Whats the angle to your question, or put another way what causal pathway are you proposing? Neil Stephenson popularized the idea in the 90s, and the concept ha

Whats the angle to your question, or put another way what causal pathway are you proposing? Neil Stephenson popularized the idea in the 90s, and the concept has been around longer than that. Personally I haven't seen any indication that anyone wants the metaverse except for Facebook and some crypto scammers. I don't see organic consumer demand, even latent demand, for it. On the other hand, free or negative interest money + inflation means an impetus to spend as quickly as possible to build something that will make more money, and so you get projects like metaverse drawing funding. I think the pandemic response has at least accelerated the tech bubble (we already were well into the next cycle, following junk bonds, dotcom / enron, cdos-> now VC to get ponzi style returns), so arguable it helped, but I think conditions existed anyway