Metamessages

No doubt the best satirical reaction to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that his company, Facebook, would henceforth be known as Meta came from the keyboard of Caroline Suzuki, who runs the Twitter account for ECW Press, the independent publisher in Toronto. “ECW Press is changing its name to Facebook now that it’s up for grabs,” she tweeted in late October. “We are a company that builds technology to connect your face to a book and we’re excited for our name to finally reflect that. No more ‘What does ECW stand for?’ Simple. Original. Your face — in a book.”

It was in such a book, Snow Crash, that the American novelist Neal Stephenson coined the term “Metaverse” nearly thirty years ago — a term that Zuckerberg has now clipped as short as his trademark hair. Stephenson’s narrator describes the Metaverse as “a computer-generated universe” that takes the form of an “imaginary...