When Meta announced its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds last week a lot of us laughed.
Social scientist Dr Ruth Diaz was not one of them.
Diaz worked for Meta as a VR community design developer in the early days of the Horizon Worlds project and left in 2022. After Meta’s announcement last week, Diaz wrote a post on LinkedIn attempting to articulate her feelings. “I cannot overstate the scale of institutional betrayal this represents,” she said in her post. “Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta to claim transformation. What he has actually done is strip-mine the trust and labor of every creator who took that promise seriously. That should sit on his record permanently. I feel horror. Rage. Grief. Shame. The specific shame of having believed.”
Diaz said she fell in love with VR after her brother lent her a PC virtual reality setup and she collaborated on art with people spontaneously in a virtual world. “VR puts us into a very disinhibited state where we can open our hearts and try on new identities,” she told 404 Media. “It's an equalizer of identities, some because of the anonymity, but some because we all choose our own skin. That creates an even footing of sorts.”
She said she signed on with Meta after being impressed by an early version of their Horizon Worlds toolkit. After joining the company, she spent some of her time getting employees into headsets and showing them around the virtual worlds people had made. “And many times, I had them in tears by the end because they finally understood what was possible,” she said. “And I don't think any other social app has ever built a tool that had that combination of simplicity and hands on learning how to create.”
In a follow up post on LinkedIn, Diaz shared some of these worlds including the interactive biography of an amputee named Lacey and an Underground Railroad experience from a woman named Bizerka. She pointed out that Alcoholics Anonymous holds meetings in Horizon Worlds and shared a church that meets on Meta’s platform every Sunday.
Diaz’s fears were allayed somewhat on March 18 when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth backpedaled on shutting Horizon Worlds down completely. During an AMA posted to Instagram, he told fans that the company would keep Horizon Worlds accessible for “the foreseeable future.” But Meta is capricious and it’s impossible to know exactly how far into the future its imagining.
“I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll work, but I think it could, because it’s very unusual for them to flinch,” Diaz told 404 Media. “They usually just kind of hunker down and pretend they don’t see it and go full PR.”
She said that Bosworth’s promise to keep Horizon Worlds running wasn’t a big enough promise. “The way they have behaved here is profoundly harmful and I would deem it a type of psychological torture from corporate neglect,” she said. “But the horror of this is ongoing, because [Bosworth] came out and said: ‘we’re going to keep it for now,’ that doesn’t reassure anybody, that doesn’t help anybody. That makes people feel foolish for being upset but also completely uncertain about their futures.”
Wagner James Au, author of Making a Metaverse That Matters and the blog New World Notes, told 404 Media that he’s sympathetic. He also noted that building the type of community she did without the support and infrastructure of a company like Meta is difficult. “A common mistake is to assume the Metaverse should be a non-corporate open source project. Those have been tried and they've all failed to gain traction,” he said.
In the end, the social connections Diaz fostered will remain even as the spaces fade. “Metaverse communities are what's important and permanent, not any particular 3D space they're associated with,” James Au said. “User communities create, congregate, and socialize around 3D spaces, but those spaces age over time and lose their luster. What's important is that they helped foster social connections which can be resilient beyond any one platform. It's why so much metaverse activity happens outside the immersive space on Bluesky, Reddit, etc.”
Like Diaz, James Au doesn’t trust the Zuckerberg. “Meta has consistently failed in its responsibilities to users, so I'm not sure it's realistic for Horizon Worlds users to expect anything from it now,” he said.
Meta’s Metaverse was doomed from the start but that doesn’t mean the idea itself is bad or even Meta’s underlying technology. Diaz and others found community there. “Despite the ups and downs and branding and ‘Metaverse is dead’ and whatever, all these twists and turns, the tools [themselves] have incredible merit. And that’s the only message I’ve ever tried to bring, and I’m just heartbroken that it got attached to these companies,” Diaz said.
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