In 2021 you were told by famous stock market gurus, like Cathie Wood, that you needed to buy into Facebook stock, because the “Metaverse” was the future, in their view. They told you that everyone would one day want to wear the goggles and lose themselves in virtual reality as that is what Mark Zuckerberg was selling. He even changed the name of the entire Facebook company to “Metaverse” and its stock symbol FB to META.
Well I hated the idea of Metaverse.
I didn’t want the googles, but really I don’t like most of these gizmos.
If I had my way the Tesla robot car would be totally outlawed from the highways and all Amazon Alexas spy devices would be destroyed.
I don’t understand the appeal of these Alexa devices when this invention here, created decades ago, does all the major conveniences that an Alexa provides.
The market gurus who push the Metaverse, robot cars, and crypto virtual wallets have no care that all of these things are designed to diminish human agency.
I know saying things like this makes people called me old fashioned or say I’m against technology, but I’m just against the technology that is anti-human.
And the thing is, it turns out that when it comes to rejecting the Metaverse I am far from being in the minority here.
It turns out that the Metaverse goggles failed to take off and it turned into one of the biggest business failures of 2022.
Do you remember of all the hype you heard about it in 2021?
The reality is that the actual sale of virtual reality headsets SHRANK in 2022!
They fell by 12% this year to only 9.6 million units across the entire world.
According to CNBC, “taken together, the estimates of VR headset sales and shipments create a problematic picture for Meta, whose stock price has lost about two-thirds of its value this year. Zuckerberg has said he’s playing the long game with the metaverse, expecting it take up to a decade to go mainstream and projecting it will eventually host hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce.”
When reporters dug deep they found out that Metaverse developers get sick when they wear the goggles too long and don’t even like it. Even when the WSJ tried to produce an even handed video showing what it is like to use the Metaverse, it still looked like a freak show, with people walking around with no legs.
After only a few hours of usage the WSJ reporter got a headache and said she can’t recommend that you use it.
Look, a year and a half a go, I said I thought the Metaverse might turn out to be as big of a dud as 3-D movies turned out to be in the 1950’s.
They were supposed to take over the entire movie industry and it turned into just a passing fad instead.
The rejection of the Metaverse by the world is a victory for you and me, because it’s a win for the human race.
For META shareholders the loss has been a disaster, but they can always sell today and get out and put their money into something better next year.
The Metaverse sucks…..
….And so it failed in 2022.
And that is your win!
Now if more people would just notice what Elon Musk has been doing to monkeys….He has killed 1,500 of them in the past four years with his neuralink, a device much worse than the Metaverse goggles.
-Mike
