One Year After Facebook Went Meta, It's Built a Multiverse of Problems
Well, Meta sure is in a bit of a mess. The company formerly known as Facebook rang in its one-year anniversary last week but had very little reason .
Well, Meta sure is in a bit of a mess. The company formerly known as Facebook rang in its one-year anniversary last week but had very little reason to celebrate. Instead, an unfortunate Q3 earnings report showed that, since its inception last October, the company has lost a gargantuan amount of money in its quest to create “the metaverse”—a hypothetical new realm where it wants all of us to live.
How did we end up here, exactly?
It all started twelve months ago, when, in the heat of a whistleblower scandal, it looked like Congress might actually crack down on Facebook. Leaked documents—what came to be known as the Facebook Papers—had revealed the company’s harmful impact on young people, its ineptitude with misinformation, and its algorithmic toxicity. As a result, regulation talk was afoot. U.S. Representatives were threatening antitrust action and activists were demanding a break up. Things were looking pretty bad.
It was then that a thunderclap of inspiration must’ve struck over a Menlo Park boardroom somewhere: if things were getting too hot to handle in the real world, why couldn’t Facebook simply invent a new world? Yesss...a new world—this could be the pivot of a lifetime! And hey, the company had changed the rules of the game before—it could definitely innovate its way out of this.
Thus, after a meeting I’m sure resembled some watered down version of that “change the conversation” scene from Mad Men, The Facebook Company became “Meta Platforms” and something called the “metaverse” was born.
What was the metaverse? Zuck and his cohort envisioned a bold digitization of our world—supported by hardware and infrastructure that hadn’t been built yet. It would be fueled by investments in the most emergent and exciting technologies, from virtual reality to augmented reality to holograms to cryptocurrency. As the leader of a push to transform the digital economy, Meta could be a pioneer—an explorer going where no tech firm had gone before. Sure, in a lot of cases, the tech wasn’t quite there yet to actually build this world, but, in the meantime, such shortcomings could be obscured via advertising and animation and hyperbolic rhetoric. All of this could be used to sorta...paint the picture of what the metaverse would look like someday...maybe.
Anyway, what did it matter? The point was this: the company had to do something big to make people look at it differently—and this was it.
Yes, Facebook’s transformation into Meta always had to be two things at once: a desperate optics shift and a genuine redirect in business strategy. Maybe the company had always envisioned broader investments in AR/VR but crisis forced it to accelerate? We don’t really know. What we do know is that the company’s massive pivot to a place called the “metaverse” seems to have only caused it more headaches over the past year: namely, billions spent on dubious investments, plummeting profits, worried investors, and a slew of hackneyed digital products that people don’t actually want to use. In a word, Meta’s “first year” has been terrible.
Will things get better? That’s unclear. Zuck certainly thinks so, though others have their doubts. We decided to take a look back at the past twelve months to highlight key events involving “the metaverse”—an imagined place that Meta has promised to build but that, as far as we can tell, still doesn’t exist yet.
Our story begins in the dark days of early October, 2021, when the company known as Facebook is besieged on all sides. Frances Haugen, a former employee turned traitorous whistleblower, has leaked extensive documentation of the company’s sins to the press. The Facebook Papers, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, expose a raft of concerns: antitrust issues, privacy issues, psychological health issues—the list seems endless. Meanwhile, a host of longstanding p...
Well, Meta sure is in a bit of a mess. The company formerly known as Facebook rang in its one-year anniversary last week but had very little reason to celebrate. Instead, an unfortunate Q3 earnings report showed that, since its inception last October, the company has lost a gargantuan amount of money in its quest to create “the metaverse”—a hypothetical new realm where it wants all of us to live.
How did we end up here, exactly?
It all started twelve months ago, when, in the heat of a whistleblower scandal, it looked like Congress might actually crack down on Facebook. Leaked documents—what came to be known as the Facebook Papers—had revealed the company’s harmful impact on young people, its ineptitude with misinformation, and its algorithmic toxicity. As a result, regulation talk was afoot. U.S. Representatives were threatening antitrust action and activists were demanding a break up. Things were looking pretty bad.
It was then that a thunderclap of inspiration must’ve struck over a Menlo Park boardroom somewhere: if things were getting too hot to handle in the real world, why couldn’t Facebook simply invent a new world? Yesss...a new world—this could be the pivot of a lifetime! And hey, the company had changed the rules of the game before—it could definitely innovate its way out of this.
Thus, after a meeting I’m sure resembled some watered down version of that “change the conversation” scene from Mad Men, The Facebook Company became “Meta Platforms” and something called the “metaverse” was born.
What was the metaverse? Zuck and his cohort envisioned a bold digitization of our world—supported by hardware and infrastructure that hadn’t been built yet. It would be fueled by investments in the most emergent and exciting technologies, from virtual reality to augmented reality to holograms to cryptocurrency. As the leader of a push to transform the digital economy, Meta could be a pioneer—an explorer going where no tech firm had gone before. Sure, in a lot of cases, the tech wasn’t quite there yet to actually build this world, but, in the meantime, such shortcomings could be obscured via advertising and animation and hyperbolic rhetoric. All of this could be used to sorta...paint the picture of what the metaverse would look like someday...maybe.
Anyway, what did it matter? The point was this: the company had to do something big to make people look at it differently—and this was it.
Yes, Facebook’s transformation into Meta always had to be two things at once: a desperate optics shift and a genuine redirect in business strategy. Maybe the company had always envisioned broader investments in AR/VR but crisis forced it to accelerate? We don’t really know. What we do know is that the company’s massive pivot to a place called the “metaverse” seems to have only caused it more headaches over the past year: namely, billions spent on dubious investments, plummeting profits, worried investors, and a slew of hackneyed digital products that people don’t actually want to use. In a word, Meta’s “first year” has been terrible.
Will things get better? That’s unclear. Zuck certainly thinks so, though others have their doubts. We decided to take a look back at the past twelve months to highlight key events involving “the metaverse”—an imagined place that Meta has promised to build but that, as far as we can tell, still doesn’t exist yet.
Our story begins in the dark days of early October, 2021, when the company known as Facebook is besieged on all sides. Frances Haugen, a former employee turned traitorous whistleblower, has leaked extensive documentation of the company’s sins to the press. The Facebook Papers, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, expose a raft of concerns: antitrust issues, privacy issues, psychological health issues—the list seems endless. Meanwhile, a host of longstanding p...
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