Will Meta solve Facebook’s uncool identity crisis?

If there’s one person that is capable of fusing real life with virtual reality, surely it’s Zuckerberg — the unassuming high-tech billionaire. But why then isn’t Meta the hot topic of conversation? Why aren’t young people talking about how “cool” metaverse is?

Mark Zuckerberg is not the same suited, stoic man that appeared before the US Congress in 2018 and unearthed a new genre of Internet memes. One might think he would be, given that his company has been embroiled in a slew of scandals for some time now.

To make matters worse, an internal memo earlier this year revealed that Facebook is rapidly losing traction among the rising generation, the very audience Zuckerberg attempted to cater to when he invented Facebook as a trailblazing 19-year-old.

Suffice it to say, Zuckerberg must have a lot on his mind. But still, he’s the near-vibrant vision of a tech leader on the verge of a new breakthrough, one that he knows could reinstate his status as an omnipotent force. Ten years from now, we could try on clothes virtually, attend concerts and appear as a hologram at a friend’s house, even if they live on the other side of the planet.

With Facebook’s rebranding as Meta and the company’s shift towards a “metaverse first” outlook, Zuckerberg has said he is reclaiming the dystopian idea presented in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and moulding it into a utopia.

But nothing about present-day Facebook is utopic. Could a rebrand and new vision save it from the shackles of ongoing missteps and improprieties? For now, it’s a mere distraction. Could this facelift at least earn Facebook a few cool points from young adults and give the company the desperate validation it seeks from a generation accused of doing the same on social media? It seems unlikely.

A character in The Social Network, the 2010 biographical drama about the invention of Facebook, at one point says: “We don’t know what (Facebook) is yet. We just know that it’s cool.” The line strikes a chord — and not because it feels outdated to the person from a generation that has all but given up on Facebook. Rather, the words resonate because this is perhaps how Zuckerberg expects us to receive the metaverse.

But one might be hard-pressed to find a group of teens lounging around the trendiest, most Instagrammable coffee shop and saying these words: “We don’t know what Meta is yet. We just know that it’s cool.”

The idea of an immersive digital space should be more appealing, but for a world that is barely surviving the brutal pummels of misinformation, conspiracy theories and crumbling democracies, the metaverse is the antithesis of Zuckerberg’s paradisiacal ambitions.

But Facebook wasn’t always the supervillain of our lives. In 2011, a year synonymous with the Arab Spring, protesters graffitied a wall near the Ministry of Interior in Tunis with the words: “Thank you, Facebook.” This display of gratitude was an acknowledgement of Facebook’s role in helping activists organise protests and disseminate information.

Maybe we can cut Zuckerberg some slack and assume that this was the vision he always had for Facebook, for the platform to be a force for good and not the debacle that followed. After all, it’s hard to imagine that a 19-year-old intentionally set out to create a billion-dollar company that would one day turn online spaces into weapons, profit from human trafficking and foster suicidal thoughts among teenagers.

A recent Wall Street Journal report alleged that top officials at Facebook knew that Instagram would have a negative impact on teens’ mental health and body image, particularly young girls.

gopika@khaleejtimes.com