Friday 29 October 2021
Beware of fraudulent labeling
Facebook is now called Meta – does that change anything?
By Diana Dittmer
Whether Raider or Twix, Facebook or Meta – in the end it doesn’t matter what nickname Mark Zuckerberg gives his company. Meta names are rarely suitable for everyday use. It’s about content. While some are cracking their jokes in the net, others smell a fig leaf.
Names are a matter of taste – this applies to both people and companies. You can’t please everyone. What is certain, however, is that everyone likes to comment on new names. It is the same with the renaming of Facebook to Meta. One day later, “Likes”, angry emojis and jokes show how divided the network is.
The Wendy’s fast food chain spontaneously announced on Thursday that it would change its name to “Meat”. The entry was retweeted 30,000 times within a short period of time. Twitter boss Jack Dorsey also commented. He found the new name confusing, he wrote. It is not clear to him what he is referring to. Meta is “self-referential”. Robert Scoble, a virtual reality enthusiast and blogger from Silicon Valley, put his finger deeper into the wound. He criticized Facebook as “the wrong company to sell us the future”.
Facebook had recently received a lot of criticism after revelations by the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. Haugen accuses her former employer of putting its own profits above the safety of its users and the common good.
“Not a new cola situation”
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg gained understanding from a “namesake”. Matthew Ball, a strategist and co-head of the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, which is listed on the NYSE as $ META. “This is not a New Cola situation,” Ball apparently tried to bring more seriousness into the matter. “We’re not talking about a new product here, but about belief in a fundamentally new level of human existence.” The duplication of names doesn’t bother him. “Meta” is a “prefix”, so trademark protection is not possible, he wrote.
With Meta, Mark Zuckerberg wants to set a new direction and show where the big picture is heading: Meta, based on “Metaverse” or “Metaversum”, stands for a virtual space that the 37-year-old defined with words such as the “next generation of the Internet” which describes the “next chapter” and “successor to the mobile Internet”. It should reflect that the company has outgrown Facebook – or could grow beyond it in the future.
It means diving into deeper virtual spheres that we don’t even know today. The physical and digital world should merge, borders should disappear. In practice, real objects should be scanned and projected into the real world as holograms.
People should be able to come together almost realistically – as avatars. They should play chess or table tennis with each other as if they were really in the same room. Grandparents should be able to experience their grandchildren in a setting as if they were with them. Metaversum should also be used in working life. Instead of team conferences in front of monitors, people should sit together at a conference table in the future. The presence effect is intended to create closeness where there is none in reality.
A long term project
The idea may seem like a technological revolution. The catch is that it is still a long way off. Raider or Twix, Facebook or Meta, that doesn’t change anything. The name change after 15 years may be full of fantasy and symbolism. But it is still a headbirth that has yet to be filled with content. The ecosystem of applications – comparable to apps for smartphones – that is supposed to exist one day has yet to be developed in the next few years.
It has not yet been decided whether Meta will keep what the name promises in the future. It remains to be seen which tech company will win the race when it comes to Metaversum. The competitors Microsoft, Nvidia or the video game manufacturer Epic Games (“Fortnite”) are not sleeping.
Mark Zuckerberg himself describes it as a very long-term project that will not generate any profits for years. The company expects investments in this area to cut operating profit by $ 10 billion this year alone. He recently announced that he would create 10,000 jobs in Europe to advance his Metaversum strategy. That’s good news, after all.
Protest in front of the Houses of Parliament in London: Mark Zuckerberg is surfing a wave of money on a poster and is holding a sign in his hands that reads “I know we harm children, but I don’t care”.
(Photo: picture alliance / dpa / AP)
Meta is – at least for the moment – just an empty shell, a typical reaching for the stars. At least Zuckerberg does not run the risk of identity or brand recognition going wrong. Because the names Facebook, Instagram and Whatapp will remain. That is not unusual either. Apart from stockbrokers, nobody says alphabet either. Everyone is talking about Google. Similar to Facebook, Google set up a holding company with the new name over the company in 2015 to signal that it no longer only operates a search engine and a cloud business, but also has ambitions for driverless cars, health solutions and other high-tech areas cherishes.
Comparison with Philip Morris
More important than the proof that the Metaversum vision will not be smoke and mirrors in the future is something else for critics on the Internet: One is reminiscent of the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, who changed its name to Altria in 2003 – and draws a damning comparison: “Facebook is following in Big Tobacco’s footsteps after the industry was exposed for its toxic and deadly effects on society,” writes Mike Davis of the Internet Accountability Project, a conservative group partially funded by Google rival Oracle.
“Philip Morris was caught exploiting children, so they became Altria. Facebook was caught exploiting children, so they became meta,” the well-known Facebook critic continued. Zuckerberg himself speaks of image cultivation in connection with the renaming. His “next chapter” confronts him with a double task – to get better at technology AND security, not only to reach for the stars technologically, but also to build his universe on other values. If hate speech and confusion theories are not put forward, the project is little more than the diversionary maneuver feared by critics and thus not just a headbirth, but a stillbirth.