• Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, made fun of the metaverse on Tuesday.
  • Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, said he wants Facebook to become a "metaverse company."
  • Dorsey agreed with a tweet that said the metaverse could be "a dystopian corporate dictatorship."

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has made fun of the "metaverse," a concept Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing as the future of both Facebook and the internet at large.

The "metaverse" refers to a future version of the internet where, instead of accessing the web through laptops and phones, people use virtual-reality and augmented-reality devices to enter a virtual space. 

Dorsey indicated late on Tuesday that he thought the idea was dystopian.

A Twitter user tweeted about Zuckerberg's metaverse ambitions, mentioning that the term was first coined by the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel "Snow Crash." The user said, "It originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship."

The user asked, "What if Neal was right?"

Dorsey responded to the tweet: "NARRATOR He was."

Zuckerberg told The Verge in July that he wanted Facebook to eventually become a "metaverse company."

Facebook announced on Monday that it intended to hire 10,000 people in Europe over the next five years to help build the metaverse.

The Verge reported on Tuesday that Facebook was considering a rebrand, changing its name to focus more heavily on its metaverse ambitions.

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