“If You Build It, They Will Come” or Maybe They Won’t
On Metaverse
In 2021, Meta released the metaverse–a virtual world they had been touting and betting on by even changing Facebook’s name to Meta to ring in this new era. This week, Meta decided to lay the metaverse to rest. On June 15th, 2026, the virtual landscapes inside Horizon Worlds will go black, and the few hundred thousand users who came and built quiet lives there will move on to something else.
Meta poured $80 billion into a wide range of metaverse-related projects with the ambition to both capture and further deepen dependence on their platforms for connection and social interaction. To quantify the dissolution of the Metaverse, I’d like to call attention to the fact that after this announcement, Meta stock barely moved. That, in itself, says something. The people who move capital to and from the company didn’t meaningfully react–suggesting the market and the real people that make it up (a portion of 3.5 billion of us) never really believed in the thing in the first place.
Meta is one of the most powerful consumer product builders in the world, with over 3.5 billion daily active users, its platforms have effectively changed the world we live in–whether for better or for worse is a given user’s prerogative. However, a user’s ability to make that decision for themselves is undermined by Meta’s imperious involvement in that choice. Through predatory engagement techniques and manipulations like the infinite scroll, Meta has mastered the consumer psyche. With this in mind, it seems they predicted the metaverse would be a further reinforcement of their ability to keep consumers involved in and addicted to their platforms.
The metaverse’s failure to go mainstream and grow beyond a few hundred thousand active users, despite their astuteness in product-market fit success, reveals something deeper about what we actually want from platforms that attempt to satiate our need for connection right now. Of course, the financial barrier to entry mattered, but I think there’s a more fundamental reason it never took hold.
We don’t want a self-referential, simulated version of our world; we want a better version of the one that is quite literally in our hands.
What most people seek in life usually comes down to safety, health, happiness, connection, and access to these things among other unalienable rights. That’s what drew us to these platforms in the first place. Isn’t it?
Meta claimed to be creating a new era of connection with the Metaverse–one of “sharing new experiences,” and “doing more.” Yet, Meta having to shut down this project, says something else that they just couldn’t engineer around. And it calls into question the broader attempts of digital products and experiences that attempt to meet our most atavistic needs with similar promises.
At Reconnect, we believe we, together, are all at the precipice of something undeniable. Social platforms have long tempted us with illusions of connection and fulfillment. But increasingly, these illusions prove to be just that. While these platforms further detract from the human experience by building more expansive and involved digital experiences, something else is becoming clear. We don’t like the direction we are headed, so we have to choose another way. With the promise of connection to us and the promise of a return to shareholders, Meta will keep building in the way they do as long as we all keep coming.
We don’t need more layers between us and reality. But what we need to do, and what we all can do, is hold our world’s greatest innovators to a standard where digital platforms that claim to exist for connection simply serve to help us get back to what’s real.
And we must decide that only once they build under that condition, it is only then that we will come.
Founded in 2025, Reconnect Stanford is a Stanford student-led movement & non-profit dedicated to helping people step away from addictive platforms and toward meaningful connection, time, and attention. We build community around social media sobriety through stories, support for students who delete, peer-to-peer mentorship with middle and high schoolers, and events where peers disconnect together.
To learn more and support our cause, visit reconnectstanford.org. To submit a guest piece, email reconnectstanford@gmail.com
About the author: Mahalia Morgan is a founding member and Chief Financial Officer of Reconnect Stanford. Raised in Novato, California, she is a third-year economics student at Stanford University. She deleted her social media accounts in 2025.