EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO

May 1, 2026

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The ha-ha videos about the failure of the metaverse are everywhere.

Seriously, I watched one last night that was just a cringe-by-cringe replay of the original Mark Zuckerberg launch video for the metaverse back in 2021.

Schadenfreude: a German word defining the experience of joy or self-satisfaction derived from witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another person.

I know I’m late to this … party. The YouTuber video crushing Zuck’s metaverse walk-through video was published a month ago, one week after Zuckerberg himself threw in the towel on Horizon Worlds, Meta’s proprietary metaverse playground, and one that had been the butt of jokes since Dan Olson’s epic takedown of the digital real estate gold rush three years ago.

A History of the Metaverse in One Sentence

I’m not going to cover the entire history of virtual and augmented reality and the concept of a second life in the second world. Here, I’ll sum it up in one sentence:

Everyone saw Ready Player One in 2018 and was like, “This movie is mid but that game would be cool.”

Also, let me put this out there so you can fight me. Ready Player One is not a good book. The movie is actually heaps better, but still kind of meh. Most of us old heads went to see it because they used the opening beat of “Tom Sawyer” for the trailer, but never in the film. Tell me I’m wrong.

Now, you can’t say that Facebook was riding that bandwagon. They had acquired Oculus back in 2014 when Oculus was the world leader in VR tech and also the world leader in people saying, “Wow. This is neat. $500? No thanks.”

But here’s the thing. The “universal” metaverse, including Facebook’s own entry, Horizon Worlds, was being stood up as the notion of digital currency as a real asset was falling apart. And the NFT and meme coin scamsters stepped quietly out from the shadows and became digital real estate agents.

By 2021, the second act of Ready Player One was in full swing in real life; the only thing missing was Ben Mendelsohn chewing the scenery as the head of a single corporation bent on maximizing revenue in this democratized, utopian new digital universe.

But that’s only because it wasn’t one corporation, it was all the corporations. It was Samsung, Coke, Adidas, Miller Lite, Nike, dozens to hundreds of brands — all throwing money at locking down prime space in the brave new digital world.

Then the Meta video dropped.

The Horizon Worlds Launch Video Is Historic

This is going to sound a little harsh … and now I’ll keep typing.

I mean, honestly, the launch video is what did it. This is what killed the metaverse, at least Meta’s entry into it. It was the rare first and final nail in the coffin, and man, they hit the shit out of that nail. You can actually feel it failing in the video, even if you missed the entire event in real time.

OK, here’s my take. The expectations for the metaverse entry from the owners of Oculus were so high that even the artistic-license-grossly-exaggerated reality paled to an extent that Meta just wasn’t prepared for.

The video, and Zuckerberg’s performance throughout, are just dripping with the kind of corporate overlay that would maximum repel the exact audience they were targeting. And by 2021, that audience target happened to be 10 to 25 years younger than Facebook’s actual audience, which was aging with a swiftness that Meta’s mostly Millennial workforce were also not prepared for.

Zuckerberg has made some headline-generating missteps over the years, for sure. But honestly, there’s only a small sliver of the general public who are paying enough attention to care. And even more honestly, and I’m just the messenger here, those missteps were mostly the eggs that a CEO is going to have to break to make a trillion-dollar-company omelet.

You think that iPhone you’re holding is made by gnomes?

Seriously, if you watch the video, you eventually just kinda feel bad for a person it’s very hard to feel bad for. That video, and those missteps, are where a lot of the schadenfreude comes from.

But is it deserved?

No. Not really.

The Metaverse Isn’t Ready Player One

The digital universe, as defined by everything physical to functional — from World of Warcraft to Roblox to Decentraland to Ready Player One, deserves to exist and is going to exist. And it’s going to take … visionaries … like Mark Zuckerberg to open the aperture from fiction to what’s actually possible.

And they’re going to fail. Sometimes spectacularly and expensively.

Here’s why.

The metaverse is the science fiction equivalent of utopia. And because it doesn’t exist, it means anything is possible. But not every aspect of every page of science fiction deserves to exist along with it.

You know what else no one wants? Laser guns. Yeah, that blaster held in the mitts of heroes from Buck Rogers to Han Solo to Peter Quill. They’re cool, sure. But no one is clamoring for them outside of sociopaths and 12-year-olds.

It’s my contention that the reason there’s so much blowback over the failure of the metaverse is because the general public doesn’t really want it. Like the Oculus before it, the entire metaverse concept is, “Wow, neat,” and that’s where it ends.

Stop Selling the Tech, Stick to Selling the Benefits of the Tech

How the metaverse got birthed into the physical world was handled poorly because it was being sold by techies who think this stuff is inherently awesome and by businessmen who think this stuff prints money.

It’s the same thing that happened with Blockchain and digital assets. It’s the same thing that could happen with AI right now. In fact, Zuck just announced today that all that metaverse money is going straight into AI.

In all these cases, the best chances for success with these emerging technologies is to advance them, let those advancements naturally take hold in the physical world, and then wait for enough denizens in that world to say, “You know what? I sure would enjoy the digital equivalent of an ice-cold Coca-Cola right now!”

Please read that last sentence again. It’s exactly as obtuse as it should be.

When that happens, go ahead and launch your video. Until then, you’re just nailing digital nails into digital coffins.

Now would be a good time to join my email list, and get a heads up whenever I post some new content from my virtual writing shack, which is right next to Snoop Dogg’s virtual house.