After facing a wave of controversy stemming from a recent whistleblower report that damningly lays bare the platform’s complicity in allowing misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread, plus that whole thing about attempting to lure children onto its Facebook Kids platform by essentially figuring out how to disrupt play dates, an embattled Facebook has announced that it will be rebranding itself later this week.
As part of the new initiative, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will “effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.” As for what the heck that metaverse part means, the most likely answer is that Facebook will be leaning hard into its virtual and augmented reality applications, which caught the attention of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Never one to miss a chance to troll Facebook, Dorsey responded to a user who couldn’t help but notice a jarring similarity between Zuckerberg’s latest initiative and a classic sci-fi book, Snowcrash:
the word “metaverse” was coined by neal stephenson in the book “snowcrash” 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
In a quote tweet, Dorsey wrote, “Narrator: He was.”
NARRATOR
He was. https://t.co/U4XnXCmeeG
— jack
(@jack) October 20, 2021
It was yet another move from the Twitter CEO who had some fun ribbing Facebook for its massive outage earlier in the month, which saw the platform go down for almost eight hours. Thanks to a DNS error, the Facebook domain was for sale, which prompted Dorsey to joke on Twitter: “How much?”
(Via Jack Dorsey on Twitter)