Okay so it's been almost a week and I'm still annoyed about this, so you get a blog post about it.
Facebook (the company, not the app) announced last Thursday that it's now called Meta. Zuckerberg did the whole keynote thing, walked through a VR pitch deck, showed off a blue infinity-loop logo, the works. The Facebook app is still called Facebook. Instagram is still Instagram. WhatsApp is still WhatsApp. It's the holding company that got the new name, the way Google's parent became Alphabet a few years back. Nobody scrolling their feed this morning noticed a single thing changed.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's a small one, but it's been bugging me all week: "meta" wasn't a blank word sitting around waiting for a corporation to claim it. It already meant something in tech, specifically. If you've built a website any time in the last two decades you've written a meta tag. Meta description, meta keywords (RIP, nobody's cared about that one since like 2009), meta viewport for mobile. I was messing with this blog's meta descriptions back around 2012 trying to figure out why Google wasn't indexing certain posts properly, and "meta" just meant the boring invisible header stuff nobody sees but search engines read. That's still what it means to me, honestly, before it means a $900-something-billion company.
And it's not just HTML. Programmers say "meta" constantly for anything self-referential: a meta conversation about how you're having a conversation, a meta joke about the joke you just told. Stack Exchange has entire "meta" sites bolted onto every one of its communities where people argue about moderation policy. Reddit's had meta threads forever. It's such an established piece of nerd vocabulary that watching a trillion-dollar ad company try to make it mean "the guys who own Instagram" feels less like a rebrand and more like someone walking into a bar and insisting everyone now call the bathroom "the lounge," because that's their new brand word for it. You can insist all you want. People are going to keep using the word the way they already used it.
I get why they did it, or at least I get the theory. October was rough for Facebook-the-brand. The whistleblower testimony, the internal documents getting leaked to basically every major outlet, senators dragging executives in front of cameras. A lot of bad weeks stacked up right before this announcement. Renaming the parent company doesn't erase any of that, but it does give headline writers a new noun to use that isn't dragging quite as much baggage yet. Give it six months and "Meta" will carry its own baggage too, these things don't stay clean for long, but I understand the short-term math of wanting a reset button.
What I don't fully buy is the framing that this is about the metaverse being the next big platform shift. Maybe it is! I'm not qualified to bet against Zuckerberg's read on where computing goes next, he's been right about scale before in ways a lot of smart people doubted. But the demo reel they showed was legs-less avatars floating around low-poly rooms, and it's supposed to be the thing worth restructuring an entire company's public identity around. I'll believe the metaverse is a real product category and not a rebrand-flavored press release when I can put on a headset that doesn't give me a headache after twenty minutes. Ask anyone who owns a VR headset how often it actually gets used past the first month. I have a cousin who bought one last Christmas and it's been in a closet since March.
My mom texted me Monday asking if Facebook was "shutting down" because someone at her book club mentioned the news. That's the whole rebrand in a nutshell, really — enough noise to reach a 60-something book club by way of a friend-of-a-friend, not enough clarity for anyone to actually know what changed. Nothing changed for her. Her app icon still says Facebook, still has the same blue, still shows the same posts from the same people. Somewhere in a Delaware filing cabinet the parent entity has a new legal name. That's it, that's the whole thing.
Anyway. I needed to write that out of my system. Back to regular posting soon.