There was this whole saga with facebook when it rebranded to meta and Zuckerberg got it into his head that he was going to make vr a thing.
First there was this very long (like I think half a day) long facebook outage, like you couldn't access facebook anywhere it was as if facebook.com didn't exist (I'd wish).
Then a day or so later this whistleblower shows up all of the msm kiss her ass and say how she's going to expose facebook for spreading misinformation and right wing propaganda or whatever the fuck, facebook was always the big bad boogieman of big tech you were allowed to hate and it just reached a feaver pitch those few days.
The whistleblower was meant to testify in front of congress so to nobody's surprise absolutely nothing happened, until some time later facebook rebranded to meta and start posting schizo ads about how the future is in the metaverse. The ads were legit weird, here's one that I remember (sorry don't know how to embed):
Along side that their stock tanked (not that I think the stock market matters shit but that's what everybody was talking about).
Next few months they shill the metaverse everywhere, they were making VR headsets and snoop dog was buying properties in the metaverse, you were going to work in the metaverse, play in the metaverse, shit in the metaverse, and you were either going to accept it or be a ludite chud who hates progress. Somehow metaverse became a part of the whole crypto / web 3 / decentralized bs circle jerk as well.
Then some times later they started selling the headsets, they cost like a grand each and nobody in their right mind was going to drop a grand on a brand new experimental piece of headware to be alone in the metaverse. Whole project bombed and the shilling campaign ended instantly.
In a few months, maybe a year, meta segways into AI, they are basically the only ones who released open source models, all the local ai people love them, they get plenty of respect from the techies that used to hate them, by now the normies only know meta as the boring company that owns facebook, instagram and what's app (they might not even necessarily know they own the last two, sad state of afairs). There are hardly any msm hitpieces on facebook like their used to be, there is just some left over hate for facebook boomers coming from your average leftist. It was as if the whole company got a PR clean slate.
I know that tech shilling campaigns are dime a dozen but something about this whole thing didn't sit right with me. I remember thinking how stupid their rebrand is and how nobody was going to give a shit, and in a way I was right just not in the way I meant it. The phrasing used by the shills reminded me a lot of covid era hysteria and now it reminds me somewhat of AI hysteria, but the difference is that the metaverse didn't end up going mainstream like the other two.
I would have completely forgotten about the metaverse stuff if I wasn't at this conference in august where one of the guys mentioned it. It was a room full of professors and PHD students wondering how come this amazing innovative project failed. None of them thought it could do with the fact it felt like and was named after a thing in a distopia novel and that it cost an arm and a leg to plug yourself into. I haven't heard anybody mention the outage and whistleblower stuff ever, even though I'm sure those were somehow the reason for the rebranding and the segway into VR.