In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg changed his company’s name from Facebook to Meta. He also announced his ambitious plans to throw billions into formulating a coherent “metaverse,” a virtual reality accessed through futuristic-looking headsets. This year, the tech giant is backtracking from their lofty vision of transferring all of life online. What began as a utopian promise of escape to a digital Eden is now what many predicted it would be all along: A failed experiment. While initially it was reported that Meta was entirely cancelling the metaverse, the company clarified that it will still exist but will be limited in its scope. Aaron Mak reports at Politico,
Meta cut 10 percent of its Reality Labs workforce in January, and the division has seen more than $70 billion cumulative losses since late 2020.
Meta also informed users on Tuesday that they would no longer be able to access its marquee Horizon Worlds metaverse platform with the company’s Quest VR headsets after June 15. The company then partially walked back the announcement on Wednesday, clarifying that the headsets will support certain Horizon Worlds apps, but that new ones will not be added.
However much Meta’s virtual world remains, one conclusion is clear, which is that the ambitious project never paid its expected dividends. Consumers simply weren’t as interested in these VR headsets as Zuckerberg thought they would be. Apple’s Vision Pro headset faced similar setbacks when it first hit the scene, too.
The writer and critic Ted Gioia was among the skeptical of Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand his company as “Meta,” noting how the metaverse was then uncharted territory and didn’t promise to be a success. It was a risky move. Gioia wrote the following back in 2021 on the heel’s of the name shift:
There’s something strange and unnatural about living in the Matrix, and there’s a good reason why alternative realities have been prominent in so many dystopian science fiction films. When you see these movies, you feel pity for the people who live plugged into their fake world. No matter how realistic the metaverse, you will never completely overcome that sense of pity and aversion.
Gioia mentioned that he thinks the metaverse will still appeal to certain people, but that these consumers will not be seen as models to emulate but examples to pity. We still seem to have a consensus that opting for a wholly simulated existence is not healthy for a society. All of those dystopian novels predicting something the rise of something like the metaverse are classified “dystopian” for a reason.
While Meta is scaling back on the metaverse, it is reportedly switching focus to artificial intelligence.
The company soared to success 20-some years ago for Facebook, but now Zuckerberg is trying to diversify his investments. The question remains whether or not it will pay off in the long run and if Meta will be able to compete with the other technology companies that are also throwing vast resources toward AI development.
For further reading: What is Meta Up To? Big Tech Turns to AI Investment | GeekPlanet
