Meta Refresh

Facebook Inc has rebranded as Meta. The eponymous platform won’t change its name but the group overall has changed its name, symbolising a strategic shift to the metaverse. (As an aside, I have been working with Hypomo on a HUGE project regarding the metaverse, called Terra — contact me if you would like to know more.)

There is obviously a lot of online commentary about it, so I’ll keep this short.

Facebook makes around $120bn each year, and growing. The company is just 17 years old. Users deleting their accounts on the back of privacy concerns have had very little effect on the business. This is a very well-run company.

The pivot to VR and the metaverse has not happened overnight. Meta is yet another company that has bought itself out of a strategic dead-end, in this case with Oculus. We now know that Oculus was never a bolt-on acquisition; it’s now core to Meta’s aspirations.

However, this pivot has a direct parallel with the billionaire space race of Musk, Bezos, and Branson. All four billionaires have one thing in common: to blast themselves into an undiscovered world rather than invest further in fixing the one they are leaving behind. In the space race, it’s Earth and other planets. In Meta, it’s Facebook and the metaverse.

Further, the focus on privacy and securty in yesterday’s talk indicates that the company has at least acknowledged the causes and effects of the core Facebook platform. Facebook, and other social media services such as Twitter, remain a blight on societal discourse. Although Meta appears to be changing and taking a “privacy by design” approach to the metaverse, well… I’ll believe it when I see it.

Meta is a cash-rich company, and the Zuckerberg family have — admirably — pledged to give most of their fortune away. I’d like to see at least some of these funds go to media literacy and education. If we can’t teach people behaviour in the metaverse, then we’ll get the same behaviours as currently, and depressingly, exposed in social media.

Nick Clegg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister and now Facebook/Meta head of PR, appears to be set up as Meta’s Jony Ive — the “cultured brains” behind the wild ideas of the guy at the top. Both Ive and Clegg, although very different characters, appear to occupy a sort of Q-type persona in Silicon Valley.

Overall, this is a big platform play from Meta. The pledge to open standards is all well and good, but the company wants to own the whole chain: the hardware, the software, the means of connection, the experience… the metaverse. The question now is whether we want it.

Header image: Padie O Mahonie via the Ireland Simpsons Fans Facebook group

Originally published at https://paulsq.blogspot.com on October 29, 2021.