Amid a string of accusations and controversies following the publication of a whistleblower’s report, Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to rebrand Facebook with a new name but some of his tech contemporaries aren’t buying it.
Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that, as part of a new initiative, they would “effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
What that means remains to be seen but it has been reported that the company could be looking at producing augmented and virtual reality apps. However, the use of the word “metaverse” has raised some eyebrows, notably those of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey, who is no stranger to trolling Facebook, responded to a tweet that highlighted that the word “metaverse” was invented by author Neal Stephenson for his 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash – about a dense digital network that begins to bleed into reality.
Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter
The tweet said: “The word ‘metaverse’ was coined by Neal Stephenson in the book “Snow Crash” and it originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship.
“What if Neal was right?”
Dorsey chimed in to respond to the question by saying: “Narrator: He was.”
NARRATOR
— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 20, 2021
He was. https://t.co/U4XnXCmeeG
Earlier this month, Dorsey joked about buying Facebook after the social media giant experienced a massive outage that also affected their sister apps Instagram and WhatsApp.
how much? https://t.co/fH0zXw7rV9
— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 4, 2021
What Facebook’s new name will be remains to be seen but it’ll take a lot to fix some of the problems that it has been accused of. As congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sarcastically said in response to the planned name change: “That’ll fix it.”
