Around the Ides of March, a universe ended. It was not a spectacular end-of-the-world event. The exit did not go out with a bang but more like a whimper that barely registered on any radar. In a flash of a nanosecond, it was irrelevant.
The universe that failed was the much hyped metaverse—a virtual space that would allow users to live out their fantasies.
Back in 2014, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of this virtual-reality-based immersive digital world where people could work, play and meet up. Mr. Zuckerberg even renamed Facebook, calling it Meta, so sure he was of its success.
Hard Times
The metaverse project has fallen on hard times, and not even virtual reality can save it from ruin. Meta has laid off more than 1,000 employees from its metaverse division. Three virtual reality studios also closed this year.
The app Horizon Worlds, which allows metaverse inhabitants to navigate inside this platform, is being put on life support. The company will keep the existing app working, but will not develop anything new. Niche users on their virtual reality headsets will be the only visitors on the metaverse’s road to oblivion.
After losing about $80 billion on the project, Meta is calling it quits. The grand portal to the unbridled imagination is now just another app.
Great Expectations
To say that the metaverse was born amid great expectations is an understatement. Everyone was talking about it as the latest and greatest development in cyberspace.
“The metaverse is going to be the biggest revolution in computing platforms the world has seen—bigger than the mobile revolution, bigger than the web revolution,” said Marc Whitten of Unity Software in a Wall Street Journal feature article.
As late as 2022, a McKinsey report predicted that “With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore.” The report cited sources that estimated that 15 percent of corporate revenue would come from the metaverse by 2027.
Introducing Science Fiction
The platform promised more than a prefabricated new world. Indeed, it would allow users to immerse themselves in a universe of their own making. People could become avatars, that is, cyber-representations of men, women, animals or things that “live” in cyberspace. They could meet with an unlimited number of other avatars.
In this world, people can be wherever they want—be it on the moon, on top of buildings or “in a field of unicorns.” This platform offered a place that could be inhabited by extraterrestrials, angels, demons, or anything else from the fantasies involved. In this new realm, the imagination was supposed to rule.
Advertisers envisioned renting space in the metaverse to reach this new universe of cyber consumers. Others even envisioned real estate development inside this fantasyland.
Reality Gets in the Way of Virtual Reality
The quest for creating the metaverse soon ran into problems. The software app needed to run was full of bugs that proved clunky and difficult to fix. The avatars that users needed to navigate were crude and ugly. For a long time, they consisted of floating torsos without legs. That did not facilitate conversation or interaction.
However, the platform’s greatest problem was its lack of appeal to the cyber-masses. Not enough people could afford the headsets that let them enter this magical domain. Worst of all, the place could not attract enough interested people to reach critical mass.
It is hard to live in continual fantasy without a stable foundation. One idea was to populate the metaverse with virtual reality games, but no one wanted to play. The metaverse turned out to be a very lonely place.
A Wrong Vision of the Universe
The problem with the metaverse is its denial of the order of the universe. God created a rational and marvelous order in which He is reflected. This order helps people understand Him better. A moral law ensures that things act according to their nature. The end of this order is to facilitate sanctification and salvation.
However, the metaverse is completely detached from this providential order. God and His moral law are disregarded in the metaverse. There is no notion of heaven and salvation.
In fact, the goal of the metaverse is to detach people from the real world by fusing online and offline worlds into one extended “meta” reality. The metaverse represented the triumph of fantasy by creating a delusional, often irrational world without morals, consequences, or meaning. People are free to defy nature by doing the most absurd things inside an imagined world unmoored from reality.
Every fantasy, even the most macabre, can become “reality” in the metaverse. It can thus open up dark and sinister spaces that will facilitate sinful acts or their simulations.
Such a lonely world disconnected from reality and the nature of things can feed the unfettered passions that hate all moral restraint. A space like this can quickly go from Alice in Wonderland to an insane asylum to a virtual hell in cyberspace.
The metaverse must be understood in the context of the postmodern effort to put humanity, not God, at the center of all things. Its promoters had an obsession with imagining new worlds without God. They wanted to turn each individual into a god.
Indeed, the demise of the metaverse is yet another Tower of Babel that has come crashing down.
Photo Credit: © Miha Creative – stock.adobe.com
First published on TFP.org.