All of the moving pieces that go on behind the scenes of giant tech and billionaires bank accounts are largely mysteries to most of us – and honestly, they’re likely to stay that way.

Some, though, think they might have figured out what made the all-but-defunct Metaverse such a hard thing to walk away from for Mark Zuckerberg.

One of those people is tech columnist John Herrman, who offered up his theory in New York Magazine – and for him, it all comes back to COVID-19.

“Empty offices and newly empowered employees drove some tech executives out of their minds, and the Metaverse promised a solution, or at least functioned as a response. It represented an intoxicating fantasy, just not one that most of us would recognize – or, if we did, one that we might recognize as sort of a nightmare.”

Now, of course, AI and it’s ability to provide “an endless supply of cheap and obedient labor and a chance to take ownership of the means of, well, everything,” has become the next big thing instead.

“From one executive to an audience of other executives, the metaverse – at least Zuck’s take on it – offered a vision of the future in which everything was different but also pretty much the same: a disruptive technology that maintained the basic order of things, and where you once again knew what your employees were up to, even if they were just avatars.”

Herrman thinks that even in the age of schemes serving the people on top, the metaverse took things too far.

“It felt uncanny and hollow, and when people stopped talking about it so much, nobody who wasn’t directly invested seemed to care. It’s true that Silicon Valley has shifted its attention to AI, but what really hampered the metaverse was workers returning to the office.”

With more and more people returning to the office, whether they want to or not, there’s probably no way to turn back the clock now.