I have good news. META Platforms, Inc., also known as Facebook, has lost 70% of its value in the last year. Zuckerberg’s gamble on creating on-line, virtual reality work places (and entertainment), is off to a terrible start. Zuckerberg, who seems convinced people want to spend more time on-line, is calling for patience and additional investment in the “metaverse”.

Zuckerberg is making a classic mistake, generalizing from his own experience. Because he wants to spend more or most of his time on-line, he thinks others do too. Surrounded by sycophant’s who depend upon him for their livelihoods, he doesn’t have anyone to tell him to snap out of his on-line fantasy world.

No one, two months from now, is going to say their 2023 resolution is “to spend more time on-line”.

Pre-pandemic, there were a lot of snake-oil salespeople promoting distance learning. All will be well, they proclaimed, if we just move school on-line.

Aspects of hybrid learning obviously make sense, but maybe with the exception of Zuckerberg himself, we are an intensely social species. We desire stronger social connections, involving all of our senses, in real life.

That is the lesson of the pandemic and Meta’s swan dive. Couldn’t be happening to a nicer corporation.

Postscript: Marques isn’t rooting for META either, but for a completely different reason (start at 9:00).