Facebook's dystopian rebrand is probably coming next week

Mark Zuckerberg’s omnipresent dystopian megacorp will reportedly enter its Final Form™ next week, emerging from its years’ long incubation within a womb sustained by invasive data mining, predatory antitrust strategies, and a dedication to sowing socio-political chaos for ad revenue. Sadly, it will not be called Fecebook.

Speaking to The Verge last night, an anonymous source revealed Facebook is set to rebrand and rename next week to “reflect its focus on building the metaverse.” One rumored name for the new umbrella company, also encompassing social media platforms like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, is Horizon... which certainly sounds like an appropriate moniker for our future off-world colony taskmasters.

Leaning extremely hard into the metaverse — In July, Zuckerberg previously told The Verge that the next few years’ strategy involves transitioning from “primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company,” and he’s showed no signs of deviating from that strategy since then. Recently, Zuckerberg added over 10,000 jobs within his VR development branch, showing just how committed the guy is to making something first coined in a dystopian sci-fi novel a reality. It’s clear that Zuck truly believes the metaverse is the next logical, even inevitable, step for digital culture and consumption, and is betting it all on getting there first.

On the Horizon — Back in August, Facebook debuted Horizon Workrooms, a VR collaborative workspace for the Oculus Quest 2, and recently rebranded its upcoming VR social media platform to Horizon Worlds. It stands to reason that Horizon will be the go-to umbrella name for all of Zuck’s metaverse machinations, despite its obvious phonetic similarities to a certain, preexisting telecom giant.

So creepy even Jack Dorsey slammed it — Look, you know something is a bad idea when even Twitter’s CEO publicly comes out against the project. Around the same time The Verge published its Facebook rebrand leak, Jack Dorsey retweeted someone criticizing people wanting to embrace “metaverse” terminology. “What if neal [sic] was right?” the original tweet asks, referring to author Neal Stephenson’s original usage of the metaverse to refer to a “virtual world owned by corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship.” “NARRATOR He was,” Dorsey tweeted in response. Shots fired... er, tweeted.

In any case, Twitter’s CEO has long vocalized his support for decentralization of the internet — particularly when it comes to things like Bitcoin — so roasting Zuckerberg’s grand unified theory of metaverse is certainly on brand for Phish Phan Tyrion Lannister. Let’s meet back here next week to slam Facebook’s official announcement, shall we?