Mark Zuckerberg, in a 2021 presentation that seemed less a business strategy than a fever dream, rebranded his company from Facebook to Meta. He was selling a future in which we would inhabit a digital utopia, a place where the friction of the physical world, the traffic, the decay, the awkward silences, would be smoothed over by the order of code.

It was a grand vision, one that presumed that the right combination of capital and engineering can solve the human condition.

However, Meta is now quietly retreating from its all-in bet, one of the most expensive experiments in business history.

It was a $60 billion attempt to fix a reality we still prefer to the simulation.

The premise was always seductive, in the way that the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave were seductive: a world that promised to be more pleasurable, more malleable than reality. But the metaverse, as it began to take shape, was less a hyperreal paradise than a clumsy imposition. To enter this new world, one had to strap a computer to one’s face, a set of electronic “ski goggles” that isolated the wearer, blinded him to his surroundings, and demanded a total surrender of attention. The Quest traded the ease of the smartphone, which slides effortlessly into our pockets, for a device that induced sweat, fatigue, and the vague nausea of motion-to-photon delays.

Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship social platform, was intended to be the bustling town square of the new digital age. Instead, it became a study in desolation. By the fall of 2022, the platform struggled to retain 200,000 monthly users, a number that seems almost tragic when weighed against the tens of billions of dollars poured into its creation. Those who did visit found a landscape populated by legless, floating torsos, cartoon avatars that managed to be both childish and uncanny. It was a ghost town, a place where the silence was amplified by the vast, empty digital architecture.

This failure was not without precedent. In the 1990s, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy promised a similar revolution and delivered only headaches and monochrome red graphics, selling fewer than 800,000 units before vanishing into the landfill of bad ideas. In the early 2000s, Second Life was briefly the darling of pundits, who prophesied we would all soon be working and shopping in its pixelated aisles; by 2010, it had faded into a niche curiosity. The pattern is clear: The cultural imagination is enticed by the idea of VR, but the human animal balks at its practice.

There is a stubborn materiality to our existence that the architects of the metaverse failed to overcome. We are embodied beings. We like the warmth of a hand, the smell of rain, the ability to glance at a screen and then look away. The metaverse demanded we leave the physical world behind, a proposition that felt increasingly dystopian.

RELATED: Inside Zuckerberg’s losing metaverse bet

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Marshall McLuhan warned that a medium pushed to its extreme can “implode” into something else, and the metaverse seemed to hit that breaking point, an implosion in which the medium devoured its own appeal. The users did not want to be immersed in a corporate-controlled simulacrum; they wanted convenience. They wanted the blue bubble of a text message, not a virtual meeting in a boardroom rendered in low-polygon graphics.

The retreat, when it came, was swift and brutal, in the way corporate corrections often are. By 2023, a metaverse winter had set in. Disney shuttered its division; Microsoft sunset its social VR platform. The world became captivated by a new technology: generative AI. Suddenly the conversation was not about new worlds but about automated intelligence that could write our emails and paint our pictures. Meta, reading the tea leaves and the plummeting engagement metrics, pivoted. The irrational exuberance for VR gave way to sober retrenchment.

The financial markets, at times the coldest arbiters of value, cheered the death of the dream. When news broke in late 2025 that Meta would cut Reality Labs’ budget and lay off staff, its stock jumped, adding nearly $70 billion in value overnight. It was a signal that the experiment was over. The Great White Whale of tech had once again slipped away, leaving the innovators holding the harpoon, exhausted.

John Carmack, the legendary game developer who tried to steer Meta’s VR ship before resigning in frustration, noted that the company had “a ridiculous amount of people and resources” but constantly “self-sabotaged.” The metaverse was not killed by a lack of technology; the Quest 3 is a marvel of engineering. It died from a lack of human necessity. It was a $60 billion attempt to fix a reality that, for all its flaws, we still prefer to the simulation.

The retreat is less a defeat than a recalibration. Meta is now looking toward “smart glasses,” wearables that overlay the digital onto the real rather than replacing it. The form factor concedes the stubborn fact that we want to remain in the world. The dream of the metaverse, that hyperreal paradise where models replace the real, has been deferred. We have chosen to keep the goggles off, to live for now, in Baudrillard’s words, in the desert of the real.

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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been officially dissolved by its board of directors after Republican cuts to funding for PBS and NPR.

The CPB provided funding for public news for 58 years but was plagued by criticism from the right that it supported left-wing policies and the agenda of the Democratic party.

‘Americans will never again have to worry that a single cent will go towards CPB’s radical programming.’

The organization released a statement Monday confirming the vote for dissolution.

“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans — regardless of geography, income, or background — had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison.

She went on to call the vote the fulfillment of a “profound” responsibility.

“CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks,” she added.

Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana welcomed the news and mocked the CPB.

“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which funneled your money to NPR and PBS to call birds, roads, and country music racist — is officially DISSOLVED,” he wrote. “Good riddance.”

Republicans had criticized public funding for NPR and PBS, while Democrats had criticized defunding efforts as deleterious for rural areas and other underserved communities.

RELATED: NPR hit with scorn over ‘insulting’ article on self-care tips for anxiety from war headlines

“Excellent news,” replied Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri.

“Now, Americans will never again have to worry that a single cent will go towards CPB’s radical programming,” Schmitt continued.

The CPB previously announced in August that it would begin winding down operations, scale down its employees, and hand out whatever funds it had left over after the Republican cuts.

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The hosts of “The View” offered a wide spectrum of responses to the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces.

Maduro was captured at his home in Caracas and flown out of the country alongside his wife in a daring mission on Saturday evening. On Monday, he pleaded “not guilty” in a court in New York City.

‘I think you can still celebrate that this murderous, corrupt, sadistic son of a b***h is out of Venezuela!’

Some on the left have criticized the Trump administration for the manner in which the operation was conducted. Sunny Hostin offered her critique on Monday’s episode of the talk show.

“Isn’t anyone concerned about the fact that what we’re doing is almost piracy? It’s like imperialism,” said Hostin, who claimed that the president violated international law.

“We’re going to another country, and we’re taking their natural resources for ourselves,” she added. “And on top of it, if we can do something like this, who is to say that Vladimir Putin, then, doesn’t go to Ukraine and arrest Zelenskyy?”

Hostin was referring to statements President Donald Trump made about seizing oil tankers from Venezuela and returning oil drilling assets that had been seized by the communist government and nationalized. She pointed out that Venezuela has control of nearly 20% of the world’s oil reserves, more even than Saudi Arabia.

Ana Navarro, however, said she was full of joy that Maduro’s reign was over and said Venezuelans and Cubans in south Florida were overjoyed about the arrest.

“For us, this is a very, very happy day when we see a dictator who has been part of oppressing and abusing the Venezuelan people for 25 years, when we see him in handcuffs and held to some sort of accountability, it brought me to tears,” Navarro said. “It brought me great joy.”

She added, “I think you can still celebrate that this murderous, corrupt, sadistic son of a bitch is out of Venezuela!”

RELATED: Venezuelan freedom fighter wins Nobel Peace Prize — and immediately dedicates it to Trump

Maduro is facing charges of “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States.”

Video of the full segment on Venezuela can be viewed on the show’s YouTube channel.

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When President Trump boycotted the U.N. climate summit, many Americans who aren’t buying the elites’ climate fearmongering were pleased, hopeful that Trump’s move might weaken the globalist plans.

But after the global elites appeared to use the president’s absence to push extreme climate policies, some are wondering if the president could have made a mistake.

“We’ve got Trump in the White House, and of course he actually boycotted the summit. We reached out to the State Department. They told us they deliberately chose not to send anybody. So there was no U.S. delegation for the first time in 30 years of these, and that made for a very interesting situation,” journalist Alex Newman tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck.

“And you know, a lot of Americans thought that was great. Hooray. And a lot of the climate skeptics also thought so. But some of the globalists at the U.N. conference also said, ‘Hey, this is a great opportunity, because the United States is still involved in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, but they’re not here to obstruct passage of an ambitious deal,’” Newman explains.

“‘So let’s do some great stuff, and then when Trump is gone in three and a half years, we’ll impose that on Americans,’” he adds.

And the agreement they passed without Trump’s presence included “mention of a carbon budget.”

“They claim that four-fifths of the CO2 that humans can be allowed to emit has already been emitted,” Newman tells Glenn.

“I think the strategy for these people, Glenn, is ‘Hey, we’ve got Trump for three and a half more years. Let’s just keep our heads down. We know that he doesn’t believe us. We know that the American people don’t believe us. So let’s just not talk about it too loudly,’” he adds.

“So was this a mistake by not showing up?” Glenn asks.

“I don’t know,” Newman answers. “I know some of the people down at the U.N. summit thought this was a good opportunity for them, but you know, Trump’s not done.”

“I’ve spoken with people at EPA; I’ve spoke with people at the State Department, who have said that they are seriously considering the possibility of withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change,” he continues.

“We have to,” Glenn interjects.

“Yeah, that seems like a no-brainer. … In fact, before he went into the White House, he said one of the top priorities for the MAGA movement and the United States needs to be to decisively crush this climate hysteria hoax,” Newman says, adding, “So he’s really serious about it.”

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President Donald Trump responded with a scathing statement to a report that the 2024 failed Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was considering dropping out of his re-election campaign. Walz later confirmed he was dropping out.

Walz has been dogged by accusations of obstruction in the investigation into government relief and welfare fraud in the Somali community in Minnesota. He has denied any involvement and claimed that his administration has tried to investigate the schemes.

‘I feel certain the facts will come out, and they will reveal a seriously unscrupulous, and rich, group of ‘SLIMEBALLS.’ … NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!’

The president mocked Walz and named other Democrats he believes are also guilty of crimes, including Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

“Minnesota’s Corrupt Governor will possibly leave office before his Term is up but, in any event, will not be running again because he was caught, REDHANDED, along with Ilhan Omar, and others of his Somali friends, stealing Tens of Billions of Taxpayer Dollars,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“I feel certain the facts will come out, and they will reveal a seriously unscrupulous, and rich, group of ‘SLIMEBALLS.’ Governor Walz has destroyed the State of Minnesota,” he added.

He went on to accuse California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, all Democrats, of more dishonesty and incompetency.

“NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!” he added.

Walz said Monday that he would be unable to put all his effort into a re-election campaign that would have meant a third term, if he had won.

RELATED: Tim Walz tries to dunk on Trump and gets pantsed on social media

“Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences,” he wrote. “So I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.”

One poll found that Walz had a disapproval rating of 48%, and over 69% of respondents said that he needed to do more to stop fraud in Minnesota.

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