In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta. To build the metaverse. That’s actually a very rare event. One of the largest tech companies on earth believed in a direction so hard it changed its own name for it. Imagine Apple renaming itself to AIpple — for, well, you know what.
And now it’s 2025. Everyone seems to have forgotten the metaverse. Even Matthew Ball writes more about games and AI these days.
So while we still read each other, and not only content spat out by LLMs — here are my three points. Let’s dot a few i’s on the metaverse.
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The metaverse has nothing to do with VR or AR. You don’t get any closer to another person by strapping on a headset.
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We’ve been in the metaverse for ages. You landed there the first time you used the verb “to hang out” about a website or a messenger (yeah, I mean ICQ). And you truly landed there when your social profile started living a life of its own — you’re asleep, and someone can still drop by your profile and like a photo. That’s 2005-2007.
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The metaverse is a space of meanings. It’s closer to Plato’s world of forms than anything else humanity has ever built. How you connect to it — desktop, mobile, a VR headset, a neural interface — doesn’t matter in the slightest. Baudrillard said it’s all simulacra, that we’ve come unmoored from reality. To me it’s the opposite: nothing is more real, or more important, than the world of ideas. That’s exactly what makes it a meta-world.
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Every character I play in a video game is one more part of me. On one more plane of meaning. Gamers live a thousand lives — the PlayStation ad wasn’t lying.
And Zuckerberg isn’t lying either. Facebook really was, for a lot of us, that extra space. It did its job, and its time seems to have passed. Something comes after. By the way — “beyond” is one of the meanings of the Greek prefix “μετά.”
As for VR — it’s just an interface. Nothing more.