The Concerning Implications of Facebook’s Rebrand to Meta
At first, I laughed at the recent announcements about Facebook’s rebrand to Meta, and the accompanying vision to build the ‘metaverse’.
Reading about their lofty goals to create VR-driven social existence for everyone, I joked that this is what it would have looked like to live in the prequel to The Matrix.
That was my initial hot take: Facebook are reaching ever further with their grand plan to trap us all in a depressing technological prison — and they ain’t being subtle about it.
But with more time to sit with things, I believe there’s something else we should be paying attention to: the danger here isn’t about whether we lose touch with the real world, it’s a subtle assault on the datasphere.
Unveiling Meta and the metaverse
In case you missed it, on October 28th, the company formally known as Facebook announced that they were changing their name to Meta.
Meta brings together all of Facebook’s apps and technologies (including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, among others) under this one brand and company.
Crucially, Meta’s focus will be a next generation immersive online platform called the metaverse.
The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world. It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.
— Meta Newsroom
For more on what the metaverse might look like, there is an 80 minute keynote to whet your appetitie. TL;DW : it’s VR on steroids, plus lots of lots of holograms.
Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more — instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.
— Zuckerberg’s Founder’s Letter
I’ll leave it to you whether this is super cool or entirely dystopian. There’s a much larger conversation to be had around the philosophy of all this — the importance of physical vs digital existence etc. — but that’s another diatribe for another day.
In any case, it’s clear that Meta’s vision is one where we are all brought more and more into the machine — into the digital realm. This says it all:
This isn’t about spending more time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.
— Zuckerberg’s Founder’s Letter
Worrying implications
At first, I got lost in the OTT metaverse concept: the real world is dead, long live virtual reality. I pondered over the social implications, thinking about the side effects on mental and physical health, the disconnection from reality, and the further handover of power and control to private corporations — all things that we’ve seen with previous and current generations of online technology.
Then I thought more about the name itself.
Meta — and its close linkage to the idea of metadata — seemed like an ironic choice of name for a company so often in trouble for its handling of their users’ data. I’m not the only one that noticed.
But maybe it’s not just ironic.
It’s possible that my tinfoil hat is on too tight today, but there’s an interesting point here. Following this line of thought, anything previously defined as a Facebook data (or Instagram data etc.), is now Meta data — confusingly similar to metadata.
What is metadata, anyway? In simple terms, it’s data that describes other data. Where data is content, metadata is description.
If you use a photo as an example of data, the metadata might include things like file size, format, what camera model took the image, GPS location etc. In the case of an email, metadata might include the sender, recipient(s), date, and subject. It’s like an electronic fingerprint.
When it comes to a hard and fast legal definition of metadata, it’s more complicated — as are debates surrounding where the line gets drawn between content and metadata, and what is and isn’t legally protected or exposed under various privacy and national security laws.
As with pretty much everything relating to our privacy and data in the digital world, the water is murky. And the Facebook rebrand makes it murkier.
Blurring the lines
This is my new hot take. It’s all about blurring the lines. Plausible deniability. Deliberately adding confusion into the mix.
As the Facebook family becomes Meta, to talk of “metadata” is different. The notion of “meta”+“data” takes on a new meaning(s).
Does this give Meta scope for broader ownership of the data they collect (their Meta data/our metadata), and the freedom to use it as they wish? Is there a clever linguistic technicality at play here that throws current definitions and rules further into question? I guess we’ll need to keep a keen eye on the user agreements, but Facebook/Meta have quite possibly co-oped the definition of metadata.
Or perhaps it’s more of an algorithmic concern. Perhaps over time google searches for metadata get lost amidst new references to Meta data. Maybe then we forget about the idea of metadata all together, or the old concept of metadata gets overwritten by the new consensus understanding — and where does that leave us?
It’s a small little shift in meaning, but it has the potential to change and redirect the conversations that crop up surrounding metadata in the future.
What’s in a word?
Maybe it will remain obvious that metadata and Meta data refer to different things. Could be, but again these are murky waters where things are already hard to define.
“Facebook” was a household name that plays a large role in modern culture, and as such the word features commonly in our everyday language. It’s not a stretch to think that “Meta” will too.
Over time, will the company take full symbolic ownership of the word? Will it be possible to think of meta-data, meta-physics, meta-ethics, meta-analysis, or meta-anything without mentally conjuring the Facebook umbrella corporation? Maybe this line of reasoning takes things a step too far, but the Facebook empire — especially with its new vision for the metaverse — appears to be a company that want to influence pretty much every aspect of our existence. (They have certainly made great strides to do so already). And now, as Meta, they have essentially privatised/protected/trademarked a significant part of our language.
In any case: names, labels, frames, signifiers — they shape the world we live in, and influence our understandings and our interactions.
It’s already begun.
Shortly after the Meta rebrand, the shares for a Canadian materials technology company named Meta Materials experienced a sharp spike.
Meta Materials spiked late on Thursday, for the same reason that Zoom Technologies rallied in 2019 and Signal Advance surged in January: It’s all about the name.
- CNBC
Blurred lines.
Conclusion
As they say, if you’re not paying for it, you are the product.
You are data, and that’s the most valuable resource in the world today.
Lest we forget, Facebook has a long rap sheet of shady activities — a rebrand isn’t enough to change that, or them.
