【1976 Archives】

976 Archivescompany formerly known as Facebook would like you to know that it's all about the metaverse. And it's not going to stop until the word is imprinted in your brain — even though no one is really sure what it means.

In a public note posted on Facebook and directed primarily at employees, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook and CEO of its umbrella company Meta Platforms Inc, has outlined a new set of values that he believes the company's employees should adhere to.

Meta employees should "move fast," he wrote, "build awesome things," and "live in the future." They should also "focus on long-term impact," and "be direct" while respecting their colleagues. These wisdom nuggets sound nice though they mean very little if the corporation behind them doesn't create an environment in which its employees can truly live by them — and there are indications that Facebook hasn't always done that (unless "long-term impact" means "bigger profits down the line.")

But the one guideline that will surely catch everyone's attention is the mention of "Meta, Metamates, Me," which Zuckerberg claims, "is about being good stewards of our company and mission. It's about the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates. It's about taking care of our company and each other."

I guess Meta employees are now referred to by the company as "metamates," which is a continuation of Zuckerberg's insistence of distancing from anything "face" and focusing on everything "meta."

According to a Twitter post from soon-to-be Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the "Meta, Metamates, Me" phrase is derived from a naval phrase "ship, shipmates, self." In my mind, this ordering of words means something like this: employees should first consider the wellbeing of the company, then the wellbeing of fellow employees, then their own wellbeing.

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That's kind of awkward. In a military context, the "ship, shipmates, self" phrase has different connotations than in the context of working for a corporation — does Meta really expect its employees to put the company's wellbeing in front of their own?

The term "metamates" would also probably make more sense if anyone really knew what Meta means by "meta."

A short history of Meta's metaverse

Last year, Zuckerberg started insisting that Facebook's future is a virtual experience called the "metaverse." In October 2021, Facebook was rebranded as Meta Platforms, a new umbrella corporation that owns social media properties including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Soon after, Meta announced massive spending and hiring plans in order to build the metaverse, and the word "meta" started appearing across the company's ecosystem of apps.

Nothing strange about that; it's the company's new name after all. But what is the metaverse, really? While talking about the term, Zuckerberg mentioned virtual reality, augmented reality, games, virtual meetings, and (for some reason) NFTs, among other things, but it's unclear how it all connects in a cohesive whole (by the way, you should read our primer on the history of the term "metaverse").

Let me tell you what Facebook's metaverse is right now: it's a few tools for meetings in virtual environments. It's games and experiences on Facebook's Oculus virtual reality platform. It's a pair of not-very-good smart glasses. It's a failed digital currency project. It's a vague notion that people will soon be spending a large portion of their lives in fully virtual worlds (a notion in which Apple, notably, doesn't seem to believe in right now). It's something that reportedly sounds worrying even to some Meta employees. And it's a bunch of rumors and teasers about Meta's upcoming products and services. It's not nothing, but it's definitely not taking over the world.

Let's just keep our meta pants on for now.