Facebook Going Meta Is Nothing New, Google Did It Too

There were no plans in my schedule to write about this, but seeing how a tiny comment of mine on another story is making waves, I thought I’d expand on it properly, because I think it’s worth being frank and pragmatic about it. Facebook, just days ago decided to announce to the world, what has been travelling on the grapevine for a while — it’s rebranding itself to Meta. Because of this thing they’re calling Metaverse.

I’ll go into what that means technologically in another story, as I think the move is objectively interesting for the software developer community, and it’s worth dissecting. Here, however, I am going to move the focus away from the shiny tech aspects and highlight the not so — if at all — talked about part of the announcement. Hardcore Zuckerberg and Facebook fans will vehemently disagree with me. That’s fine, working at FAANG companies was never my life’s goal anyway. So, without further ado, let’s look at some history, the present and finally the future.

The mess under the rug

I was a Facebook user since its inception, well, since it become public to the world that is. I didn’t quite get the point initially, I already had Hi5, didn’t see why the world would need another social media platform. But then it kind of grew on me. As more users joined, as it became more dynamic, and me having moved away from home, it felt almost like a digital home away from home. It was all about finding long lost friends, loves, family and keeping in touch. An innocent platform for the most part. It didn’t last very long though.

Enter the wall of everything. First people sharing stuff with no context, then advertisements, then polls, then games, then memes, and rapidly the wall became a hot mess of everything I never really asked for, but Facebook gave me because … algorithm. And it started to feel sticky and creepy. Then Cambridge Analytica happened, followed by uncontrollable spirals and rabbit-holes of fake news, in parallel with studies coming out showing the detrimental nature and effects of social media dependency on our young, but not just. Acquisitions like WhatsApp and Instagram at this point weren’t even seen as your average garden-variety purchases any more, but rather a clear strategy of potentially harmful data-mining. A business of “we want all the data we can eat, and we can it a lot”.

And the world took notice. Users by the millions fled to Signal, governments started pointing the finger and asking hard questions. One could argue that from Zuckerberg’s vantage point, the entire world was out to harass him and his innocent little invention he (not alone) cobbled together in his Uni bedroom. People were leaving the platform, myself included. Month by month, week by week the media kept uncovering dirt about the company’s inner-workings, whistleblowers came forward, risking a lot, just so the world could hear what’s really happening on each of their devices. Because what not enough people realise is that, Facebook is not somewhere out there, Facebook is everywhere. In your hands, in your pockets, in your companies, homes, cafes, restaurants, churches, mosques, parks, everywhere. It wasn’t about connecting people any more, it was about connecting products that connected everything else that people did, said, thought — a massive addictive data-grid.

And then, Facebook goes Meta…

When the rumours started surfacing, I already started thinking to myself — this is all too familiar. It has been done before. Who was it? And then it dawned on me. This has been done probably many times before, but the famous one I remember is Google. Another innocent company at first, that wanted nothing more than to create a smashing search-engine. As a software developer, I so totally get that. It genuinely solves a problem. The internet without a search engine is nearly pointless. Sure, we had Yahoo, but it wasn’t that good. Nor was Alta-Vista, or the others. Google gave search-engines a good name, and they had “don’t be evil” as their motto. A model company you’d want to invest in, right? In terms of doing good for the world you could probably even consider them for 3rd place after doctors without borders and Mother Theresa.

Until… they dropped the motto, restructured Google and made it a subsidiary — just a product — inside Alphabet. A very abstract name, just like Meta. What is Alphabet really? It can be anything, it can do anything and sell anything, it can be anywhere and everywhere and still be true to its brand. And it does exactly that.

Same goes for Meta, because really, what is Meta? According the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary it is:

showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category : cleverly self-referential

Right. Could not be any more abstract. So the brand of this company is presumably now about “the self”, which traditionally people understand very little about. How do I know that? Just looking at the state of the world, the skyrocketing number of life-coaches, therapists, every other advertised service between entirely scientific and absolute nuts that came out in the last few decades, that people pay hard-earned cash for, I think is proof enough that even the most self-reflective, self-aware human still has a long way to go to reach an adequate understanding of the self.

It’s the Google switcheroo all over again, except it’s worse. Facebook got so much bad press that the only long term-solution was to make Facebook less central to its brand, its business, detach the mess from under the carpet of the brand, shove it under just one app, evade the upcoming torrent of lawsuits, governmental inquiries and audits in light of the latest slew of revelations of its internal affairs, and present the new horizon of the Metaverse as a clean slate.

How bright really is that future though?

Google did it— arguably — the right way and with less dirt under the rug. It was a business move, and while they lost a large portion of their initial values together with their motto, one could argue that it’s a company that has clear business goals, tries less to be your best buddy but rather a jack-of-all trades neighbour you either pay or do barter with, whenever you need something done. I myself avoid using Google services for the most part, but I feel less intruded upon when the transaction is much more clear and I have control over it.

This however is not the case with Facebook, and believe it or not, it’s less the software aspect that sheds a bad light, and creates an exponentially worsened perception of any brand change and technological direction they take. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. I am baffled to no end to see that once upon a time Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple for infinitely less than what Mark is single-handedly doing to the company. Call it Meta, call it FluffyUnicorn or BlueCheese, or anything under the sun, and as long as Mark is at the helm of it, it’s going to carry a massive creep-factor.

From a purely business perspective, the brand change makes all the sense in the world. Facebook is falling to pieces, it’s neither cool, informational or safe. A bit of a public toilet in a shoddy neighbourhood. One cannot build a future on that. But Metaverse is infinitely worse, because the way it is presented, Facebook was nothing but a training-ground for a truly data-hungry beast, where both reality and virtuality are for sale. Personal, business, casual, any of it, all of it. Mashed up into a future that makes people even more confused about the “self”. A world where another potential pandemic will act as a catalyst for an alternative reality, a Metaverse… a cyclops sucking data out of literally every move we do. Not because it’s the Metaverse, but because it’s Mark’s Metaverse and frankly, after Facebook, one simply cannot trust this alternative reality to be any less malicious and confusing than its predecessor.

I am a technologist, I like AR and VR, and see its values, but whatever Meta is doing in the future I simply cannot trust. Trust is not something I offer twice, and once broken, it stays broken. I believe in a world where nature and technology and complementary, and one enhances the other. Meta simply does not have that goal. Thankfully the world is healing, thanks to real-world scientists, tangible people doing tangible work to make this world able to literally breathe again. Spend time in this world, with these people, in the “Realverse”. It’s a cool place, where not everything is for sale. 😉

Attila Vago — Sr. Software Engineer building amazing ed-tech software. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!