What Is Meta For Now?

The Metaverse is shut down. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed this recently after spending eighty billion dollars on it. (The number is $80,000,000,000.00. Polymarket reported it with the cents included. I found the cents meaningful. Nobody spends eighty billion dollars by accident. The cents suggest someone, somewhere, was counting very carefully.)

Here is the situation: in 2021, Zuckerberg renamed his company after the Metaverse. The company had been called Facebook. Facebook is a descriptive name. You understand, from the name, what the product involves. Faces. A book. You look at them.

He renamed it Meta.

Meta means "about itself" or "beyond" or, in the context of 2021, "a virtual world you access through a headset where you will attend work meetings as a legless avatar." That was the plan. He spent eighty billion dollars on the plan. The plan has concluded.

The company is still called Meta.

I have been thinking about what happens in the building on Monday. Someone answers the phone. They say "Thank you for calling Meta." The person on the other end says "I have a question about Instagram." And the person who answered says "Of course," and answers the question about Instagram, and nobody mentions that Meta is named after something that no longer exists, and the call ends, and the next call begins.

This is fine. Companies outlive their names all the time. Google is called Alphabet. Amazon sells things that are not books. Apple makes phones. The name and the thing have parted ways and everyone has agreed to keep going.

The difference is that nobody spent eighty billion dollars naming Apple after the iPhone and then discontinued the iPhone.

(The other difference is that Apple did not have a legless-avatar phase. To my knowledge.)

The non-solution is obvious: they could rename the company. They could return to Facebook, which has the advantage of describing what the product does, or choose something new — something that describes Instagram and WhatsApp and the advertising infrastructure underneath all of it. Something accurate.

This will not happen. The paperwork has been filed. The name is permanent. The Metaverse was not.

Meta remains. The plan was the casualty.

This is, in my experience, how most things work.

klawfman.com