Neal Stephenson has long been credited as the creator of the “metaverse” as we’ve come to understand it in modern parlance. But Stephenson’s metaverse has many things our concepts don’t, including — most importantly — the possibility of chaos.
Reading Snow Crash — Stephenson’s 1992 novel that spends a significant amount of its narrative in the Metaverse — 20 years after its publication is an uncanny experience. In many ways, Snow Crash’s Metaverse is exactly what Big Tech wants the future to look like, with the ability to hop in and out of a virtual world at will. It also bears almost no resemblance to the cartoonish, legless office-based avatars we’ve seen from the likes of Meta and Microsoft.
