March 6, 2024 • 38 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host
ed Zitron. Today's episode is about how one man tricked
the entire tech industry into burning billions of dollars based
(00:25):
on nothing. You may remember a time in twenty twenty
one 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
(00:46):
we socialized in. Was it 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
twenty twenty one to really work out what the hell
went on though. Interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for The Virgin July
(01:07):
twenty twenty one, 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
(01:28):
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 metavers
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
(01:50):
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 or 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 web three,
(02:12):
which was a term used by cryptocurrency con artists to
sell you some sort of decentralized blockchain based thing in
reality metas 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. You all kind
(02:36):
of felt like a con. Yeah, The media in 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
this podcast, But if you felt like you were being swindled,
you should have been. Believe your ears, believe your eyes.
(02:57):
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 year's 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 to crying the made up metaverse. I was
(03:19):
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,
(03:40):
and multiple startups would claim that they'd now entered the metaverse,
only to end up ditching the idea. Toward the end
of twenty twenty two and early twenty twenty three, 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
(04:01):
meta on artificial intelligence after seeing how well chated GPT
was doing. I've always been an anti metaverse, mostly because nobody
could tell me what it was. In fact, in May
twenty twenty three, I wrote a piece of Business Insider
declaring the metaverse dead, something which pissed off Tim Sweeney,
the CEO of Epic Games the developers Fortnite, who then
(04:22):
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 six hundred
million monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roadblocks, PUBG, Sandbox
and Vrchack and morn it's passing together in real time
(04:42):
three D. 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
(05:06):
that have existed for upwards of a decade that were
never once referred to as part of the metaverse, despite
this being a nineties term from a book. And it's
just ridiculous because these people never use this term before
until it helped them sell crap to investors. Whether or
not the metaverse may actually exist one day is immaterial
(05:28):
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 metaverse 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 twenty twenty two, I,
(05:52):
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 and virtual reality and of course,
now the metaverse. This conference has existed for quite a
long time. I had been before, but before it was
around things that existed like AR and V are augmented reality,
(06:14):
meaning that something you put over your face, perhaps like
the Vision pro or VR, like the Oculus headsets and
Quest headsets. The 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,
(06:37):
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 get 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
(06:58):
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 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 twenty twenty one video, you might believe it's
(07:20):
a virtual world that encompasses your senses, a fully sensory
experience that the kinds you'd find in Ernest Klein's horrible
book Ready Player One. Now you may be thinking, Heed,
that's not technically possible, and you'd be completely and utterly right.
The conceptual ambiguity, of course, and the fact that a
(07:41):
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,
(08:01):
not the investors, not the founders, could actually describe. Let
me give you some examples. Bud they're a company that
raised over sixty million dollars that, according to tech Crunch,
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.
(08:24):
It's actually a micro transaction 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 like that. I've seen one hundred million of these things.
Versions of what Bud does have existed for a long
(08:46):
long time. Then there's another company Trip that's tripp because
why name things normally. They raised twenty six point three
million dollars to create apps that and I quote power
mindful metaverse and said metaverse is community driven. In practice,
it's a virtual reality app that shows you these weird,
(09:08):
trippy visions that you would imagine seeing in a PSA
for drug abuse in the nineties. They cost ten twenty dollars.
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
(09:31):
one of these pablum filled multimillion 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
they're very stupid investors might catch on that they were
(09:52):
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
(10:17):
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 Rodeblocks quote the metaverse, you kind of have
to consider World of Warcraft and ultimre Online or any
other avatar based game that's ever existed part of the metaverse.
(10:41):
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,
(11:06):
maybe it's worth a trillion dollars or three trillion dollars,
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
(11:26):
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,
(11:50):
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
(12:11):
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
(12:33):
twenty twenty two, people were calling microsoft seventy five billion
dollar 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
(12:55):
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
(13:15):
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 Roadblocks 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
(13:37):
weight considering the definitional fuzziness of the metaverse. But that
also allows people who back 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 I messaged the metaverse was rc the earliest chat
room function of the Internet. The metaverse was aim aol
(14:01):
instant messenger was that the metaverse? What the hell is
(14:21):
the metaverse? It just all kind of feels like bullshit.
Fortnite and Roadblocks 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
(14:45):
verifiable age data for these titles, but one survey published
in twenty twenty one said that the ten to twenty
age group has the highest percentage of people that have
played a proto metaverse game, which includes titles like Minecraft, Fortnite,
and Roadblocks. Now you may hear stats like that and think,
gee whiz, this might be the future. This is the present.
(15:06):
This shit has existed for five to ten years. Anyone
telling you the metaversus the future is just trying to
pretend they were part of the past. Laugh in 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
(15:29):
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 piss me off about that
is the same thing that pisses me off about the
metaverse in general. In the kids have been playing video
(15:51):
games online a while, they've been using headsets a while.
These things already existed, and Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies
satch in a della 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.
(16:13):
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 three D version of Travis Scott looks like an
Xbox three sixty game, and it was performed to twelve
(16:36):
point three million players at once. It was defined as
a breakthrough moment for the metaverse and allegedly 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 twelve point three million people in
one place, you had groups of them, in the same
(16:57):
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 three D 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,
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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 focused on a point and you're
not really doing anything else, and past that it's just
(17:38):
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 meta us. Being able to watch weird stuff
fly around you in a video game. Cool, I guess,
(18:02):
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 twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, these companies
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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 Axieinfinity raised one hundred
and fifty two million dollars at a three billion dollar
(18:45):
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 axi 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
(19:05):
a future episode. Don't worry. Companies like Skymavis are not
the only ones. This metaverse boom started in October twenty
twenty one, 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.
(19:27):
The blockchain and the associated Ponzi scheme nonsense that followed
was a recurring theme within many of the first metaverse companies.
Non Fungible Tokens nftss 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
(19:49):
articles about this, claiming that people were selling fifty million
dollars of metaverse real estate. Nobody cares anymore. It's all disappeared.
And indeed, many other metaverse companies were also decentralized quote
web three businesses a spurious name for decentralized blockchain software
that barely worked. And these companies just printed money, no literally,
(20:14):
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, Yeah, places like The New York Times
and The Wall Street Journal were doing whole articles about
(20:34):
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
(20:56):
a way that kind of echoes the empty height pseeing
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
(21:20):
the con more on, I guess, until it wasn't than
at one hack away where I believe Mark Zuckerberg lives.
In early February twenty twenty three, The Wall Street Journal
pointed to Meta's healthy Q four numbers, where its stock
price jump by twenty percent, thereby reinstating its membership in
the club of companies with a market capitalization over one
trillion dollars, as proof that Meta had and I quote,
(21:43):
finally figured out how to sell the Metaverse. The journal
pointed to Meta's Reality Lab's division, which houses the company's
Metaverse efforts, which made over one billion dollars in revenue
for the first time, driven primarily by healthy holiday sales
of Meta's Quest three virtual reality headset. That was the
big sign that the Metaverse was fine, except it wasn't.
(22:06):
That's a fortieth of Meta's forty billion dollar Q four revenue.
It's also roughly a sick of the amount of money
that Reality Labs burned, with the unit making a four
point sixty five billion dollar loss, which was its highest
on record, and in the case of virtual reality, in general,
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it's still a very early stage technology. Most headsets, including
the latest Oculus in 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.
(22:46):
A Metas 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 Metas metaverse. It's all so confusing, and Horizon
(23:06):
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 twenty twenty three, linked documents
(23:28):
obtained by the verges Alex Heath revealed that only one
in ten Horizon World's users returned after trying the title
for the first time since it's 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
(23:48):
to Meta Because of the Metaverse, Horison Worlds has continued
to share 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 more because
you can kind of see what people would buy there.
It's just negative space. And all of this is just
(24:10):
a stunning fall from grace, considering the capital, both reputational
and monetary, that Zuckerberg pumped into it. When Mark Zuckerberg
announced in twenty twenty one 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
(24:30):
alongside the name change described this future where we'd 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,
(24:53):
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
(25:14):
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
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the metaverse didn't mean anything, because of course money could
be made. Microsoft CEO Sachynadella would say at the company's
twenty twenty one 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 seventy five point four billion dollar
(26:00):
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, Diabloau, and many others created by Activision Blizzard. Roadblocks,
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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 two thousand and four,
but rode the Metaverse hypewave to take itself public. Their
IPO raised at a forty one billion dollar valuation. At
the time of writing this script, its market cap is
(26:42):
now twenty seven point six to three billion, a far
cry from its debut and a fraction of its pandemic
era peak, when the company was worth seventy eight billion dollars.
Important note about Roadblocks, by the way, they've never made
a profit. Kind of a big problem in the business industry.
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Even businesses that seem to have very little to do
with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse by
creating a Roadblocks experience that they would eventually shut down
less than a year later. Disney created their own Metaverse
division in early twenty twenty two, only to lay them
all off in March twenty twenty three. In twenty twenty four,
Disney would then invest one and a half billion dollars
(27:28):
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
epics Fortnite, the word metaverse is never used. In twenty
twenty two, the consulting firm Gartner claimed that twenty five
(27:51):
percent of people would spend at least an hour a
day in the metaverse by twenty twenty six. 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
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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 five
trillion dollars in value by twenty thirty, adding that around
a ninety percent of business leaders expected the metaverse to
positively impact their industry within five to ten years, not
(28:35):
to be outdone. City put out a massive report that
declared the metaverse would be a thirteen trillion dollar opportunity
by twenty thirty. 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
(28:55):
or Garner report and it's quoting an X Y Y
using a thirteen trillion by twenty thirty, 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
(29:16):
discussions of the metaversus potential, particularly when talking about anything
that wasn't a video game. While I failed to see
the distinction between an MMRPG like World of Warcraft or
EverQuest and a so called metaverse game like Roadblocks or Fortnite,
I can kind of begrudgingly concede that a virtual workplace
is conceptually distinct enough to have its own name. That
(29:37):
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 sach In A. Della of Microsoft
and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta believed or would have had
you believe that ordinary office workers want to hold meetings
(29:59):
in virtual rooms rooms were 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
(30:20):
even more, and then they would have said no, Zukia 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 grizzly history, and he
knew that the media and investors would drink down whatever
slop he had prepared for them. I'm not sure if
(30:41):
you remember. In twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two,
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 twenty twenty three, when everyone
kind of crashed back down to Earth. I actually think
the metaverse com would gone a lot longer had the
zero interest free economy, which I'll attack in a later episode,
(31:06):
not fallen 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 twenty twenty
(31:29):
three was a rough time for everybody. Microsoft shuttered its
virtual workspace platform all Space VR in January twenty twenty three,
and then laid off the one hundred 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
(31:50):
of forgotten about. In September twenty twenty three, mister Metaverse himself,
Tim Sweeney, and Epic would lay off eight hundred and
thirty people, attributing it to there and I quote unrealistic
metaverse ambitions. Several months after my article, I should add
the billions of dollars invested around this half baked concept
that to thousands if not tens of thousands losing their jobs,
(32:14):
and the meta versus savior would also be the one
to ultimately kill it. Metas 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. Metas chief technology officer Andrew bos Bosworth
told CNBC in April twenty twenty three that he, along
(32:36):
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 one hundred billion dollars in research
and development on its mission to be and I quote
metaverse first. While Mark Zuckerberg sometimes suggests the metaverse isn't
(32:58):
dead by limply telling you that they developing things to
their headsets and that people are making games for the quest,
the writing's on the wall. Metas 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 cumbasson hardware. The metaverse
(33:22):
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 whold of the tech industry in
a good portion of the American business world in line
behind him and behind this half baked con The fact
(33:43):
that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the metaverse
is a fairly damning indictment of everyone who followed him
and anyone who still considers 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
(34:03):
on the flimsiest 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
(34:25):
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
tim has come for online advertising and for Facebook's only
(34:47):
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
(35:07):
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
twenty twenty one, and it bothers me today. It was
so clearly specious. Reporters talking to Mark Zuckerberg ate up
(35:28):
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.
(35:48):
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
(36:10):
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
(36:30):
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
(36:53):
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 a
(37:15):
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.
(37:39):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
T O. S O w Ski dot com. You can
email me at easy at Better offline dot com, or
check out Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter
and more links to this podcast. Thank you how much
(38:00):
for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media. Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host
ed Zitron. Today's episode is about how one man tricked
the entire tech industry into burning billions of dollars based
(00:25):
on nothing. You may remember a time in twenty twenty
one 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
(00:46):
we socialized in. Was it 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
twenty twenty one to really work out what the hell
went on though. Interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for The Virgin July
(01:07):
twenty twenty one, 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
(01:28):
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 metavers
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
(01:50):
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 or 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 web three,
(02:12):
which was a term used by cryptocurrency con artists to
sell you some sort of decentralized blockchain based thing in
reality metas 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. You all kind
(02:36):
of felt like a con. Yeah, The media in 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
this podcast, But if you felt like you were being swindled,
you should have been. Believe your ears, believe your eyes.
(02:57):
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 year's 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 to crying the made up metaverse. I was
(03:19):
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,
(03:40):
and multiple startups would claim that they'd now entered the metaverse,
only to end up ditching the idea. Toward the end
of twenty twenty two and early twenty twenty three, 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
(04:01):
meta on artificial intelligence after seeing how well chated GPT
was doing. I've always been an anti metaverse, mostly because nobody
could tell me what it was. In fact, in May
twenty twenty three, I wrote a piece of Business Insider
declaring the metaverse dead, something which pissed off Tim Sweeney,
the CEO of Epic Games the developers Fortnite, who then
(04:22):
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 six hundred
million monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roadblocks, PUBG, Sandbox
and Vrchack and morn it's passing together in real time
(04:42):
three D. 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
(05:06):
that have existed for upwards of a decade that were
never once referred to as part of the metaverse, despite
this being a nineties term from a book. And it's
just ridiculous because these people never use this term before
until it helped them sell crap to investors. Whether or
not the metaverse may actually exist one day is immaterial
(05:28):
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 metaverse 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 twenty twenty two, I,
(05:52):
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 and virtual reality and of course,
now the metaverse. This conference has existed for quite a
long time. I had been before, but before it was
around things that existed like AR and V are augmented reality,
(06:14):
meaning that something you put over your face, perhaps like
the Vision pro or VR, like the Oculus headsets and
Quest headsets. The 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,
(06:37):
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 get 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
(06:58):
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 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 twenty twenty one video, you might believe it's
(07:20):
a virtual world that encompasses your senses, a fully sensory
experience that the kinds you'd find in Ernest Klein's horrible
book Ready Player One. Now you may be thinking, Heed,
that's not technically possible, and you'd be completely and utterly right.
The conceptual ambiguity, of course, and the fact that a
(07:41):
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,
(08:01):
not the investors, not the founders, could actually describe. Let
me give you some examples. Bud they're a company that
raised over sixty million dollars that, according to tech Crunch,
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.
(08:24):
It's actually a micro transaction 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 like that. I've seen one hundred million of these things.
Versions of what Bud does have existed for a long
(08:46):
long time. Then there's another company Trip that's tripp because
why name things normally. They raised twenty six point three
million dollars to create apps that and I quote power
mindful metaverse and said metaverse is community driven. In practice,
it's a virtual reality app that shows you these weird,
(09:08):
trippy visions that you would imagine seeing in a PSA
for drug abuse in the nineties. They cost ten twenty dollars.
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
(09:31):
one of these pablum filled multimillion 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
they're very stupid investors might catch on that they were
(09:52):
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
(10:17):
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 Rodeblocks quote the metaverse, you kind of have
to consider World of Warcraft and ultimre Online or any
other avatar based game that's ever existed part of the metaverse.
(10:41):
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,
(11:06):
maybe it's worth a trillion dollars or three trillion dollars,
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
(11:26):
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,
(11:50):
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
(12:11):
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
(12:33):
twenty twenty two, people were calling microsoft seventy five billion
dollar 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
(12:55):
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
(13:15):
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 Roadblocks 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
(13:37):
weight considering the definitional fuzziness of the metaverse. But that
also allows people who back 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 I messaged the metaverse was rc the earliest chat
room function of the Internet. The metaverse was aim aol
(14:01):
instant messenger was that the metaverse? What the hell is
(14:21):
the metaverse? It just all kind of feels like bullshit.
Fortnite and Roadblocks 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
(14:45):
verifiable age data for these titles, but one survey published
in twenty twenty one said that the ten to twenty
age group has the highest percentage of people that have
played a proto metaverse game, which includes titles like Minecraft, Fortnite,
and Roadblocks. Now you may hear stats like that and think,
gee whiz, this might be the future. This is the present.
(15:06):
This shit has existed for five to ten years. Anyone
telling you the metaversus the future is just trying to
pretend they were part of the past. Laugh in 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
(15:29):
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 piss me off about that
is the same thing that pisses me off about the
metaverse in general. In the kids have been playing video
(15:51):
games online a while, they've been using headsets a while.
These things already existed, and Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies
satch in a della 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.
(16:13):
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 three D version of Travis Scott looks like an
Xbox three sixty game, and it was performed to twelve
(16:36):
point three million players at once. It was defined as
a breakthrough moment for the metaverse and allegedly 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 twelve point three million people in
one place, you had groups of them, in the same
(16:57):
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 three D 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,
(17:18):
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 focused on a point and you're
not really doing anything else, and past that it's just
(17:38):
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 meta us. Being able to watch weird stuff
fly around you in a video game. Cool, I guess,
(18:02):
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 twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, these companies
(18:22):
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 Axieinfinity raised one hundred
and fifty two million dollars at a three billion dollar
(18:45):
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 axi 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
(19:05):
a future episode. Don't worry. Companies like Skymavis are not
the only ones. This metaverse boom started in October twenty
twenty one, 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.
(19:27):
The blockchain and the associated Ponzi scheme nonsense that followed
was a recurring theme within many of the first metaverse companies.
Non Fungible Tokens nftss 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
(19:49):
articles about this, claiming that people were selling fifty million
dollars of metaverse real estate. Nobody cares anymore. It's all disappeared.
And indeed, many other metaverse companies were also decentralized quote
web three businesses a spurious name for decentralized blockchain software
that barely worked. And these companies just printed money, no literally,
(20:14):
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, Yeah, places like The New York Times
and The Wall Street Journal were doing whole articles about
(20:34):
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
(20:56):
a way that kind of echoes the empty height pseeing
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
(21:20):
the con more on, I guess, until it wasn't than
at one hack away where I believe Mark Zuckerberg lives.
In early February twenty twenty three, The Wall Street Journal
pointed to Meta's healthy Q four numbers, where its stock
price jump by twenty percent, thereby reinstating its membership in
the club of companies with a market capitalization over one
trillion dollars, as proof that Meta had and I quote,
(21:43):
finally figured out how to sell the Metaverse. The journal
pointed to Meta's Reality Lab's division, which houses the company's
Metaverse efforts, which made over one billion dollars in revenue
for the first time, driven primarily by healthy holiday sales
of Meta's Quest three virtual reality headset. That was the
big sign that the Metaverse was fine, except it wasn't.
(22:06):
That's a fortieth of Meta's forty billion dollar Q four revenue.
It's also roughly a sick of the amount of money
that Reality Labs burned, with the unit making a four
point sixty five billion dollar loss, which was its highest
on record, and in the case of virtual reality, in general,
(22:26):
it's still a very early stage technology. Most headsets, including
the latest Oculus in 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.
(22:46):
A Metas 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 Metas metaverse. It's all so confusing, and Horizon
(23:06):
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 twenty twenty three, linked documents
(23:28):
obtained by the verges Alex Heath revealed that only one
in ten Horizon World's users returned after trying the title
for the first time since it's 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
(23:48):
to Meta Because of the Metaverse, Horison Worlds has continued
to share 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 more because
you can kind of see what people would buy there.
It's just negative space. And all of this is just
(24:10):
a stunning fall from grace, considering the capital, both reputational
and monetary, that Zuckerberg pumped into it. When Mark Zuckerberg
announced in twenty twenty one 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
(24:30):
alongside the name change described this future where we'd 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,
(24:53):
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
(25:14):
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
(25:37):
the metaverse didn't mean anything, because of course money could
be made. Microsoft CEO Sachynadella would say at the company's
twenty twenty one 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 seventy five point four billion dollar
(26:00):
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, Diabloau, and many others created by Activision Blizzard. Roadblocks,
(26:21):
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 two thousand and four,
but rode the Metaverse hypewave to take itself public. Their
IPO raised at a forty one billion dollar valuation. At
the time of writing this script, its market cap is
(26:42):
now twenty seven point six to three billion, a far
cry from its debut and a fraction of its pandemic
era peak, when the company was worth seventy eight billion dollars.
Important note about Roadblocks, by the way, they've never made
a profit. Kind of a big problem in the business industry.
(27:08):
Even businesses that seem to have very little to do
with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse by
creating a Roadblocks experience that they would eventually shut down
less than a year later. Disney created their own Metaverse
division in early twenty twenty two, only to lay them
all off in March twenty twenty three. In twenty twenty four,
Disney would then invest one and a half billion dollars
(27:28):
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
epics Fortnite, the word metaverse is never used. In twenty
twenty two, the consulting firm Gartner claimed that twenty five
(27:51):
percent of people would spend at least an hour a
day in the metaverse by twenty twenty six. 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
(28:13):
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 five
trillion dollars in value by twenty thirty, adding that around
a ninety percent of business leaders expected the metaverse to
positively impact their industry within five to ten years, not
(28:35):
to be outdone. City put out a massive report that
declared the metaverse would be a thirteen trillion dollar opportunity
by twenty thirty. 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
(28:55):
or Garner report and it's quoting an X Y Y
using a thirteen trillion by twenty thirty, 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
(29:16):
discussions of the metaversus potential, particularly when talking about anything
that wasn't a video game. While I failed to see
the distinction between an MMRPG like World of Warcraft or
EverQuest and a so called metaverse game like Roadblocks or Fortnite,
I can kind of begrudgingly concede that a virtual workplace
is conceptually distinct enough to have its own name. That
(29:37):
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 sach In A. Della of Microsoft
and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta believed or would have had
you believe that ordinary office workers want to hold meetings
(29:59):
in virtual rooms rooms were 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
(30:20):
even more, and then they would have said no, Zukia 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 grizzly history, and he
knew that the media and investors would drink down whatever
slop he had prepared for them. I'm not sure if
(30:41):
you remember. In twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two,
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 twenty twenty three, when everyone
kind of crashed back down to Earth. I actually think
the metaverse com would gone a lot longer had the
zero interest free economy, which I'll attack in a later episode,
(31:06):
not fallen 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 twenty twenty
(31:29):
three was a rough time for everybody. Microsoft shuttered its
virtual workspace platform all Space VR in January twenty twenty three,
and then laid off the one hundred 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
(31:50):
of forgotten about. In September twenty twenty three, mister Metaverse himself,
Tim Sweeney, and Epic would lay off eight hundred and
thirty people, attributing it to there and I quote unrealistic
metaverse ambitions. Several months after my article, I should add
the billions of dollars invested around this half baked concept
that to thousands if not tens of thousands losing their jobs,
(32:14):
and the meta versus savior would also be the one
to ultimately kill it. Metas 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. Metas chief technology officer Andrew bos Bosworth
told CNBC in April twenty twenty three that he, along
(32:36):
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 one hundred billion dollars in research
and development on its mission to be and I quote
metaverse first. While Mark Zuckerberg sometimes suggests the metaverse isn't
(32:58):
dead by limply telling you that they developing things to
their headsets and that people are making games for the quest,
the writing's on the wall. Metas 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 cumbasson hardware. The metaverse
(33:22):
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 whold of the tech industry in
a good portion of the American business world in line
behind him and behind this half baked con The fact
(33:43):
that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the metaverse
is a fairly damning indictment of everyone who followed him
and anyone who still considers 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
(34:03):
on the flimsiest 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
(34:25):
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
tim has come for online advertising and for Facebook's only
(34:47):
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
(35:07):
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
twenty twenty one, and it bothers me today. It was
so clearly specious. Reporters talking to Mark Zuckerberg ate up
(35:28):
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.
(35:48):
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
(36:10):
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
(36:30):
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
(36:53):
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 a
(37:15):
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.
(37:39):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
T O. S O w Ski dot com. You can
email me at easy at Better offline dot com, or
check out Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter
and more links to this podcast. Thank you how much
(38:00):
for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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