Say goodbye to the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal obsession. In 2021, the Facebook founder declared that we would all soon meet, shop and do business in a cartoon world where we were represented by crude 2D versions of ourselves. His company was renamed to reflect this new digital frontier.

A fortune has been spent to convince us that this was the future. Meta, as it became, has lost at least $US70 billion ($105 billion) over four years on the effort, equivalent to the annual GDP of oil-rich Azerbaijan. But the world still doesn’t want to know.

Turns out Zuckerberg’s Metaverse wasn’t the future after all.Credit: Digital image: Matt Davidson

No wonder Meta’s share price jumped on the news that it’s pulling back, making 30 per cent cuts to its virtual reality unit. Wall Street regarded the Metaverse as the Silicon Valley equivalent of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale Moby Dick: a mad venture that puts his crew at risk.

Any other chief executive who blew $US70 billion and had nothing to show for it would have been ousted long ago, but investors retain confidence in Zuckerberg’s leadership.

The surest way to reach a large digital audience remains through the Google and Meta duopoly, and although their demise has been forecast many times, and their combined market share has dipped slightly, they both remain formidable money generators.

To understand Zuckerberg’s obsession, we must remember that its founder is driven by insecurity. Facebook’s business empire hangs on a cookie – it doesn’t own a Chrome browser or an iPhone, an underlying platform to drive traffic to........

© The Sydney Morning Herald