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I don't really feel like the press coverage of the metaverse implosion honestly captures the access tech press' role in propping up Mark Zuckerberg's fake innovation mythology if you go back and read "journalism" from this era, 97% was indistinguishable from advertorial

it really was the pinnacle of lazy "CEO said a thing!" pseudo-journalism where you just parrot executive claims with absolutely no historical context, challenge, or objective third party expert analysis

zuck was just like "we're going to try and distance ourselves from a decade of privacy and ethical scandals by renaming ourselves and trying to monopolize the entirety of video gaming and virtual spaces" and the tech press, pretty uniformly, was like "sounds amazing!"

there was a handful of notable reporters of the time that were suitably skeptical, but that skepticism was not the norm, and for many of them it didn't really last there's a mike bloomberg tech columnist in my replies telling me the tech press did a good job, and I'm sorry but that's delusional

I'm not making this up because I'm mean. You can go back and read the interviews with Mark from the time and watch as they don't really ask very hard questions, and assist the framing that meta was doing anything particularly revolutionary

It was, as far as I can tell, about as revolutionary as Second Life.

Yesterday I needed a good laugh, so googled “Zuckerberg metaverse announcement” in search of that hilarious video Results were legit page after page of uncritical, breathless news coverage of the announcement from reputable outlets. I didn’t remember it being so universal! But you’re 100% right!

Just looked like Dwight in second life to me, only kind of worse somehow

I was wondering why they talked so much about facebook and ignored vrchat that existed with a user vase

Ask hard questions? They were actively trying to rationalize and explain to Zuck what his vision was when he was stumbling on his own words trying to make it seem interesting or even realistic.

What's always crazy to me is how effective this was where it mattered. The general public response was very dismissive but the executives believed the headlines and press releases more.

Yeah but if you criticise then you get your access to them cut off… 🫠 wouldn’t want your source of cheap and easy hits to dry up.

you'd lose your early look at the next thing that sucks!