Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new name for his company this week: Meta. All of Facebook’s products — the eponymous social media service, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, will continue under a new corporate parent. The move mirrors what Google did in 2015 when it set up Alphabet as the umbrella entity. Mr Zuckerberg said Meta represents the next stages of Facebook’s evolution into a “metaverse” company. Zuckerberg demonstrated use cases, depicted by computer-generated imagery (CGI), of how it will
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new name for his company this week: Meta. All of Facebook’s products — the eponymous social media service, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, will continue under a new corporate parent. The move mirrors what Google did in 2015 when it set up Alphabet as the umbrella entity. Mr Zuckerberg said Meta represents the next stages of Facebook’s evolution into a “metaverse” company. Zuckerberg demonstrated use cases, depicted by computer-generated imagery (CGI), of how it will bring people together in virtual reality to “play, work, shop, create” and more. He announced some projects and products, most of which appeared centred around improvements to the Oculus Quest, a virtual reality (VR) headset, and its ecosystem that Facebook has developed.
The concept of the metaverse is hardly new. The term made its first appearance in Snow Crash, a 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson. Facebook executives have acknowledged that their augmented and virtual reality developments have been inspired by the novel. Virtual reality is the most likely of ideas that originated in science fiction to become a part of everyday technology, in part due to Mr Zuckerberg’s own fixation. His company acquired Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, when it was still a startup. Facebook has acquired several VR companies and slowly built one of the largest software platforms under the Oculus brand. But for now, metaverse technologies are far removed from how science fiction envisioned it — some of the demonstrations in Mr Zuckerberg’s presentation were almost bizarre.
Substantially, the Meta announcement lacked any indication it will lead to meaningful change in how the company is structured at a time when there have been calls to break it up to reduce its influence. Mr Zuckerberg framed the Meta pivot as a plunge into a future technology even though materially, the company will remain focused on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fantastic vision for the future he outlined comes at a time when the company has arguably left the present with problems of unimaginable scale. Its technologies have furthered hate and psychological harm, manipulated democracies, even enabled genocides. Recent disclosures suggest the company was aware of these harms and chose not to act. In the midst of these controversies, the presentation by Mr Zuckerberg touting a future based on virtual reality and how it will solve several of today’s challenges seemed starkly removed from reality itself.
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