My Prodigal Brainchild - by Neal Stephenson - Graphomane

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My Prodigal Brainchild<br>Reflections on the latest and greatest Death of the Metaverse

Neal Stephenson<br>Mar 23, 2026

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It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to various reports, spent eighty billion dollars.<br>I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.<br>This event has unleashed yet another spate of Internet cartoons depicting tombstones with the word METAVERSE chiseled into them, a genre that comes and goes every few years. Here’s one from three years ago that prompted a tweet from Tim Sweeney:<br>businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead…","username":"TimSweeneyEpic","name":"Tim Sweeney","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/795819168629198849/SBY3ARvZ_normal.jpg","date":"2023-05-09T17:59:02.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":341,"retweet_count":589,"like_count":3541,"impression_count":1280386,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-flexDirection-column pc-gap-12 pc-padding-16 pc-reset bg-primary-zk6FDl outline-detail-vcQLyr pc-borderRadius-md sizing-border-box-DggLA4 pressable-lg-kV7yq8 font-text-qe4AeH tweet-fWkQfo twitter-embed">

Tim Sweeney@TimSweeneyEpic

The metaverse is dead! Let's organize an online wake so that we 600,000,000 monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, Sandbox, and VRChat can mourn its passing together in real-time 3D.

businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead…<br>5:59 PM · May 9, 2023 · 1.28M Views

341 Replies · 589 Reposts · 3.54K Likes

I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.<br>In retrospect, John’s message was prescient, since it marked the moment when the Metaverse really did break free and become my alienated, prodigal brainchild.<br>In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.<br>So there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause.<br>Since this is now water under the bridge, here is some free advice to future companies who might become interested in this topic when the tombstone cartoons fade once again from memory and the concept becomes hot again.<br>The basic idea is obvious. Consider picking a different name

Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space where users go around in audiovisual bodies (avatars) is sort of obvious . Such a thing existed at least once before I wrote Snow Crash, in the form of Habitat, and would have been independently invented over and over again had the book never existed. All I did was make up a name for it, and put it in a novel that got read by a lot of techies. And the novel had a plot - a topic I will return to at the end of this post.<br>People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.<br>Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.<br>A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with...