John Herrman writing for the Intelligencer:

The metaverse was another supreme executive fantasy. Most broadly, it offered the prospect of a new frontier, the likes of which Zuckerberg hasn’t seen since, well, his conquest of the last one. More immediately, it was a way to make remote work more like in-office work for everyone, but especially for bosses, who understood it as a way to regain control and authority over their newly WFHing employees. It was a theoretical solution to the suddenly pressing problem of expensive and empty real estate — replacing a finite resource with an infinite one. (Meta has long talked about being a remote-work-friendly company but pays for millions of square feet of office space around the world.) From one executive to an audience of other executives, the metaverse — at least Zuck’s take on it — offered a vision of the future in which everything was different but also pretty much the same: a disruptive technology that maintained the basic order of things, and where you once again knew what your employees were up to, even if they were just avatars.

The ‘metaverse’ was idiotic from the get-go, an out-of-touch vision from an executive class disconnected from reality. Furthermore, wasn’t a comparable concept already explored in the 2000s with Second Life?

How is it that Zuckerberg still holds a leadership role at Facebook?

Edit: Looks like Second Life is very much still afloat.