NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I n the 2010 film The Social Network, a (fictionalized) account of the founding of Facebook, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) believes he has seen the future. “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the internet,” the Napster founder and onetime president of Facebook proclaims. For a time, it looked like this prediction would be borne out. In the aftermath of Facebook’s founding, more and more of life has either moved to or been intermingled with the digital sphere, in a manner over which seemingly no one has any real control, even as we consciously or unconsciously assent to it.

That ceaseless march away from reality, led to a considerable extent by Facebook itself, may help to explain the company’s unbounded confidence in embracing the “metaverse,” such that it even changed its name to “Meta.” Broadly speaking, the metaverse is an attempt to blur the lines between the real and the digital, allowing people to exist in entirely virtual spaces and enabling physical spaces to be overlaid with virtual attributes. (Facebook’s metaverse, it should be noted, is not the only one and is not necessarily linked to the others.) In a 2021 promotional video, Facebook/Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg described it as an “embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” an “immersive” place where everything will be “more natural and vivid” and users will be able to “do almost anything” they can imagine. He stressed that a “feeling of presence” would be the “defining quality of the metaverse” in that “you’re going to feel like you’re really there with other people.”

But Meta’s metaverse gambit has not paid off. Reality Labs, which was responsible for creating and sustaining the division’s functionality, lost about $25 billion in two years. The company is now going to prioritize making the division more “efficient,” surely presaging staff reductions. And Zuckerberg is no longer pitching the metaverse to advertisers.

What happened? How could one of the few people responsible for changing the very nature of man’s relationship to the digital world have whiffed?

It was not for lack of buy-in on the part of Zuckerberg himself. In addition to the commitment signaled by changing its name, Meta then put its money where its mouth was, sinking $100 billion into research and development for metaverse technology. So when Zuckerberg told The Verge, a tech website, in October 2021, “I think we’re basically moving from being Facebook first as a company to being metaverse first,” it sure seemed like he meant it. Indeed, his declaration that the metaverse would be “the successor to the mobile internet” made it sound as if he bought into the Parker character’s dialectic.

Nor did it seem that Meta, by embracing the metaverse, was going out on a limb in the tech world. In the wake of Meta’s early efforts, other tech companies such as Microsoft and Roblox were all in. The CEO of the former claimed in 2021 that he “couldn’t overstate how much of a breakthrough” the metaverse was for the company. And the latter, an online-gaming company, launched a successful IPO and a stratospheric $41 billion initial public valuation.

Much of the non-digital economy was along for the ride as well. Walmart, Disney, and others joined the metaverse. Its potential was apparently infinite. Writing recently for Business Insider, Ed Zitron recounted some of the more hyperbolic predictions. “The consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse would change the way we work forever.” Consulting firm McKinsey, whose other greatest hits include turbocharging the opioid crisis, working with Chinese-government entities (and taking a staff retreat to Xinjiang Province, not far from Uyghur concentration camps), and projecting wild success for CNN+ (remember CNN+?), foresaw “$5 trillion in value” arising from the metaverse. Citi believed it would be worth $13 trillion.

Elites in various parts of public life were also gearing up for a metaverse transition, arguing that it would, in certain ways, outdo reality itself. In an “experimental” interview, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bemoaned the “reality privilege” of those who “live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date” and are therefore unable to accept that, for the vast majority, “their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.” Thus, it was imperative to create “online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”

Economist Noah Smith saw in the metaverse the possibility for greater resource efficiency. “The more fun or useful stuff you can do in VR — games, business meetings, vacations, hangouts — the less you’ll have to suck up physical resources to do it in meatspace,” he wrote. “The more you can transform your subjective world by overlaying it with AR, the less you’ll have to suck up resources transforming your physical environment to suit your tastes.” Kids today, instead of riding around in cars as in American Graffiti, Smith wrote, could get their kicks in the digital world. “That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had.” Uh-huh.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that, when so many elite people and institutions agreed on a claim so dramatic, the claim would collapse. Regardless, it has indeed collapsed: Apart from Meta itself, Walmart, Disney, and others who were suckered into the metaverse have of late been withdrawing, cutting their losses along the way.

What happened?

One major problem: The technology simply wasn’t there. In Zuckerberg’s early promotional video, he sold a flash, futuristic melding of the digital and physical realms. The reality was a clunky, awkward, buggy platform that offered shallow simulacra of activities readily accessible in the physical world. The prospect of a new niche activity appealed, as is common today, to a subset of weirdos — in this case, the kind of person who would want, say, to get married in the metaverse. For everyone else, though, it appeared to be some unholy hybrid of a boring video game and a Zoom call.

But this problem is really downstream of the biggest flaw in the metaverse: People like living in the real world. It seems ridiculous to have to say it, but what some people — those for whom the non-digital is not the default — call “meatspace” will always outdo simulated alternatives. Such alternatives derive their power from how they either recreate the real thing or transcend it — an inescapable fact that points to how the physical plane remains our existential gyroscope. Technology can facilitate the lives we live in this realm; indeed, right now, you would not be reading this article without the internet as a means of dissemination. For that and other blessings, we should be grateful. But there is no reason to let that gratitude carry us headlong into eternal escape.

For Andreessen, a recent quintessential example of “reality privilege” was the situation created by Covid lockdowns, one that would have been “profoundly, terribly worse” without the Internet. But might not that have been a crutch making society collectively less driven to push for the end of lockdown, and facilitating the kind of half-existence we managed during that time? And hasn’t that deficient digital lifestyle pointed us, once again, not merely to the superiority but also the necessity of the real world?

It would be nice if one could be confident that the specter of the metaverse has been forever exorcised from our civilization. But instead, it appears to have been merely waylaid — who knows for how long — by a different tech obsession. The arrival of ChatGPT-type artificial intelligence suggests that the tech overlords who have so heedlessly attempted to redefine our lives have not given up quite yet. The next time the metaverse beckons, the technology might be better, the amenities might be more attractive, and, for some of us, our lives in the real world a little bit harder.

The movie version of Sean Parker makes a category error in his typology of ages: From farming to cities was a big change, yes, but in the remaking of society — the way people survived and organized themselves — the physical remained primary. To abandon the physical for the digital — that would be a change without precedent or even reference in human history. To undertake such a change would be to lose something fundamental about ourselves in the process.