The Metaverse as Infrastructure: Building the Cave

In late 2022, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal logged into Meta’s Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship metaverse platform, into which Mark Zuckerberg’s company had poured over $36 billion over the previous two years — and found it largely empty. The virtual spaces were vast, architecturally elaborate, and almost entirely devoid of people. The journalist visited dozens of “worlds” and reported that most had fewer than five users at any given time. Some had none at all.

It was one of the most expensive ghost towns in history. And it raised a question that Plato never had to face: what happens when the cave is built before anyone agrees to live in it?

In our previous article, The Digital Cave: Why We Choose Shadows Again, we examined why people voluntarily remain inside digital environments even when they know they are artificial. The more uncomfortable question — the one this article takes on — is structural: who builds those environments, who owns them, and what it means that the architecture of our shared imagination is increasingly a privately controlled, commercially optimized product.

Plato’s cave was a thought experiment about knowledge. The digital cave of 2026 is a real estate problem.

What “Infrastructure” Actually Means

When we say the metaverse is infrastructure, we mean something technically precise. Infrastructure, in the engineering sense, refers to the foundational systems that other systems depend on — roads, power grids, sewage networks, internet backbones. Infrastructure is what you do not notice until it fails. It is the invisible prerequisite for everything visible.

Translating this to the metaverse, the infrastructure layer consists of four interlocking components:

• Compute: The processing power required to render immersive 3D environments in real time. A single user session in a high-fidelity VR environment can require more computational horsepower than streaming four 4K video streams simultaneously. At the scale Meta imagines — billions of concurrent users — the compute requirements are essentially planetary in scope.
• Network: Immersive environments demand ultra-low latency. Even 20 milliseconds of delay between head movement and display update causes motion sickness in most users. This is why the metaverse depends on 5G and eventually 6G infrastructure — and why its geography is essentially limited to areas with advanced network coverage.
• Storage: Every digital environment — every virtual building, avatar, object, and interaction — must be stored somewhere. The data footprint of a persistent metaverse world, one that continues to exist and evolve even when no user is present, is orders of magnitude larger than any existing platform’s storage requirements.
• Identity and Authentication: Who are you in the metaverse, and how does the system know? This layer includes everything from account systems and avatar data to biometric authentication and, increasingly, wallet-based digital identity systems linked to blockchain infrastructure.

All four of these layers, in every major metaverse platform currently operational or under development, are controlled by private corporations. This is not an accident or a transitional state. It is a deliberate architectural choice with profound implications for everyone who enters these spaces.

Meta’s $36 Billion Cave: How Horizon Worlds Actually Works

Meta Reality Labs — the division responsible for Horizon Worlds and the Quest hardware — reported losses of approximately $13.7 billion in 2023 alone, following losses of $13.7 billion in 2022 and $10.2 billion in 2021. These are not development costs. They are ongoing operational losses: the cost of running the infrastructure of a metaverse that most people have not joined.

Horizon Worlds is built on what Meta calls a “creator economy” model. The platform itself is free to access — provided you have a Meta Quest headset. Within it, users (called “creators”) can build virtual worlds using Meta’s proprietary tools, set their own access rules, and eventually monetize their creations through a virtual currency system. Meta takes a percentage of every transaction — initially announced at 47.5%, a figure that drew significant criticism when disclosed in 2022.

Meta Horizon Worlds vs. Apple visionOS Ecosystem (2024–2026)

Dimension	Meta Horizon Worlds	Apple visionOS
Business Model	Creator economy + advertising (future)	Hardware premium + App Store commission (30%)
Platform Cut	Up to 47.5% of creator revenue	30% App Store + 30% payment processing
Content Moderation	Meta Community Standards	Apple App Review Guidelines
Data Collected	Eye tracking, body movement, voice, social graph	Eye tracking, hand gestures, biometrics (on-device)
Interoperability	Closed (Meta ecosystem only)	Closed (Apple ecosystem only)
Open Standards?	Partial (supports some WebXR)	Limited
Identity Portability	Meta account (non-portable)	Apple ID (non-portable)

The percentage matters less than what it reveals: Meta has positioned itself not merely as a platform but as a landlord. Creators build within Horizon Worlds using Meta’s tools, on Meta’s servers, under Meta’s rules, paying Meta’s rent. They can be evicted at any time. Their worlds can be modified, restricted, or deleted. The land itself is not theirs.

In Plato’s cave, the prisoners did not know who built the walls. In the metaverse, the builder’s name is on the terms of service — and accepting those terms is the price of entry.

The Body as Data: What the Headset Knows About You

Every VR headset currently on the market collects data at a resolution that has no precedent in the history of consumer technology. This is not a side effect of the hardware — it is architecturally central to how these devices function, and it constitutes, perhaps, the most significant difference between Plato’s cave and ours.

Consider what a Meta Quest 3 collects during a typical session:

• Eye tracking: Where you look, how long you look there, how your pupils dilate in response to specific content. Pupil dilation is an involuntary physiological response — it cannot be faked or consciously controlled. It reveals emotional states, sexual arousal, fear, interest, and decision-making processes with a fidelity that self-reported data cannot approach.
• Micro-expressions and facial movement: The headset’s sensors track facial muscle movements in real time for avatar animation. This data is sufficient to infer emotional states.
• Body kinematics: How you move — your gait, your balance, your reaction times, the way you reach for objects in virtual space. Research has shown that these movement signatures are as individually unique as fingerprints and can be used to identify users across sessions even without a login.
• Voice patterns: All spatial audio passes through Meta’s servers. Voice data, combined with the physiological data above, allows for emotional state inference at a sophistication level that has no consumer-facing equivalent.

A 2023 paper from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated that 25 seconds of movement data within a VR environment was sufficient to identify users with over 94% accuracy. We are not talking about behavioral profiling in the abstract sense — we are talking about a physical fingerprint generated by your body every time you use the device.

This data is the real economic asset. Meta’s $36 billion investment in Reality Labs is not purely a bet on VR adoption. It is a bet on a fundamentally new class of behavioral data — deeper, more intimate, and more difficult to consciously obscure than any data previously available to advertisers. The cave does not just show you shadows. It studies how your pupils respond to each one.

Apple’s Alternative Cave: Spatial Computing and the Closed Garden

Apple’s approach to the same territory is philosophically distinct — and, in some ways, more sophisticated as a form of enclosure.

Apple does not call Vision Pro a “metaverse” device. The company carefully uses the term “spatial computing” — a phrase that positions the technology not as a parallel digital world but as an enhancement layer over the existing physical one. In Apple’s framing, you are not escaping reality; you are augmenting it. Your desk is still your desk. Your family is still in the room. The digital elements are additive, not substitutive.

This is a meaningful philosophical distinction, but it does not change the structural reality: every piece of software that runs on visionOS passes through the App Store. Apple reviews, approves, and can remove any application at any time, for reasons that are ultimately at the company’s discretion. Every transaction takes a 30% commission. Every developer who wants to reach Vision Pro users must accept Apple’s terms, build within Apple’s frameworks, and remain in compliance with Apple’s guidelines — guidelines that have historically prioritized Apple’s competitive interests alongside user protection.

Apple’s data approach differs from Meta’s in one important respect: the company claims to process much of the sensitive biometric data on-device, without transmitting it to Apple’s servers. This claim is consistent with Apple’s broader privacy positioning and has been partially verified by independent researchers. But on-device processing does not mean the data is not used — it means it is used locally, in ways that still shape your experience and Apple’s product development, without the data leaving the device.

Both models — Meta’s data-maximalist social metaverse and Apple’s premium spatial computing ecosystem — arrive at the same structural conclusion: the infrastructure of the digital cave is privately owned, commercially optimized, and governed by terms of service rather than any democratic or public accountability mechanism.

The Terms of Service as Constitution

Here is a detail worth sitting with: the rules that govern your behavior inside these digital environments are set by corporations, updated without your consent, and enforceable without appeal to any external authority. Meta’s Community Standards for Horizon Worlds, Apple’s App Review Guidelines, the moderation policies of any virtual platform — these are, functionally, the constitutions of the spaces they govern. They determine what you can say, what you can build, who you can be, and what happens to you if you violate them.

There is no separation of powers inside a corporate metaverse. Meta is simultaneously the legislature (it writes the rules), the executive (it enforces them), and the judiciary (it adjudicates disputes). There is no appeals court. There is no FOIA request for the moderation algorithm. There is no election for the CEO of the cave.

Plato proposed philosopher kings. Corporate metaverse governance delivers something structurally similar — governance by those who believe they know best, accountable only to shareholders.

This is not a hypothetical concern. In 2022, Meta introduced a “Personal Boundary” feature in Horizon Worlds after reports of sexual harassment — virtual avatars groping or simulating assault on other avatars. The feature creates an invisible four-foot bubble around each avatar that other avatars cannot enter. The company’s response to a governance failure was a technological patch, not a governance reform. The cave gets a moat. The power structure remains unchanged.

The Pivot: When the Cave Proves Unprofitable

In late 2022 and through 2023, Meta underwent what observers described as a significant strategic retreat from its original metaverse vision. Zuckerberg had, just two years earlier, rebranded Facebook Inc. as Meta Platforms and announced a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar commitment to building the metaverse. By 2023, the company was laying off over 20,000 employees, refocusing on AI, and substantially reducing its public emphasis on Horizon Worlds.

We touched on this corporate reversal in our article on economic shocks and their effects on the freelance economy (When Wall Street Shakes, the Freelancer Feels It First): when large technology companies experience investor pressure, their pivots ripple outward in ways that affect workers, platforms, and entire ecosystems far removed from the boardroom decision.

But Meta’s pivot from “metaverse company” to “AI company” did not mean the infrastructure was dismantled. The servers still run. The Quest headsets still ship. The data collection continues. What changed was the narrative — the public-facing story about what the infrastructure is for. The cave persisted. The tour guides changed their script.

This flexibility — the ability to rebrand the same infrastructure under different cultural narratives — is itself a structural feature of corporate-owned digital environments. The walls do not care what story is being told about them. The data collection is indifferent to whether the platform calls itself a social metaverse or a spatial computing ecosystem or an AI-powered communications tool. The infrastructure outlasts its justifications.

Who Could Own the Cave? The Alternatives

It is worth pausing to note that corporate ownership of metaverse infrastructure is not the only architecturally possible model. Alternatives exist at various stages of development, each with its own structural trade-offs:

• Open-source and decentralized platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox operate on blockchain infrastructure, meaning their core rules are encoded in smart contracts that no single entity can unilaterally change. The land within these worlds can be owned, traded, and governed by users. In practice, these platforms have struggled with adoption, user experience quality, and the concentration of land ownership among early speculators — but they represent a genuinely different structural model.
• Public or civic metaverse infrastructure has been proposed by researchers and some policy advocates — the idea that governments or public institutions should fund and operate metaverse infrastructure as a public good, the way they fund roads or broadcasting infrastructure. No major implementation of this model exists at scale, though South Korea has invested in government-sponsored metaverse initiatives.
• Protocol-based approaches — building the metaverse on open standards, the way the internet is built on TCP/IP rather than a single company’s proprietary stack — are advocated by organizations like the Metaverse Standards Forum and the Open Metaverse Alliance. Progress has been slow; the economic incentives strongly favor closed, proprietary systems.

The comparison is instructive. The internet itself was built on open protocols, funded initially by public institutions (ARPANET was a US Defense Department project), and only later privatized at the application layer. The metaverse, by contrast, is being built from the infrastructure layer upward by private corporations, with open standards as an afterthought rather than a foundation. The direction of travel matters enormously for what the cave eventually looks like.

The Cave as a Business Model

Step back far enough and the economic logic is straightforward: the more of your life you spend inside a corporate-controlled digital environment, the more data is generated, the more advertising can be targeted, the more purchases are made, the more subscription revenue accrues. Engagement is the product. Immersion is the competitive advantage over older media. The headset is the most complete attention-capture device ever engineered because it replaces not a portion of your visual field — like a phone screen — but all of it.

This is the business model of the cave: sell the experience, own the space, monetize the attention. Every hour you spend in Horizon Worlds is an hour Meta knows more about your behavior, preferences, emotional responses, and social relationships than any previous technology allowed. Every purchase in visionOS is revenue Apple would not have captured in a flat-screen environment. The immersion is not incidental to the economics. It is the economics.

Plato imagined that the operators of the cave — those who carried objects behind the prisoners and cast the shadows — were engaged in something like a philosophical exercise, a demonstration of the gap between appearance and reality. The operators of the corporate metaverse are engaged in something more plainly legible: maximizing shareholder value by minimizing the gap between user attention and corporate revenue capture.

Understanding that is not cynicism. It is the prerequisite for any serious thinking about what it means to live increasingly inside spaces built on those terms. In the next article in this series — Forms vs. Code: Are Digital Worlds More Real Than Reality? — we examine the philosophical status of what is built inside these infrastructures: whether digital objects, digital places, and digital identities have a different ontological status than their physical counterparts, and what Plato’s theory of Forms has to say about a world where perfect digital replicas are cheaper to produce than imperfect physical ones.

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References

1. Meta Platforms, Inc. Q4 2023 Earnings Report. February 2024.
2. Ortiz, Rosario. “Meta’s Metaverse Is Still a Ghost Town.” The Wall Street Journal, October 2022.
3. Meta Platforms. “Introducing Personal Boundaries in Horizon Worlds.” Meta Blog, February 2022.
4. Miller, Mark R. et al. “Personal Identifiability of User Tracking Data During VR Sessions.” Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2022.
5. Nair, Vivek et al. “Unique Identification of 50,000+ Virtual Reality Users from Head & Hand Motion Data.” UC Berkeley, 2023.
6. Metaverse Standards Forum. metaverse-standards.org
7. Apple. visionOS Developer Documentation. developer.apple.com/visionos
8. Also in this series: The Digital Cave: Why We Choose Shadows Again
9. Related: When Wall Street Shakes, the Freelancer Feels It First
10. Related: Smart Cities: Is Humanity Ready for Life in the Future?