Goodbye, Facebook Inc., a brand name that has been seared in the back of our skulls for much of the 21st century; we're a long way from the world of poke wars and Farmville now. The social network we know and grudgingly allow in our lives will keep its iconic name, but its parent company has undergone a rebrand. It is now named Meta, reflecting its future commitment towards building the metaverse.
If it sounds like an idea pulled straight from a Black Mirror episode, that's because it kind of is. In a presentation fronted by Zucc himself, all of us lowly personal data providers were introduced to the company's new focus on creating a shared virtual reality to replace the mobile internet as we know it.
It's fair to say that many social media users have been skeptical of this new name and the lofty goals behind it. People were quick to make fun of the surprisingly versatile new logo of the business, as well as its notorious CEO and naturally, there were plenty of jokes about sci-fi dystopia sprinkled here and there. However, perhaps the strangest part of the whole thing was the revelation that Mark Zuckerberg uses a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce as a bookend.
Seasonings aside, the only thing that really affects most of us at the moment is that one of the companies that has a scarily big stake in our lives has a different, more supervillain-appropriate name. The ridicule doesn't stop here, but neither does the hope that we'll live in a technology conglomerate-controlled VR wonderland in the near future.
