The History of the Internet
The Billion-Dollar Room Nobody Wanted to Enter
Meta spent roughly the GDP of a small nation building a virtual world, and at its peak, fewer people were inside it than fit in a mid-sized conference hall.
The Idea
The metaverse was supposed to be the internet's next form — not pages you visit but spaces you inhabit. Mark Zuckerberg rebranded an entire company around the idea in late 2021, and for a brief moment, every tech executive with a slide deck was nodding along. The pitch had genuine intellectual weight: persistent, shared, three-dimensional digital environments where work, socialising, commerce, and identity could converge. Science fiction had been sketching this since William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The timing felt right — we'd just spent two years proving we could live large portions of our lives through screens. But the hype revealed a confusion at its core. 'The metaverse' was never a technology — it was a destination, and nobody could agree on the map. Was it VR headsets? Blockchain-backed virtual land? Fortnite concerts? The word became a container into which anyone could pour their particular obsession. That ambiguity made it easy to fund and nearly impossible to build coherently. What emerged was something more honest: a reminder that the internet doesn't upgrade itself on a schedule, and that 'the next big thing' is almost never the thing the people shouting about it say it is. The metaverse hype is less a story about a failed product and more a story about how technological narratives get manufactured — and who benefits when they do.
In the World
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stood on a virtual stage inside Horizon Worlds — Meta's flagship metaverse platform — and announced that this was where humanity was heading. The avatars had no legs. That detail became a meme, but the deeper problem was the emptiness. By late 2022, internal documents leaked to the press revealed that the average Horizon Worlds user spent less than an hour a month in the platform. Most worlds had fewer than fifty visitors ever. Meta had by then spent over thirty-six billion in company funds on Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse push — and the division was losing billions each quarter with no clear path to revenue. Meanwhile, Decentraland — a blockchain-based virtual world that had sold plots of digital land for eye-watering sums to investors convinced they were buying the SoHo of the internet — reported in September 2022 that it had just 38 active daily users despite a market capitalisation still sitting in the hundreds of millions. The contrast was almost absurd. Real estate speculators had snapped up virtual land next to Snoop Dogg's digital mansion, and almost nobody was walking by. By 2023, Zuckerberg had quietly pivoted to AI. The metaverse didn't die so much as get filed away — a monument to what happens when a powerful company tries to conjure a future into existence through sheer declaration.
Why It Matters
The metaverse cycle follows a pattern worth internalising, because it will happen again — possibly soon, possibly around AI, possibly around something nobody has named yet. A compelling vision gets articulated. Investors need a story. The press needs a narrative. Executives need a roadmap. Suddenly a speculative idea hardens into conventional wisdom before anyone has checked whether the underlying demand is real. What makes this worth carrying with you isn't cynicism — genuine breakthroughs do emerge from hype cycles, often as quieter second-order effects. The infrastructure built for the metaverse push (better VR hardware, faster spatial computing research, more sophisticated avatar systems) will likely matter eventually, just not in the way anyone announced. The useful habit is learning to ask: who benefits from this narrative existing right now, independent of whether the technology works? That question cuts through a surprising amount of noise — in tech, in finance, and well beyond both.
A Question to Ponder
When a new technology gets a name and a capital letter, who is actually doing the naming — and what does it tell you about what they need you to believe?
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