Image via New York Magazine, “Mark Zuckerberg trying on Mark Zuckerberg outfits”

The wait is finally over for those losing sleep over Facebook’s much-hyped new name reveal. Drumroll, please…it’s Meta. Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change during a Facebook Connect presentation on Thursday. The rebrand comes at a contentious time for Facebook, as it battles whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s Facebook Papers scandal, faltering public trust ratings, and a long-embroiled antitrust suit spanning multiple continents.

As the brand pivots focus from social media to the metaverse, it’s clear that what Zuckerberg lacks in creative ideas for business names, he makes up for in ambition. Facebook already has more the 10,000 employees working on augmented and virtual reality hardware and $10 billion slated to make the metaverse a reality.

Despite the illustrative media release, it’s unclear what Zuckerberg’s vision of a metaverse will look like in practice. Meta’s mission to create an “embodied internet”, to quote Zuckerberg, will provide an interesting case study for what the future may hold in one form or another.

As Project Q steps into our own meta-world-making project of Quantum Meta-Ethics, some critical questions arise. Where does “meta” come from? What does the metaverse have to do with quantum? Will it be better (or much, much worse) than the real thing?  Or as they ask in parts of Boston, is meta always bettah? Stay tuned for the answers.