of a breakthrough” it was.

Against which the actual product was Horizon Worlds and a clunky headset, and the demo everyone remembers is the low-quality avatar interview with Gayle King.

The indictment

Zitron’s real target is not Zuckerberg but the apparatus that priced the thing — a “pliant press” publishing claims “somewhere between unrealistic and outright irresponsible,” and consultancies competing to out-forecast each other. He notes Jim Cramer nodding along to a claim of a billion users spending hundreds of dollars each, with no answer to what they would receive.

Connections

• The anchor source for Who Cares About The Metaverse.
• The transferable lesson is about forecasting, not VR. The $5tn and $13tn numbers were produced for a product with no definition — so they were measuring narrative intensity, not a market. That is a general failure mode and it connects directly to Forecasting and 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974, where technologists got infrastructure right and consequences wrong.
• ⚠️ Note the date and the register. May 2023, written as a victory lap in obituary form, before Apple announced Vision Pro. The genre rewards overstatement; the forecasts are the durable evidence, not the death certificate.