In this week’s ThrowForward Thursday, Graeme Codrington revisits his April 2022 episode on the Metaverse hype cycle – and what it teaches us about separating real technological change from expensive noise. With AI, spatial computing, and the “next big platform” dominating headlines, the ability to distinguish signal from hype is the most valuable skill a leader can have.
What you’ll learn:
– Why the Metaverse failed – and what the warning signs actually were
– How to identify genuine technological disruption vs. hype-driven investment
– The thinking framework futurists use to stress-test tech trends
– What today’s equivalent of the Metaverse might be
How much money can you afford to lose before it hurts?
Well, apparently, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, the answer is $80 billion. That’s what Facebook Meta has spent on the Metaverse in the last five years, and now they’re shutting it down.
But five years ago, they were saying this was everything. They even changed the name of Facebook to Meta to make sure we understood how important, how valuable, and how bright the Metaverse future was. Others, like McKinsey got involved in hyping everything. HSBC was buying bank branches in the Metaverse.
And yet, here we are in April 2026, and they’ve announced that they are shutting it down completely. $80 billion down the drain.
Well, back in April of 2022, our team at ThrowForward Thursday told you this. We’re not really given to “I told you so” videos, but today all I’m going to do is replay our April 7, 2022 episode. We were right. All the others were wrong.
What are you doing to make sure that you protect yourself from AI, IT, and Metaverse, and technology hype?
Be careful who you listen to. Be careful of the hype you get caught up in.
It’s not that difficult to work out what is really going to be successful and what is just hype anyway. The Metaverse is dead. Long live the Metaverse.
The Metaverse is rubbish or at least, the metaverse we’re being sold by retailers and our bosses at the moment is a complete failure of imagination.
If we can be anything and go anywhere, why would we want to go into a store and pretend to push a trolley around and take items off the shelves with our physical hands?
If we could be anything and go anywhere, why would we surround ourselves with a whole lot of virtual screens and apps that increase our productivity and make us feel like we’re sitting in an office, with our colleagues walking past our desks and our bosses able to pop in unannounced at any time?
Why would we recreate the world that already exists?
If I want to be surrounded by screens and productivity apps, well, I already am. I’m on the internet. I have all the apps I need on my smartphone and my laptop. I don’t need to be in some virtual or augmented reality world to make that a reality.
If I’m going to be in the Metaverse, I want to be a dragon. I want to be able to hyperspace and fly from place to place.
And I don’t want my boss to be able to literally melt into my face anytime I’m working from home.
The Metaverse, as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it, is literally taking the worst parts of working from home and forcing me to live and immerse myself in that for hours and hours on end.
I believe HSBC has bought plots of land in some of the metaverses so that they can build virtual bank branches. Are they mad?
One of the most soul-destroying things any human being can do in the physical world is spend time going to an actual bank branch. Why on earth would I do it in the Metaverse where, I remind you, I would much prefer to be a dragon?
Virtual reality and augmented reality are coming and they are here. There are some great use cases in gaming and entertainment, even in the medical, technical, and engineering worlds. There’s a lot we can do with this technology.
But recreating our physical world – especially stores, banks, and offices and putting it onto our faces in virtual reality is a failure of imagination. And it’s not the future.
Well, there we go.
We might not be able to predict the future, but we can, in fact, separate signal from noise and identify what’s hype and what’s real, and there’s a lot of hype in the world at the moment.
If you’d like our team to help your team, see what’s real and what isn’t, please make sure that you connect with us. The TomorrowToday team will be happy to have a conversation with you and talk about how we can help you think more clearly about the future and what’s happening today.
Thanks, as always, for joining me in the ThrowForward studio. I look forward to seeing you again next week.
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Graeme speaks to 100,000+ people a year in 150+ countries and is a 2× TEDx speaker and best-selling author. He’s also ranked #17 in the Global Gurus “Top 30 Futurist Professionals” for 2026.
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