The Continued Unraveling of Mark Zuckerberg’s Malicious Metaverse

What is best in life?

Being right about another man’s failures. Watching his allies abandon him. And hearing the lamentations of his shareholders.

Call me the world’s happiest cynic, then, because when I predicted the utter and catastrophic failure of Facebook’s rebranding as “Meta” starting less than a year ago, I genuinely didn’t think it would all unravel as quickly and ignominiously as it has. Horizon Worlds, Meta’s intended metaverse, went live in December and, my god, it has been downhill from there.

The good news is that we’re getting a lot of free entertainment out of Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to be “the face” of this dead-end transition, and the past few weeks have seen some real highlights, culminating with a transcendently embarrassing appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week. Zuck and his marketing team are still seemingly in thrall to the Meta CEO’s former status as a Silicon Valley wunderkind, evidently blinding them to his nearly supernatural lack of personal appeal.

he results are frequently, in a word, delicious for a hater like me. And while the sizzle comes in the form of incredible public relations embarrassments, after that comes the steak: Facebook’s pivot to Meta is crashing and burning as a material business proposition with astonishing rapidity.

The past few weeks have been particularly brutal for Zuckerberg’s grand ambition to create a Second Life mod in which everyone is a double amputee. The current (far from first) wave of embarrassing flubs kicked off on August 17 when Zuckerberg posted a “selfie” from Meta’s Horizon World’s rollout in France. As pretty much everyone was happy to point out, it looked embarrassingly bad – not just like a game built to roughly 2007 levels of detail and immersion, but like one without the slightest spark of design creativity.

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