Meta and the Metaverse: The Plan to Move Daily Life Inside One Company’s Platform

On October 28, 2021, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg said the company would move from 2D screens toward the “metaverse”, a 3D space where people could work, learn, shop, play, and meet through avatars. He did not present it as a side project. In his founder’s letter, he wrote that all of the company’s products would point toward the metaverse and that Meta would be “metaverse-first”, not “Facebook-first”.

Behind the promise of a new world is a concrete question: if one company controls where people talk, work, and buy things, how much of daily life can that company see and shape? The rumor around Meta says the goal is not only to sell virtual-reality headsets. The goal is to move users out of separate apps and into one space, then collect data about body movements, reactions, and relationships inside that space.