The company formerly known as Facebook has been both loved and hated over the years. These are the weirdest things that happened during the creation of Meta.
The company formerly known as Facebook has been both loved and hated over the years, but its influence is undeniable. From a dorm room at Harvard, Facebook emerged as the dominant player in social media, reaching a billion users by 2012. It upended the way we communicate, made the concept of «Facebook official» relationships a thing, and completed its dominance by snapping up hot new social apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp. But as the company followed founder Mark Zuckerberg’s «Move fast and break things» motto, the disasters began to pile up. The social network was putting elections at risk. It was held responsible by a major human rights organization for genocide in Myanmar (via PBS).
As Facebook’s public image cratered, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced one of the largest pivots in tech history. As of October 2021, the company formerly known as Facebook was now called Meta, and its mission was to develop something called «the metaverse.» Think «Ready Player One» but without the sense of childlike, nostalgic wonder. Think being forced to strap a box to your head as a prerequisite for joining that Zoom meeting that could have been an email.
Directing attention away from the product that made Facebook a household name was strange on its own. However, given that Meta had seen some success in the virtual reality space since its acquisition of Oculus, the move wasn’t entirely illogical. But since the reorganization, the arc of Meta’s trajectory has been spectacularly bizarre. From the humorous to the surreal, and even the disconcerting and concerning, here are the weirdest things that happened during the creation of Meta and its metaverse.
When Meta founder and noted barbeque sauce enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the metaverse in October of 2021, few knew what to make of the sea change. Despite Facebook’s floundering and a loss of public trust, Zuckerberg had irrevocably changed the world once before, and it was possible he would do so again. But the product demos Meta showed off were uncanny, to say the least, and the notion that Meta’s metaverse products are underbaked only grew from that point forward.
It didn’t help that Zuckerberg, who has often presented in public as awkward and a bit robotic, demoed the product himself, stepping into a virtual world as an avatar of himself that was somehow more lifelike than the real thing while also looking like a Nintendo Mii avatar from 2006. Some may have reasoned that it was still early days, and that the graphics would improve over time. But when Zuckerberg posted a VR selfie from the VR Eiffel Tower one full year later, it became evident that Meta was lagging behind even third-party metaverse apps. In many ways, Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatar was even worse than it had looked at launch, and the internet seized on the moment to mock him with memes (via Business Insider).
But Meta and Zuckerberg’s self-inflicted public shaming was far from over.
One thing most people have in the real world is a pair of legs. It’s easy to take them for granted, as Mark Zuckerberg reminded the public with Meta’s most roundly mocked feature announcement. In October 2022, the «Meta Horizon» Twitter account posted, «Legs coming soon! Are you excited?» The tweet was accompanied by a video of Zuckerberg’s low-polygon-count digital form jumping up and down. It did, indeed, have legs.
But if Zuckerberg was expecting people to jump for joy (pun intended), the bizarre announcement had the opposite effect, reminding people just how bafflingly far behind smaller competitors Meta’s multibillion-dollar VR platform was. Other social VR platforms, such as the widely popular VR Chat, have had head-to-toe avatars for quite some time, and allow for a much broader range of virtual expression. Pretending that the addition of legs to «Horizon» avatars was some sort of great leap forward only reiterated to the public how out-of-touch Zuckerberg seemed to be.
The legs announcement would turn out to be weirder and even more pathetic than it first seemed, as the hilarious truth about the legs came to light shortly thereafter.
Despite the surreal and head-scratching nature of Meta’s legs announcement, no one had any reason to doubt its veracity. A company of Meta’s size should have no trouble adding legs to VR avatars because it seems like a basic, bare bones feature. And yet, the legs turned out to be a lie. As SlashGear reported, Meta admitted it added the legs using motion capture technology to create the announcement video. As of this writing, users of «Meta Horizons» are still rendered from the waist up, floating above the ground like ghosts.
All of this prompts questions about why Meta made a big splash over adding legs in the first place. Sure, the company needed a public relations boost, but who thought that boost should come in the form of legs for digital avatars? For most major tech companies, such a feature would barely be worth a tweet. And why lie about it when it was almost inevitable the deception would be quickly revealed? The entire debacle feels like a satirical plot point from HBO’s «Silicon Valley.
