Technology can change many things. Meta’s metaverse demonstrated, at close to $80 billion cost, that it cannot change human nature. Horizon Worlds is being shut down on VR — off the Quest store in March, terminated on June 15 — ending Mark Zuckerberg’s experiment with a clear lesson: technology can enhance what people already want to do, but it cannot change what they fundamentally want. The metaverse tried to change what people wanted. Human nature did not cooperate.
What people fundamentally want from social technology is connection without excessive friction — the ability to interact with people they care about through interfaces that are natural, immediate, and already part of their lives. Social media satisfied this want by making connection accessible through devices people already owned, through interfaces they had already learned, and through formats — text, photo, video — that mapped to how they already communicated.
The metaverse asked for something different. It asked people to want immersive virtual presence — to find value in avatar-mediated interaction that was richer and more spatially real than anything a flat screen could provide. For the few hundred thousand monthly users who engaged with Horizon Worlds regularly, this want was genuine. For the mainstream population, it was not — or at least not yet, and not in the specific form the metaverse offered it.
Reality Labs spent close to $80 billion trying to build a product compelling enough to generate the want it needed in people who did not already have it. The approach is precisely inverted from the successful social platform model — successful platforms find wants that already exist and satisfy them better. The metaverse tried to create wants that it could then satisfy. Human nature resisted the creation.
Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees in early 2025 and the AI pivot reflect the lesson applied. AI satisfies wants that already exist — the want for faster writing, clearer code, better information access, and richer creative tools. These are wants that humans already have; AI makes them easier to satisfy. The contrast with the metaverse’s approach to want creation is the clearest possible illustration of the lesson that close to $80 billion bought.