One might ask how a hype dies — not merely as a technological development, but as a matter of language and expectation. Even before the media began celebrating the “metaverse” around 2020, the term was never a sober concept; it was a promise: the expansion of our living space through digital realms. These were not meant to be merely “virtual”, but to extend into everyday life, to permeate it and become interwoven with it.
At the time, I too was seized by this longing: cities in which information appears where it is meaningful. Spaces that explain themselves through digital layers. Smart infrastructures that communicate with us quietly and unobtrusively. For me, this was less a technical forecast than a poetic promise — that digital intermediary layers would enrich and refine our perception, not replace it.
Yet even visions do not simply die — they transform, and they cast shadows. (A reflection on the language of technology.)
1. From Hype to Hype Cycle: The Metaphor of Failure
When Facebook renamed itself Meta in the autumn of 2021, it seemed that a turning point had been reached. A single company had politicised the myth of the “Next Big Thing” and claimed it for itself. Mark Zuckerberg staged himself as a pioneer, determined to create a new universe. The metaphor was radical: the social network was to become a social universe; users were to become avatars, existing permanently between reality and virtuality.
This ambition combined rhetorical overreach with economic force — and collided with a moment in which many people were increasingly critical of digitisation, data protection, and the very purpose of technological progress. Public enthusiasm quickly turned into ironic distance: users complained of unfinished worlds, clumsy avatars, and a lack of relevance compared with familiar platforms. The term “metaverse” came to be perceived as symptomatic of technological overextension — ideas that failed to translate into everyday social life. Instead of insight, polemic and mockery prevailed. The metaverse was seen as inhospitable and empty. The hype failed to penetrate social practice, and its language began to evaporate.
Increasingly, the term “metaverse” became a symbol of technological overload — of visions that could not be anchored in daily life. The hype found no path into lived experience, and its vocabulary lost its force.
2. The Reality of the Numbers: Losses, User Figures, and New Priorities
Economic indicators reflect this gap between vision and social acceptance. Meta’s Reality Labs division recorded losses in the double-digit billions over several years. In total, these amounted to more than 70 billion US dollars, while revenues fell well short of expectations.
Horizon Worlds, conceived as the core of the metaverse, reached an estimated 200,000 monthly users in 2022. Measured against the originally projected millions — and against the billions of users on other platforms — this represented only a tiny fraction.
In response, Meta recalibrated its priorities: budgets for metaverse initiatives were cut, while artificial intelligence and smart-glasses hardware returned to the forefront. The figures do not point to a moral “catastrophe”, but to a sober reassessment — the moment when a grand narrative collides with economic and social reality.
3. Linguistic Change as the Triumph of Practice
If the metaverse still exists today, it does so not as a monolithic dream, but as a coexistence of terms describing different visions:
“Spatial computing” emphasises the integration of digital content into the physical environment as a new form of interface and interaction. Apple uses this term deliberately to distance itself from the buzzword “metaverse” and to foreground more natural human–computer relationships.
“Mixed reality” (MR) describes hybrid realities in which virtual elements are embedded in the real world without fully replacing it.
“Extended reality” (XR) serves as an umbrella term for VR, AR, and MR, standing for expanded perception without promising an all-encompassing digital world.
Further terms such as “human co-experience”, “omniverse”, or “industrial metaverse” show that the idea lives on — no longer as a single, closed world, but across many specialised and fragmented fields of application.
What might appear to be a Babylonian confusion of tongues thus reveals itself not as failure, but as a shift: towards concepts that refer more concretely to real applications and actual needs.
4. From the End of a Myth to Transformation
In the cultural history of technology, moments of disillusionment have often signified not the death of an idea, but its reintegration into everyday life. Social media prevailed despite early scepticism; cloud technologies became indispensable; and artificial intelligence is now widely used — accompanied by intense debates about energy consumption, control, ethics, and social consequences.
The claim that the metaverse is “dead” therefore falls short. What has died is not the vision itself, but the inflated claim of a single, company-owned metaverse world. The underlying technologies persist, change their language, find new terms, and continue to develop wherever they generate tangible social value.
In this sense, the metaverse has not died — it has merely lost its language and found a new one. In a culture that remains imaginative, the future survives in its metaphors, even when they no longer appear under their original name.
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