Imagine losing to fucking VRChat
There’s still a metaverse budget?
It’s Zuck’s biggest personal passion project.
Bezos wanted to go to space, Gates wanted to cure malaria.
Zuckerberg wants to be a fucking Mii.
Zuckerberg just wants to build his own universe where he’s in charge of everything and everything costs money and there no taxes.
You can bet there were pitching ideas such as paying people with game money.
Sunk cost at this point lots of large companies bought space when it was “launching”
Imagine how much value would have been created if the several hundreds of billion spent on the shitty VR sims went to wages, or taxes, or healthcare.
But no. We should all marvel at the efficiency of the oligarchy!
It’s actually insane to think about what could have been accomplished with the capital investment that has collectively gone into generative AI, public ledger blockchain, and metaverse VR projects. IIRC its over a trillion dollars. There are credible plans for more or less ending world hunger for under ten billion. Yeah, those plans come with a ton of asterixes, but the point is, if that’s what ten gets you, imagine what you could do with a hundred billion? Now think about what a trillion could do. It’s honestly sickening.
A lot of those plans very much in the “assume a spherical chicken in a vacuum” territory. They only work on paper, and tend to assume things like criminal gangs are randomly just sort of going to get out of the way and not interfere. Also there are no corrupt government officials, and the people you are trying to help actually recognise that, and respond positively.
Yes, and I feel like I addressed that with “…those plans come with a ton of asterixes…”
Funny how Zuck thought our lives were so miserable we would all throw ourselves into his virtual shit, just to realize most people actually have real friends they hang out with.
Even in a world without IRL friends, they still had to compete with VRChat. They didn’t come even remotely close to that benchmark.
If they would have focussed on making a good place first, and then corrupting it with commercialism, they could have at least boiled a few of us frogs. But you can’t start with the commercialism foot forward and the quality foot behind and expect to make a place worth visiting.
That was pretty much the trajectory of Second Life, as I recall.
Metaverse still exists?
I wonder what trend Meta will rebrand themselves to next.
Congratulation to the writer of Ready, Player One to costing the Zuccer $77bn
That may be the first good thing that author did.
