Facebook will now be owned by Meta, Inc., Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious bet on his future vision. Zuckerberg stated that his company will now focus on building a metaverse, an “embodied” internet that delivers the clearest form of presence.
The metaverse is an old idea, but it only entered the mainstream conversation in 2021 when Zuckerberg started talking about it. The term originated from the dystopian [1] novel Snow Crash that depicts a future where mankind fled crumbling reality to live in virtual reality. But he is reclaiming the narrative by framing the metaverse as a concept that will enable a techno-utopia.
The underpinnings of Zuckerberg’s take on the metaverse are virtual reality, augmented reality, and blockchain technology. A pair of AR glasses called Nazaré is in the picture, as Zuckerberg views it has the potential to be as widely used as smartphones are today. Unlike VR headsets, he is planning normal-looking glasses with display capabilities that can overlay computing on the world around the wearer. Buying and selling digital assets in the metaverse will be done through NFTs and smart contracts.
To Zuckerberg, the metaverse is not a far-fetched story. “By the end of this decade, or even by the middle of the decade, I would guess that we’re going to reach a point where our VR devices will start to be clearly better for almost every use case than our laptops and computers are,” he told the tech newsletter Stratechery.
Expressed in this rebrand is Zuckerberg’s philosophy that his company is more than just Facebook and social media. It has been his mission to connect people, which is well captured by the metaverse project. Nevertheless, the timing of this rebrand raised some eyebrows. Over the past few weeks, Facebook has faced immense criticism thanks to internal documents leaked by former employee Frances Haugen. Critics see the name change as Zuckerberg’s gimmick [2] to distance himself and his company from the tainted name Facebook.
Skepticism is not the only challenge faced by Meta, as an official name change can involve an intellectual property war. According to TMZ, a small Arizona company of the same name, Meta PC, trademarked the name a few months ahead of Zuckerberg’s big reveal. While Meta PC’s owner Zack Shutt said he wouldn’t sell the name for anything less than $20 million, legal experts told the Guardian that there are many loopholes to be exploited by a behemoth like Facebook.
However, names are merely a matter of technicality in comparison to the vast potentials of the metaverse. If Zuckerberg’s vision pans out, we will see clear progress towards a digital “utopia.”