No, Zuckerberg Didn't Create the 'Metaverse'

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Over the last week, or so, or, since Fall 2025, Meta has been in the process of sunsetting their entry into the metaverse on the VR side of things, and cementing it as a mobile-only sort of experience. The problem, is that nobody seems to know that this thing that Zuckerberg spent billions on, is not called “metaverse,” but rather, “Horizon Worlds.” Zuckerberg simply renamed the company itself to mirror a concept that he didn’t even create.

And, it’s kind of funny, because even apparent actual employees didn’t seem to know that it wasn’t literally called, “The Metaverse.” (albeit, this guy is probably lying for engagement)

But, if Meta didn’t create the concept of the metaverse, where’d it come from?

Snow Crash, 1992, Neal Stephenson:

Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.

Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.

But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).

Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

Do you see the keyword in this synopsis?

And, not only is this a concept that predates Meta and Facebook by at least 10 years, it is the original inspiration for Second Life, a currently existing “metaverse” that enjoys 30,000 to 40,000 concurrent daily users near twenty six years after its launch, and the currently only literal interpretation of Stephenson’s “Metaverse.”

If anything should, or would ever be called, “The Metaverse,” it would be most fitting for a Second Life rebrand, because worlds like Roblox and VR Chat are just off-shoots of the same concept that, frankly, don’t get it 100%, either via massive censorship, or via catering to children.

That the astroturfing of the phrase “metaverse” has been allowed to happen, though, just because Zuckerberg renamed his company to “Meta” and seemingly never mentioned anywhere that his virtual world is called “Horizon Worlds,” is almost rage-inducing. But, we can’t fully blame just the weirdo billionaire who blasted 77 billion dollars on his concept of “the metaverse…”

We, sometimes, do have to hold individual users accountable, even if just a tiny bit, because this reaches back to a concept I’ve been speaking about a lot lately. And it has much to do with encouraging people to do their own research, to find things out for themselves. Stop taking your ideas and opinions from others, especially now, especially in 2026, and especially on social media.

I know this is how people operate. He-said, she-said, everything is secondhand, but that doesn’t work anymore.

Many, many people on social media are lying to you, or spreading misinformation unknowingly (this isn’t something exclusive to right-wing social media users), or simply saying whatever they feel will get them the most engagement, because on corporate social media this gets them paid, and on socmed that doesn’t pay? It gets them followers. And lots of likes and followers makes the dopamine go boing-boing, which, for some, is even more valuable than money. This is a problem on Bluesky, and this is a problem on the Fediverse.

I’ve seen plenty prima donnas via both.

Everybody wants to be a celebrity, and some will reach for that goal no matter the cost.

Some of this is beside the point, though. Overall, I wanted to write this as a correction, as Horizon Worlds comes crashing to the ground, to maybe start the process of “reclaiming” the “metaverse” from one of the world’s richest and also dumbest people.

A virtual world sanitized and censored to the point of being completely useless for self expression was never going to take off, especially with it being exclusive to VR, which many still see as a gimmick that’s only tolerable for about an hour.