Every digital entrepreneur building virtual real estate in the 2020s is quoting a sci-fi movie every chance they get, and it’s usually a half-remembered one. It is a handy tool in the rhetoric of innovation, often employed in the name of progress.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s only natural that they do: science fiction gave digital design its vocabulary long before the technology to support it arrived: think about the colourful holographic floating panels in the MCU, or the avatar you assemble like an outfit. Cause, yeah — avatar in its digital sense was popularised by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, the same novel that gave us metaverse, decades before anyone tried to sell us one.
Decades passed, tech giants came and went. The metaverse arrived, promised, and failed. Many moons later Meta's Reality Labs has accumulated roughly $88 billion in operating losses since late 2020, against quarterly revenues in the low hundreds of millions, and the company cut around 1,500 jobs from the division in January 2026 as it pivoted toward AI. A company renamed itself after a Stephenson work of fiction and spent the GDP of a small country discovering that people did not really want to live there.
Whenever we talk about sci-fi writers, we very commonly associate them with prophets, or visionaries. But without discrediting any of them, it's worth saying plainly: these people don't dabble in witchcraft. They think about ethics, technology and politics, and they follow the argument to its logical conclusion. The fault is ours. The digital industry ran off with the aesthetic under its trenchcoat, left everything that felt remotely pessimistic behind, and called that part dystopian fiction.
We inherited those worlds, and we all smiled while some (few) of us moulded our futures into a digital present until it turned into a caricature of these novels. Nearly every one of these films was a warning, but we mined them for mood boards instead.
Three films built most of what we called the metaverse, and each came with an instruction we ignored. Now the pitch decks are gathering dust, and the virtual reality meeting rooms are vacant. So as I lay down my VR flowers at the Metaverse’s funeral, let's spend a few words on the movies Mark Zuckerberg watched (allegedly) with no sound on.
Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott's neon city is the most borrowed image in digital design. Moody rain, neon lights, holographic advertising the size of a building. Hell, I have created countless blue and purple coded Pinterest Boards. We were so quick to borrow the surface, and almost never the argument underneath it: this is a city drowning in commercial signal, where the light is beautiful because it is selling you something.
Real design lesson, though. Environments feel alive when light behaves as if it has a source and materials look like they have a history.
The Matrix (1999)
The Wachowskis gave us the aesthetic of legible data — falling green code, interfaces that read as pure information. It has aged into a cliché in cinematic language (and a visual companion to any fictional hacker for some reason), but the underlying principle holds: an interface earns its place by disappearing, by being ubiquitous, dynamic, ever-changing. Transparent panels, contextual menus, voice input.
The film, however, is also a story about a comfortable interface concealing whose interests it serves. A love letter to all the individuals who strive to gain their agency back. Anyone designing immersive systems should sit with that for longer than a moment. The metaverse was never short of seamlessness; its offer was freedom and its product was control.
Ready Player One (2018)
Spielberg's OASIS is where the industry got its picture of the metaverse: infinite worlds, endlessly customisable bodies, a culture built out of references. Its promise is genuine. Letting people choose how they appear is not decoration, it is the whole point. Self expression is both the medium and the goal.
Its warning is genuine too. The OASIS is where people go because the physical world has been abandoned. Spielberg's characters are retreating into the OASIS. The industry took that as a business model rather than a diagnosis, and built a place to live rather than a place to visit. A virtual space is only inclusive if it is not the only room left — and it is only appealing if it isn't the last room available. I had a whole creative workflow built around Ready Player Me, for young people to build their own avatar and animate their own co created music visualiser. Ready Player Me was officially discontinued and shut down its public platform on January 31, 2026. Self expression was never the point.
What this means in practice
Narrative is what makes an environment worth returning to. Quests, authored worlds, things made by users for each other — these are the things that create meaning.
Science fiction is useful to designers not because it’s optimistic, but because it is a marvellous study in human nature. I often look at it as a subcategory of speculative design: it presents us a scenario where we have technology together with its social cost, the economical ramifications, and its power dynamic, and then asks whether we would accept the trade.
The lesson here is not that the metaverse was a bad idea. It is, perhaps, that the Metaverse promised us to propel us into a new reality, but only delivered a pantomime that no one wants to sit down for.
