A year ago Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, announced that the world’s largest social media company was rebranding. It would now be called Meta, the new name revealing a shift away from one online reality – Facebook itself – in pursuit of another: the Metaverse. Zuckerberg claimed that this virtual world, which users navigate through CGI avatars, would soon compete with our offline one. In the Metaverse, he insisted, people would hang out with friends, build homes and spend money – and most of their lives.
The idea was largely derided at the time. A video of the Metaverse, featuring laughably basic graphics and cringeworthy cameos from Zuckerberg, his wife and Facebook’s vice-president, Nick Clegg, was widely mocked online. The timing of the announcement also triggered widespread scepticism: Facebook was undergoing its worst bout of publicity since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with the leak of the “Facebook Papers” and many commentators, myself included, saw the rebranding as an obvious attempt to escape negative press.
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