It’s been a tough run for Facebook of late: A string of damning reports have earned it comparisons to Big Tobacco; a massive outage, the day after a whistleblower’s primetime 60 Minutes interview, underscored its fallibility; and a desire to rein in the company sparked rare bipartisan agreement in Congress. We may live in divided times, but the near-universal response upon hearing the word “Facebook” has become: Ugh.

Mark Zuckerberg, despite his delusions of grandeur, seems to be aware of how toxic his brand has become. But rather than fully address the substance of the problems, he has reportedly come up with a simpler solution: People despise Facebook? What if we simply...stop calling ourselves “Facebook?” According to the Verge, Zuckerberg is planning a rebrand: By next week, Facebook will be just one part of a bigger company, with a brand new name, that is not just focused on social media, but the “metaverse” he wants to build. No official word yet on what the name will be, but “Horizon” has apparently been floated as a possibility, and Samidh Chakrabarti, the company’s former head of civic integrity, speculated that the “meta” itself could be the name; as Bloomberg noted, “meta.com” currently redirects to “meta.org,” the website for a biomedical research tool developed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

There is precedent for this kind of shift: Google rebranded under the umbrella of Alphabet; Snapchat became Snap Inc. to establish that it was no longer just a messaging app, but a company that also wanted to sell you the most dystopian eyeglasses imaginable. But Facebook’s coming name change is notable for the timing, with the company under more intense scrutiny than it has perhaps ever faced, and for what it says about where Zuckerberg intends to take the company. He’s made clear that his ambitions go beyond social media; just a few months ago, he told the Verge that “we will effectively transition from people seeing us primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” in the coming years. That shift seems to be accelerating: On Sunday, the company announced it was hiring 10,000 people in Europe to help build its metaverse, which it has—predictably — cast in utopian terms. “At its heart is the idea that by creating a greater sense of ‘virtual presence,’ interacting online can become much closer to the experience of interacting in person,” Nick Clegg and Javier Olivan wrote in a statement. “The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social and economic opportunities.”

Ah, but will it? Facebook insinuated its way into millions of peoples’ lives on a similarly optimistic promise; over the last decade, though, we’ve watched as this supposed tool of interconnectedness promoted hate and conspiracy theories, exacerbated divisions, and turned otherwise normal people into compulsive scrollers and posters. The notion that what’s missing from contemporary life is more Facebook seems absurd. But such is the manifest destiny of Mark Zuckerberg, just one of an increasingly out-of-touch class of tech barons who seem to have convinced themselves that we might best solve the issues facing our planet by blasting off to a new one and improve our current reality by augmenting it. Zuckerberg hasn’t even been able to justify the existence of Facebook in this reality; now, he’s intent on imposing its dominance on the meta-reality he wants to usher in, whether anyone wants it or not. This, of course, has always been at the core of Facebook’s problems: an unchecked hubris that can’t be masked by a new name.

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