When bad ideas in theory turn out worse in practice
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Let’s check in Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to rebrand his company in an implicit concession that Facebook has been a major net negative for humanity:
Last October, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, announced that the company would change its name to Meta and become a “metaverse company,” he sketched a vision of a utopian future many years off in which billions of people would inhabit immersive digital environments for hours on end, working, socializing and playing games inside virtual and augmented worlds.
In the year since, Meta has spent billions of dollars and assigned thousands of employees to make Mr. Zuckerberg’s dream feasible. But Meta’s metaverse efforts have had a rocky start.
The company’s flagship virtual-reality game, Horizon Worlds, remains buggy and unpopular, leading Meta to put in place a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year while it retools the app.
Some Meta employees have complained about frequent strategy shifts that seem tied to Mr. Zuckerberg’s whims rather than a cohesive plan.
And Meta executives have butted heads over the company’s metaverse strategy, with one senior leader complaining that the amount of money the company had spent on unproven projects made him “sick to my stomach.”
Might be time to pivot to video!
The thing about a winner-takes-almost-everything economy is that if your fortune-making success turns out to have been a contingent fluke you get to burn through absolutely unconscionable amounts of money proving it.