I picked up The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything when it came out in 2022, though I haven't gotten around to reading it until now. The author, Matthew Ball, was a venture capitalist known for elaborately long essays on video games; this book was a culmination of a number of his posts on the metaverse, strung together into a single volume.
In 2026, though, the metaverse isn't exactly en vogue, and many of the elements that he envisioned have fallen through. I went into this eyes wide open: I was more interested in where and why his predictions faltered. It became an exercise in critical reading, in watching how motivated reasoning twists a perfectly fine piece of technology beyond its capabilities. As the Upton Sinclair adage goes:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
When The Metaverse was published, the momentum around digital-only technologies was at its peak. The pandemic drove all homestay entertainment, including video games and VR headsets. Facebook became Meta, and tried to brute force their Quest devices into the mainstream—only to scale back earlier this year after investing over $80 billion in their endeavors. Apple launched their own Vision Pro headset in 2024, and also discreetly deprioritized the platform.
As the chapters rolled on, it became more and more obvious that the book wasn't so much prescient analysis, as it was the promotional vehicle for Ball's venture investments, particularly his "world's largest" ETF that tracks companies involved in the Metaverse. It has not panned out; the ETF is still trading below its inception price, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite has almost doubled in price in the same five years.
The skewed framing began with the definition of the Metaverse itself. Certainly, some advances in 21st century technology were inspired by the great science fiction of the 20th century, and popular shows like Star Trek still influence everything from iPads to humanoid robots. For the metaverse, Ball drew from books like Snow Crash and Ready Player One, and perhaps movies like Tron: virtual spaces accessible by plugging into an immersive headset, escaping from the real world and living purely digital lives in cyberspace.
Of course, we've already had most of these elements in place—for decades. The internet is a strong, interconnected network with billions of users, with interoperability via open standards like TCP and HTML, and with persistent user data across hundreds of major services. We haven't needed physics engines and realistic avatars to establish virtual communities, be they on social networks, chat groups or internet forums.
The book correctly noted that the vision of recreating the physical world digitally wasn't new. There have been many attempts to merge the breadth of the internet with simulated reality. Second Life, There.com, PlayStation Home, Meta's Horizon Worlds: most of these services have come and gone, bolstered by initial curiosity but unable to sustain interest[1]. That's not to say that virtual worlds can't work. The handful of popular ones—Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox—started as online games first and foremost, only tacking on social features in service to the gameplay and player usage patterns.
Then… there's the crypto pitch. The Metaverse makes a sketchy connection from virtual reality and gaming-related tech to stretch into the need for decentralization. Somehow, because mobile platforms have sorted themselves into just the App Store and Google Play Store, the metaverse will be fundamentally hampered without the ability to transact via blockchains and smart contracts. That premise led Ball to highlight the importance of NFTs and DAOs, plus the rest of the pile of crypto ventures that all peaked around the time the book was published.
The most damning development, though, isn't in this book: Ball revised and published an update to his book two years later, retitling it to The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet. Admittedly, I didn't read this version; I didn't know there was a newer version until I was researching for this post. But from the book's own landing page, the revision downplays all the crypto initiatives while adding new material on AI. That is, the metaverse narrative and its supporting elements are suspiciously malleable, closely following whatever is getting VC attention and money at the moment.
It gets more dramatic. The Xbox division has been underperforming for years, and Microsoft has shaken up its leadership in response. Xbox has had its share of innovations in gaming—the Xbox Live service, Game Pass, trophies—but it has also underwhelmed in recent years precisely by hopping onto the tail end of hype cycles. The Kinect, the always-connected Xbox One, the Activision acquisition; all were expensive strategic mistakes stuck in the past for one too many beats.
Guess who they brought on as Xbox's new Chief Strategy Officer.
Second Life arguably got the furthest; they held campaign events and town halls, hosted brands and colleges, and even had Sweden open a virtual embassy. ↩︎
