The Metaverse Was Snake Oil for Isolation

A follow-up point from my post yesterday linking to Nick Heer’s blockbuster “The Metaverse Fever Dream”. In particular, the connection Heer draws between the rise of “metaverse” hype and the pandemic.

I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covid lockdown and our collective period of isolation and loneliness, a year-plus stretch when we relied mostly on computer platforms for nearly all socializing. But here in 2026 it’s now clear that metaverse hype and lockdown-induced isolation exactly coincided. They didn’t roughly overlap; they exactly overlapped. So much so that I’m now wondering if any of the “metaverse” hype would have happened if Covid hadn’t happened. Facebook still likely would’ve renamed itself, because they’d so poisoned the “Facebook” brand itself, but maybe to something other than “Meta”.

We allowed the necessary initial emergency lockdown to extend indefinitely because it seemed like maybe we could get by for a long stretch using technology. The extended lockdown never would have happened if the Covid pandemic had broken out 20 or more years earlier. In 2020 and 2021, we could squint and say, sure, maybe kids can “go to school” via Zoom. We never would have kept all kids home for an entire year pre-Zoom. But the truth is Zoom “school” wasn’t much better than no school at all. Same for Zoom “work collaboration”, and Zoom “friend gatherings”. It was an illusion that today’s technology is even close to a sufficient substitute for being in each others’ physical presence. The siren call of “the metaverse” was exactly what we craved — technology that would be a sufficient substitute for real-world experiences and socializing. The best audience for snake oil are people with actual ailments. And during Covid, we were all ailing socially.

★ Tuesday, 2 June 2026