Facebook recently announced that it has changed its company name to Meta and the internet can't stop with the jokes.
The social networking site will continue to be called Facebook but the new name reflects, according to CEO Mark Zuckerbeg, their work investing in the metaverse.
The metaverse is a term coined in the dystopian novel Snow Crash three decades ago and now attracting buzz in Silicon Valley, according to Reuters. It refers broadly to the idea of a shared virtual realm which can be accessed by people using different devices.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future,” said Zuckerberg.
But his announcement was met by many jokes and expressions of incredulity. Facebook trying to venture out into an all encompassing online world where people can game, work and communicate in a virtual environment, often with the help of virtual reality headsets? That's about as dystopian as you can get.
