Picture this: you’re a merchant in the late 1990s. Someone tells you that in a few years, you’ll be selling goods to people you never meet, through a digital storefront that exists nowhere physically. You’d probably call it a fad, a silly distraction. But that was the dawn of e-commerce. We’re at a similar inflection point. My opponent will likely argue the metaverse is just clunky VR headsets and empty digital spaces—a solution in search of a problem. And look, today, that criticism isn’t totally wrong. The hardware is awkward, the experiences can be shallow. But history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. Every transformative technology has an awkward, dismissed adolescence. Think about the internet itself. In the early ‘90s, it was a niche tool for academics and techies. Dial-up was slow, websites were basic text on gray backgrounds. Critics called it a passing trend for geeks, not the backbone of global society. They were focused on the clunky how and missed the revolutionary why—connection, access, a new layer of human interaction. The metaverse is that next layer. It’s not about putting on a headset to attend a bad virtual meeting. It’s about persistent digital spaces where geography stops being a limit. It’s about a digital identity that carries across work, education, socializing, and commerce. The precedent is clear: human progress is marked by creating new “spaces” for interaction—from market towns, to cities, to the telephone network, to the internet. This is the logical evolution. The current execution might feel like a fad because we’re in the "dial-up" phase. But the underlying shift—towards more immersive, embodied digital experiences—is irreversible. We’re building the platform not for how we use technology today, but for how the next generation will live. Dismissing it now is like dismissing the World Wide Web because your first AOL chat room was a bit glitchy. The pattern is there. The future isn’t always polished on day one.