I have a soft spot for the Metaverse, conceptually.

I learned to code, by accident, in Second Life, at the age of 19. It was intoxicating: a massive online environment where you could build anything. Objects of any kind, limited only by your imagination (and primitive 3D rendering of the day).

The experience changed my life. I was able to sell my creations to other people, and in the process, I paid my real life rent. It taught me entrepreneurship skills in a fundamentally new medium, which opened the door to my entire career.

Zuckerberg's metaverse would not create anything like this agency. It would not expand your reach. Its primary motivation was to extend Zuckerberg's control and give him a device platform, something he envied Apple and Google bitterly. There was nothing transformative to do there, nothing compelling to create.

Second Life, famously, had a problem with users creating phalluses and other adult fare. This was the tradeoff for creating an open-ended creativity platform. The Second Life environment was permanent and durable: a shared tapestry created as a group project by users, explorable by all. A full, complicated spectrum of human creativity would be expressed there. Some stuff was obscene, yes, but other stuff was just ugly.

Facebook, despite its appetites for the ugliness of antivaccine conspiracy groups and algorithmically enhanced pogroms, would never cede that much control to their users. It's just not in their business model or DNA. Their success is built on exerting control over their platform, the better to sell ads against it.

Once, Facebook prevailed over MySpace on exactly this basis: while MySpace was a fertile ground for an entire generation to learn HTML, CSS and even JavaScript, it created a noisy, sometimes garish environment that became tough to navigate. Facebook, by contrast, was tightly controlled, uniform. Perhaps a useful lesson for building the substrate of textual communication and update-passing between friends.

But also the wrong north star for a company trying to build the entire next chapter of the internet. It was too rigid to be weird. This was a death-knell for a web successor, as any early web adventurer could tell you.

Weird was the whole joy of the exercise.

Instead the Metaverse adventurer got sterile, stale, and joyless. $80 billion to produce almost no cultural impact, aside from people laughing at it. For context, the iPhone cost only $200 million in R&D, a 400x efficiency that actually ushered in a paradigm shift.

Substrate readiness

The thing is, you can't buy a paradigm shift. These things happen because a new substrate gives you the power to change the rules of something important.

But it only works if the substrate is ready.

The headsets were junk. In the early 2020's, a mass-market device at $500 was not pleasant to wear, nor pleasant to look through. The pixel edges were prominent. The controls were awkward. Your face got sweaty.

The substrate (un-)readiness picture is completed by the competing Vision Pro: $3,500 for exquisite picture and a perfect gestural UI.

And the feeling of a brick taped to your forehead.

So even if you spent all the money in the world, the computing and interface substrate for delivering the metaverse—as an immersive experience—simply was not ready. You could not create a compelling experience even if you were comfortable letting the user meaningfully, permanently impact the digital worlds they were inhabiting.

Which Facebook wasn't going to do anyway.

Meanwhile, the LLM revolution kicked off while Zuckerberg was distracted. It's a damning indictment of Zuckerberg as an operator. The most consequential new substrate opening since the microprocessor, and he's busy adding legs to avatars nobody wants.

The whole exercise is a cautionary tale of the dual-class share structure. Imagine what someone talented could do with all these resources.

Zuckerberg had good timing once. The rest of his advantage is a generation of check-writing. He's riding the momentum of a truly gargantuan captive audience, with deep ad targeting. There are years of fruits remaining for being the apex predator of the last cycle's social graph extraction mechanics.

But he's not going to recognize the next big thing.