The metaverse was the future, once. Nor was it that long ago: back in 2023, I reviewed a book about how this virtual parallel universe “will revolutionize everything”. Even then it was just about possible to believe, if you squinted hard enough, that fully digitized, dematerialized virtual realities accessible via special goggles would somehow become a new kind of “place” where people would, by degrees, increasingly prefer to live, work, and socialize.

Not anymore. After spending $80 billion on the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that Horizon Worlds — the virtual reality social network he launched in 2021 and had billed as a key step in that direction — will soon be removed from the Quest VR store. The company has since backtracked, suggesting it will keep some features going for existing fans. But the explanation for the change is telling: the company is shifting away from immersive “virtual reality” and pivoting to mobile.

This speaks to something that ought to have been obvious even when Zuck embarked on the project: the real metaverse was always just the internet, and there was never any need to reinvent that in more costly, unwieldy, and inconvenient forms. That is, ultimately, what’s acknowledged by this latter pivot to mobile: that the kind of metaverse people actually want, at scale, is not a virtual reality but an augmented one.

People don’t want a digital dimension that replaces existing “IRL” experience, but rather one that overlays it. The market for sensory-deprivation goggles that grant access to a private digital reality, while making the user physically vulnerable and aesthetically ridiculous, was always small. By contrast, there is demonstrably a very big market for a pocket-sized portal that grants access to equally immersive private digital realities, but without wholly losing contact with the physical one around you.

Phones are powerful in this sense precisely because they enable the user to be absorbed in their digital metaverse while simultaneously keeping the physical world present in their peripheral vision. This is a feature, not a bug, at least in terms of addictiveness. Most of us don’t have hours a day to be totally absent from “IRL” while wearing a pair of silly goggles. But most of us do find hours a day to be only partially present IRL — even sometimes at the expense of important immediate realities such as the developmental needs of children.

Is any of this actually desirable? I’ve long suspected that what makes metaverses so compelling is a deep-seated spiritual hunger: a craving to transcend the physical world in favor of a less bounded one of pure thought. The long human history of mystical practices and ecstatic cults attests to the fact that the internet is hardly the first human phenomenon to speak to this yearning. But it’s surely the most comprehensive effort, to date, to capture and profit from it.

In this sense, from a purely commercial perspective, Mark Zuckerberg’s testing of the best vehicle for commodifying the human longing for transcendence and settling on smartphones over VR goggles is, in a narrow sense, a kind of progress. Whether or not it’s beneficial in some absolute sense for millions to spend their days entranced by a private, handheld, digital simulacrum of spiritual life is a separate question.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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