What makes the "metaverse"'s failure particularly amusing to me is that it isn't even a matter of understanding fun. Yeah, SV doesn't 100% get that. It's not re

What makes the "metaverse"'s failure particularly amusing to me is that it isn't even a matter of understanding fun. Yeah, SV doesn't 100% get that. It's not really their domain and it's not a surprise they don't get it very well. But the metaverse can be dismissed on grounds that SV and its investor class is supposed to be among the best at, which is, I've never heard a description of the metaverse that makes any business sense as a whole. Yes, the metaverse as a business proposition made sense to Facebook specifically, but I've never heard a sensible, old-school SV-style "win-win" business analysis that gave an explanation for why anybody else would participate in Facebook's metaverse, and, in particular, why it wouldn't fragment into a whole bunch of irreconcilably different metaverses. Then again, my objection is sort of a layer too high in the stack, as the metaverse as a concept never even got close to that being its biggest problem; its biggest problem was that in the end they couldn't even figure out why anyone would use it at all. Lacking fun is a 100% valid criticism but even more deeply it seems to have lacked any utility whatsoever, to anyone. But even more generally, the whole Ready Player One vision is such an IP nightmare, such a compatibility nightmare, such a mismash of conflicting monetary interests that in the real world would never come to the table together. The only way to create such a thing would be to radically rewrite the legal system to enforce massive compatibility requirements, mandatory licensing, mandatory compatibility, and in the end there isn't anyone in the real world who is going to push for that. Company's natural inclinations are to demand more power to control when the only way to the metaverse is to strip them of it. And that's just not going to happen. You're never going to be able to buy a Mickey Mouse avatar and use it in WB's space. You're never going to be able to find a sword in Blizzard's World of Warcraft and use it in Super Mario RPG. (Such a thing is hardly even definable in terms of how that would work!) In the end, the value proposition of "owning" the metaverse is clear, but I've never seen a clear, sensible value proposition for anyone being willing to jump into someone else's owned "metaverse" on their own terms. So the metaverse is a mirage. It turns out that science fiction is not obligated to be something that can be turned into a real thing. (And it doesn't matter. Things will continue to proceed anyhow. The final result won't be "the metaverse" but it'll be its own thing and it'll happen anyhow.)