Bay Area reporters are dancing around what actually just happened.
Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to “Meta” in October 2021 because the Facebook name had become synonymous with election manipulation, teen mental health destruction, and genocide facilitation in Myanmar.
The metaverse was never a product.
It was PR to avoid accountability for documented crimes against humanity. If you’re just a Meta company instead of whatever came before, you can’t really be charged with crimes. Get it? Facebook was yesterday. Nothing is real today because it’s Meta, not even laws, perception itself is controlled by Zuckerberg in his unilaterally defined “verse”.
For three years, the company poured $71 billion into building legless avatars with no rights for an empty private virtual world that even their own employees refused to use.
The business press dutifully covered quarterly losses as if it were a “long-term bet” on future paradise, rather than what it was: an expensive disinformation campaign to hide Meta’s actual business model. Converting the politically-driven surveillance of 3 billion people into advertising revenue had a new name, while changing exactly nothing.
The cover story was weak, despite billions propping it up—Elon Musk knows the playbook, his driverless Tesla always just around the corner. The absurd metaverse of Meta finally has become too embarrassing to defend.
And the 1,000 people at Meta who believed it the most? They will be sacrificed now, while the predatory company announces a “pivot to wearables”, as if the metaverse wasn’t always about wearables from the very start.
Who wants to sign up today and replace the 1,000 workers who just got treated like shit, because 2026 wearable work won’t be like 2016 wearable work?
Meatspace surveillance cameras for your face sound as bad as they are. The entire concept is just a tool for power struggle, attracting privileged young men to assert public domination in a gladiator combat fetish costume. A recent incident on the subway is foreshadowing.
A New York subway rider is going viral after a TikToker accused her of breaking his Meta AI glasses, a moment that instantly made her a folk hero…. The eyewear, which can discreetly record video, has been criticized as a creeping surveillance threat. …the internet has already taken her side, celebrating her as the anti-AI vigilante of their dreams.
Notice how the framing in every news story is still about “Meta cuts jobs”. Is that really the story? “The company announced layoffs.” Passive voice. No actor. No responsibility. And no mystery why.
So let me rewrite the news as accurately as possible, while others dance around an ugly elephant as if they can’t see it:
Mark Zuckerberg spent $71 billion on a vanity propaganda project, to curate and rehabilitate his reputation. The Emperor needed new clothes.
New hair, new workout, who’s this?
The actual product failed completely, while the makeover worked, and now workers are being discarded to clean up his mess while he moves on to a new flavor of the same fantasy. Why does everyone need clunky surveillance glasses? Who wants ugly gladiator goggles? Expect marketing phrases like “cognitive disadvantage” to spin the surveillance.
The metaverse wasn’t a business strategy. It was radical narrative cover, to prevent victims ever seeing any justice. The layoffs aren’t an operational adjustment. They’re evidence disposal.
The actual business of Facebook remains unchanged: collect and harvest humans, selling their extracted value to advertisers and politicians, rename and repeat.
Full disclosure: I worked with the original Facebook security team and deleted my account in 2009, as I wrote here in 2011, when it was already clear data privacy and integrity were intentionally undermined, and Russian money was funding the platform for objectives without transparency. As I wrote then:
Zuckerberg faced serious charges of breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy.