WHAT HAPPENED TO THE METAVERSE?
You called it the next frontier. You renamed the company. Reality Labs lost roughly $81 billion from 2021 through Q1 2026. Now your “one more thing” is an AI Tamagotchi. I have one question: what exactly did you build?
I have a question for Meta.
Not a complicated question.
Not a white-paper question.
Not an AI-safety-panel question.
Not a question requiring 40 researchers, 17 executives, a keynote, a headset and another hundred billion dollars.
What happened to the metaverse?
Seriously.
What happened?
In October 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t describe the metaverse as a side experiment.
He called it “the next frontier.”
He wrote that Meta would become “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
He said he wanted the company identified with what it was building toward.
Meta said its focus was to “bring the metaverse to life.” (About Facebook)
Beautiful.
So where is it?
Because yesterday, at Meta Connect 2026, the “one more thing” was the Muse Charm: a little keychain device carrying a customizable AI character.
TechCrunch didn’t need me to make the joke.
They called it “Tamagotchi-like.” (TechCrunch)
Excuse me?
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE METAVERSE?
You renamed the fucking company.
LET’S LOOK AT THE RECEIPT
This is where the comedy stops being subjective.
Reality Labs reported operating losses of:
2021: $10.193 billion.
2022: $13.717 billion.
2023: $16.120 billion.
2024: $17.729 billion.
2025: $19.193 billion.
Q1 2026 alone: another $4.028 billion. (Meta)
Do the arithmetic.
Approximately $80.98 BILLION in Reality Labs operating losses from 2021 through Q1 2026.
Eighty.
Billion.
Dollars.
And I understand perfectly well that Reality Labs contains AR, VR, hardware, software and content—not every dollar can honestly be labeled “money spent on the metaverse.” Meta itself defines the segment that way. (Meta)
Fine.
That distinction doesn’t rescue the question.
It makes the question more precise:
After roughly $81 billion in operating losses from the division carrying your future-platform bet, what happened to the future you renamed the company after?
Because now you’re holding up an AI character on a keychain.
That’s not my characterization.
That’s the product.
AND PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME OPEN THE NFT FOLDER
Remember this shit?
In 2022 Meta told people NFTs would be important to how people bought, used and shared virtual objects in the metaverse.
Instagram started connecting wallets.
Ethereum.
Polygon.
Flow.
Solana.
Digital collectibles.
Meta said NFTs could become an essential part of online identity and metaverse experiences.
They were going to let creators mint them.
Sell them.
Display them.
Use them as part of this enormous coming digital economy. (About Facebook)
Then look at the update sitting on Meta’s own fucking announcement:
March 31, 2023: “We’re no longer offering digital collectibles on Instagram and Facebook.” (About Facebook)
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
So wait.
The metaverse was the future.
NFTs were going to be important to identity, ownership and virtual objects inside that future.
Then the NFT functionality disappeared.
Now we’re doing AI companions.
And the grand “one more thing” is hanging from a keychain.
Guys.
Where did the future go?
HERE IS WHY I FIND THIS PARTICULARLY FUNNY
My story went in the opposite direction.
I didn’t start with a buzzword and search for something to attach to it.
I built worlds.
Phi.
The Phiverse.
And then I encountered the problem that actually matters.
The infrastructure can disappear.
Servers cost money.
Databases disappear.
Companies disappear.
APIs disappear.
Platforms change.
Models change.
Applications change.
And if the identity, history, ownership and state of your digital thing ultimately live inside somebody else’s running machinery, then when that machinery disappears, what exactly did you own?
That failure sent me downward.
Not toward another headset.
Not toward another token.
Not toward another rebrand.
Toward the object.
What would the object itself need to carry?
Identity.
Authority.
Provenance.
State.
History.
Succession.
Temporal position.
Verification.
Continuity.
What would it take for the record to survive the application?
What would it take for verification to survive the server?
What would it take for a digital thing to leave the world that created it and still be itself?
That became Receiz.
Reality-grade infrastructure.
Which makes the name of Meta’s division almost too perfect.
They have Reality Labs.
I built reality-grade infrastructure.
One builds increasingly elaborate machinery for experiences.
The other asks:
What remains true when the machinery disappears?
Turn the server off.
Now show me the thing.
AND THEN I BUILT THE CREATURE
This is the part where the chronology gets uncomfortable.
Because after solving downward, I could build upward again.
Portable state.
Proof-native identity.
Continuity.
Memory.
Then Wildz.
A living digital subject whose interesting property isn’t merely that a cartoon character talks to you.
The interesting property is continuation.
The creature has a past.
The creature can change.
The creature can carry state.
The creature can have provenance.
The creature can continue.
The infrastructure problem comes before the cute character.
And now, after the metaverse, after the NFT excursion, after years of Reality Labs losses, Meta walks onto a stage in September 2026 and unveils a customizable AI character living in a pocket-sized object.
Again:
What happened to the metaverse?
THIS IS WHY I DON’T EVEN NEED TO SAY YOU COPIED ME
That is almost beneath the point.
I don’t need to tell anyone what happened inside Meta.
I don’t know who saw what.
I don’t need a conspiracy.
Open the archive.
Look at my dates.
Look at my releases.
Look at the systems.
Look at the failures.
Look at what I built because of those failures.
Then look at their announcements.
You decide what the chronology means.
Because the question gets stranger every year:
Why does your new frontier keep looking like my old frontier?
That’s the question.
Not:
“Does BJ have more money than Meta?”
Obviously not.
Not:
“Does BJ employ more engineers?”
Obviously not.
That’s what makes this so fucking funny.
The giant had capital, laboratories, thousands of employees, distribution to billions of humans and essentially unlimited access to compute.
I had to watch infrastructure I spent years building become economically impossible to maintain.
And the constraint taught me the lesson the money allowed them to avoid.
They could keep the machinery running.
I had to ask what survives when it stops.
That question changed everything.
THE FLOPS AREN’T RANDOM
Metaverse.
NFT integration.
AI.
Agents.
Companions.
Wearables.
Whatever word comes next.
These things can individually succeed or fail. Meta’s Muse, in fact, has had a strong early launch, so pretending everything Meta touches fails would weaken the argument. Reuters reported millions of downloads shortly after launch. (Reuters)
The deeper problem doesn’t care.
Every time software becomes more autonomous, persistent and personal, the same questions get harder:
Whose identity is it?
Where is its history?
Who has authority to change it?
Which state is canonical?
What happens when two histories diverge?
What happens when the model changes?
What happens when the company shuts the product down?
What happens when the database rolls backward?
What happens offline?
Can I take the thing somewhere else?
Can another intelligence inspect its history without asking the original platform what happened?
Eventually the cute demo reaches the boring questions.
And the boring questions turn out to be the fucking infrastructure.
That’s what keeps happening.
YOU KEEP STARTING WITH THE EXPERIENCE
That’s the inversion.
Build the world.
Build the headset.
Build the avatar.
Build the NFT marketplace.
Build the AI.
Build the agent.
Build the creature.
Build the charm.
Then eventually somebody asks:
How does the thing continue?
I started there because reality forced me there.
I lost the luxury of pretending the server was permanent.
So I built for the machine to come and go.
And once you do that, the application stops being the authority.
The database stops being reality.
The model stops being the mind.
The server stops being the thing.
The thing carries the continuity.
Now you can build worlds on top of it.
Creatures on top of it.
Commerce on top of it.
Memory on top of it.
AI on top of it.
Whatever comes next on top of it.
That’s the difference between chasing a frontier and building beneath one.
SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Not “Meta definitely fails.”
That’s not the interesting prediction.
Some of their products will work.
Some will make enormous amounts of money.
Some will disappear.
The more important prediction is architectural:
the deeper these systems become, the harder it becomes to avoid continuity.
AI that acts for humans needs authority.
AI that remembers needs provenance.
AI that moves between environments needs portable state.
AI that changes over time needs succession.
AI that operates offline needs verification without calling home.
Digital creatures that are supposed to live need something more durable than a row in one company’s database.
And eventually somebody is going to walk onto a stage and announce those requirements as the next breakthrough.
When that happens, don’t ask me to act surprised.
I published the chain.
Then the field walked into it.
And now they keep announcing my old frontiers.
So I’ll ask Meta one more time.
You had Facebook.
You renamed it Meta.
You declared the metaverse the next frontier.
You said you were going metaverse-first.
You pushed virtual worlds.
You pushed digital collectibles.
You shut the collectibles down.
Reality Labs accumulated roughly $81 billion in operating losses from 2021 through Q1 2026.
And now you’re showing humanity an AI character on a keychain.
Meanwhile, I followed the problem beneath the world, beneath the database, beneath the application and beneath the model.
I built the object that survives the machinery.
Then I used it to build the living world again.
So before we announce another frontier—
before another keynote—
before another buzzword—
before another hundred billion dollars gets fed into the machine—
I have one tiny question.
What happened to the metaverse?
And after you answer that:
Why does your next frontier keep looking like somewhere I’ve already been?
