When everyone else was busy writing the metaverse obituary and tallying up how many billions Zuckerberg lit on fire, nobody thought to check on the people who had actually unpacked their boxes in there. Artists, community managers, small business owners — people who looked at Decentraland and Horizon Worlds and said, yeah, I’ll build my life here, which in hindsight is the kind of sentence that aged about as well as everything else from that era. Some of them are still showing up, still opening the virtual storefront, still scheduling events in a world the rest of us declared dead and moved on from, which makes this less of a cautionary tale about hype and more like watching the last few employees mill around after the company quietly turned off the lights and never came back to tell anyone.
When everyone else was busy writing the metaverse obituary and tallying up how many billions Zuckerberg lit on fire, nobody thought to check on the people who had actually unpacked their boxes in there. Artists, community managers, small business owners — people who looked at Decentraland and Horizon Worlds and said, yeah, I’ll build my life here, which in hindsight is the kind of sentence that aged about as well as everything else from that era. Some of them are still showing up, still opening the virtual storefront, still scheduling events in a world the rest of us declared dead and moved on from, which makes this less of a cautionary tale about hype and more like watching the last few employees mill around after the company quietly turned off the lights and never came back to tell anyone.