It turned out that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella actually could overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse

Occasionally, sitcoms will go meta and play with the conventions of the genre, such as the way that huge, life-changing events seem to disappear from the characters' collective memories and are never referred to again. For example, years after Married... with Children dropped the disastrous storyline about adopting a small child, the actor's face was briefly glimpsed on a milk carton on the kitchen table.Both Web3 and the metaverse sometimes feel like one of those abandoned storylines. It seems like they should still be a bigger deal, the sort of thing people would bring up more often, particularly given the fact that so many still-powerful individuals and institutions, from the company formerly known as Facebook to the New York Times ("Investors Snap Up Metaverse Real Estate in a Virtual Land Boom" -- Nov 2021), invested so much of their reputations in these next big things that seem inexplicable in retrospect and which many of us were calling out in real time.In one of his recent…