DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: March 22, 2026
RIP–Metaverse. We Hardly Knew Ye:
This week, it was reported that Meta, the company behind Facebook, would be shutting down Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social network with VR headset use. After June 15th, the platform will only be available on a standalone mobile app. This didn’t make a ton of headlines but it signals one of Facebook’s biggest failures in a proud history of them.
Mark Zuckerberg had promised that the so-called metaverse was the future and that one day we’d all have to be on it lest we fall behind with the times. Indeed, when Meta changed its name from Facebook in 2021, it was intended to help launch the new era of the internet. “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time when announcing the change. By the time its closure was announced, it was reported that Zuckerberg’s metaverse had only 900 or so regular users.
The idea of a metaverse — a catch-all term for online virtual worlds where people interact with one another in a 3D space — has been around for decades, largely popularized through sci-fi narratives like Snow Crash and The Matrix. Games like Second Life and World of Warcraft pioneered the form, with users creating their own communities and social mores in these spaces. After VR headwear became more accessible to the masses, companies like Microsoft and Facebook started to invest heavily in their own metaverses. In 2019, Facebook launched a social VR world called Facebook Horizon, which they renamed Meta Platforms two years later. Zuckerberg said that Meta was going all in on this new venture. Sorry, NFTs.
During this time, other 3D virtual worlds sprung up, many built around cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Decentraland, launched in 2020, promised to be not only a radical new online space for users but one with tangible financial value. You could buy and sell plots of land and advertising. Soon, brands began appearing in Decentraland, like Atari, Nestle, and Samsung. There was a Metaverse Fashion Week. Paris Hilton hosted a DJ set. Slews of headlines sprung up claiming that people were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for virtual land and that users would one day navigate these spaces the same way they would traverse the real world. Why go to the store to buy a pizza when you could slip on your VR headset, go to Decentraland, ‘walk’ to the pizza place there, and order one to be delivered to your real location?
Tech companies are notorious for trying to reinvent basic and popular concepts into something stupider and claiming it’s a disruptive step into a bright new future. These are the people who made Juicero think Elon Musk’s underground tunnels scheme is a great idea. But even by their brain-melt lack of self-awareness, some of their notions about the Metaverse were baffling. Why would anyone want to recreate the mundane experience of, say, walking through town to do your shopping in a game, step by step?
In our current era, we’re not even close to having the means to pull it off. Wearing VR headsets for longer than an hour results in vomiting or dizziness. Most people just want to log on and get the information they seek as quickly as possible. It’s just easier to DM a friend than set up a virtual coffee date you have to navigate as though it were a tangible space. Why would anyone invest in these spaces when the technology couldn’t even manage to make avatars with movable legs?
Cue Andy Fairweather Low:
For years, the “Bachelor” empire has been in decline.
Its flagship series, “The Bachelor,” a fixture of ABC’s winter programming schedule for nearly two decades, has not been seen since last March, with no star or premiere date announced for its return.
Ratings for last year’s finale of “The Golden Bachelor,” an attempt to reinvigorate the dating franchise by casting older contestants, dropped by nearly 60 percent compared with the inaugural season.
And “The Bachelorette” was on life support, failing to air last year after two underperforming seasons and a devastating reveal on live television.
All of that was before ABC abruptly pulled the plug on the new season of “The Bachelorette,” starring the influencer and reality star Taylor Frankie Paul, who ABC had hoped would lead a ratings renaissance. The season had been scheduled to premiere on Sunday, but a leaked video showed Ms. Paul assaulting her partner in 2023.
“It’s going to be tough to relaunch it, because people will be asking questions,” said Ryan Callahan, a former producer of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” about the prospect of reviving “The Bachelorette” after the Paul controversy. “‘Did they vet this person properly? Are they pulling a fast one on us again?’ Something like this breaches the faith of the viewer.”
‘The faith of the viewer’? Reality television? What kind of ‘viewer’ are we talking about?
The network needed a ratings win, though, and Ms. Paul had more than seven million followers across Instagram and TikTok after starring in Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” where her tumultuous relationship was front and center.
Then TMZ published the video of the 2023 assault on Thursday. In it, Ms. Paul, who was initially also charged with domestic violence and child abuse, kicks and throws metal chairs at Mr. Mortensen.
“The Incredible Story Of The Cartel Olympics”. Got time to go down a rabbit hole today? Might I recommend this one?:
They arrived suddenly—five white vans, identical and unmarked, blocking the street.
It was February 9, 2023, and Mauricio Morales was leading a group of migrants he had found at a bus station through Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood. Mau, as his friends called him, had told the migrants he could help them at the nearby refugee camp where he worked. They had just crossed a busy boulevard and were making their way down a side street when the five large utility vans lurched to a stop in front of them.
Men with machine guns, wearing tactical gear, spilled out and started barking orders and threats: ¡Entren todos!¡Ahora mismo, hijos de puta! Were they police? Military? Mau couldn’t tell, and there was no time to ask for identification. Within seconds, the migrants were being shoved into the vans. When Mau tried to resist, something hard hit him on the head, and he fell to the ground. As he was loaded into the back of one of the vans, he heard gunshots. He thought of his mother. If this is the end, he remembers thinking before he lost consciousness, please let her be okay.
The facility they took him to was strange. It vaguely resembled a school: four wings divided into classroom-like compartments and an enclosed courtyard in the middle. But there were no children here. Instead, men with guns patrolled the premises while women who looked like they were dressed for a night of clubbing loafed around. Narcocorridos, accordion-heavy cartel ballads, played loudly over speakers in the courtyard.
Mau was taken to a makeshift office, where a man with a paunch and a thick mustache sat behind a desk. He was flanked by a large bodyguard in a butcher’s apron and a voluptuous woman in a low-cut, form-fitting dress. He seemed irritated as he assessed Mau. “Look at him,” the man grumbled. “He’s so fucked up.” He sent the bodyguard and the woman, who seemed to be his girlfriend, out of the room. Once they were alone, the man became warm and friendly. He introduced himself as Don Paco, and apologized to Mau for what he’d been put through.
“I know who you are,” Don Paco said.
He told Mau that his men had noticed a tattoo of the Olympic rings on his wrist. After some research, they discovered that they had inadvertently kidnapped a world-class athlete—an Olympic runner who’d competed in Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro. This was serendipitous, Don Paco explained, because he happened to be in the market for athletes.
He said he was a leader of an organization called La Unión Tepito. Mau had heard about La Unión on the news. The cartel was relatively new, having risen to power in the past decade or so, but its tight grip on Mexico’s capital city had made it one of the country’s most notorious criminal syndicates. Don Paco told Mau that for all the attention paid to bloody turf wars and theatrical executions, organizations like his were an important part of the community—and Mexico was better off when its cartels got along.
Then Don Paco revealed something that would forever change how Mau saw his own country: For many years, Don Paco said, a secret tournament had been organized by Mexico’s biggest cartels. They each fielded teams in sports such as soccer, flag football, and boxing, and rival cartel leaders gathered to watch the games. He described the event as a civilized affair, where the bosses could place friendly wagers and do business without shooting one another.
Winning the tournament was a point of immense pride, Don Paco explained. And so he had a proposition for his new prisoner: He wanted Mau to coach and play on a flag-football team. The team would train at the facility and then represent La Unión at the tournament. If Mau won, he and his teammates would be released. If not, they would meet the same fate as anyone else who let down the organization.
Perhaps sensing Mau’s incredulity, Don Paco put it bluntly.
“If you win, you live,” he said. “If you lose, you die.”
For a work of fiction with a similar theme, check out “Chain Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
Afroman Wins Defamation Suit. Hey, the cop really wanted a slice of that…:
On Wednesday, Afroman won a widely watched defamation lawsuit that seven cops filed after the rapper made music videos mocking them for conducting a 2022 raid of his home that resulted in no charges and no marijuana found.
Videos for songs like “Lemon Pound Cake,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” used real footage from the raid, pulling from security camera footage and videos shot by Afroman’s wife. Cops from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office alleged they were humiliated and received death threats after the videos went viral.
Accusing Afroman of defamation, cops individually sought damages as high as $1.5 million. But Afroman’s lawyer, David Osborne, argued this was a clear-cut First Amendment case. At trial, Afroman testified that cops had no one to blame for the reputational damage but themselves, arguing that “if they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit,” The New York Times reported.
“They broke into my house, put themselves onto my video cameras, and into my music career,” Afroman testified, according to Ohio-based Local 12, a news outlet sharing footage from the trial. “With my freedom of speech, I had the right to talk about events going on in my life.”
