![]() It’s the job description and often explains a lot, but not everything - sometimes it legitimizes what can seem like much more instinctual and personal decisions made under the auspices of the cold logic of capitalism. It’s fair to assume that the leadership at a big tech firm is interested in maximizing efficiency and profit, for themselves or for shareholders. They live weird lives, develop idiosyncratic views of the world, and have unusual amounts of power. It represented an intoxicating fantasy, just not one that most of us would recognize - or, if we did, one that we might recognize as sort of a nightmare.Įxecutive fantasies - and executive autonomy in general - get short shrift in most popular theories about How Things Work, I think, especially in the tech industry, where superstar founders and CEOs are given considerable deference and leeway. Empty offices and newly empowered employees drove some tech executives out of their minds, and the Metaverse promised a solution, or at least functioned as a response. In hindsight, though, I think one obvious answer is severely underrated: COVID. “We are committed to our metaverse vision, and we’re seeing good momentum.”) Maybe they just read Snow Crash in high school and thought: What if that, but not cool? (“We’ve always been clear that our metaverse vision is a long-term one, and nothing about that has changed,” said Meta spokesperson Elana Widmann, in an emailed statement. A sense of impending stagnation among tech giants surely provided some anxious fuel. Crypto-adjacency had something to do with it. One question worth dwelling on, however, is why it worked at all - and why people like Zuckerberg were so zealously committed to it, despite the massive costs. Which is fair: Changing Facebook’s name to Meta was a bold attempt not just to rebrand a company but to set an industry agenda, and while it ultimately failed, it sort of worked, for a while. “Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street,” he writes. He lays a great deal of responsibility for the hype at the feet - or in the space below the floating torso - of one man. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.” ![]() The billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept led to thousands - if not tens of thousands - of people losing their jobs.īut the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Disney shuttered its Metaverse division in March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse projects. Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its “industrial metaverse team,” and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. In an obituary published on Insider, Ed Zitron suggests the ultimate cause of death was the arrival of yet another next big thing: The metaverse was a term in search of a trend a trope in search of instantiation a failed act of summoning by leaders who really thought they could control the weather. Legless avatars beckoned us into barren digital landscapes to … stand around and talk about NFTs? Parcels of “property” sold for millions of dollars? It was a … virtual world? No? A mixed-reality game? No? A new frontier? An escape from meatspace? A layer on top of it? Companies raised and spent billions of dollars on the metaverse without ever quite getting their stories straight about what it was supposed to be or do - they didn’t just lack a good pitch beyond “getting in early,” they lacked a coherent concept to pitch in the first place. ![]() A few years on, Silicon Valley’s brief obsession with the metaverse has assumed the quality of a bad dream, half-remembered.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |