In 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta. A bold move.
The name Meta came from “the metaverse", an idea from
dystopian novels of a place where people escaped from a hellish real world. And
the move was based on a simple idea: the future would happen inside headsets.
We’d all wander into a glossy digital elsewhere while the real world quietly
smoldered in the background.
Mark Zuckerberg seemed convinced this was where life was
headed: goggles on, reality optional.
Now that whole push toward virtual reality has mostly…
evaporated. Not dramatically. Not with a cinematic collapse. Just a slow
corporate shrug, the way trends usually die …fading like a New Year’s resolution.
What fascinates me isn’t that the bet failed. Big bets fail
all the time. It’s the speed of it.
The company renamed itself after something that was supposed
to be the future… and that future never managed to become the present. It
skipped straight to the past. It promised disruption, but ended up speed-running
obsolescence.
There’s something oddly perfect about a tech company doing
that. The tech industry worships the future so intensely that sometimes it
trips over it, face-plants, and accidentally invents nostalgia for last week.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are still just using our phones to
text people and watch cat videos. Reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to go out
of style.
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