Editor's Note: The Metaverse is already here

This is a synthwave album cover. I couldn’t find the original source.

Hey Friends -

This post was almost as slippery as the Ethereum posts and for similar reasons - the Metaverse is such a broad and vague term that it is difficult to talk about clearly. I’m overall pretty pleased with where it landed.

Snow Crash was one of my favorite novels when I first read it in high school and is still one of my favorites to this day. It is astonishingly prescient and very fun. The vision it paints of the future felt outlandish but coherent in the nineties. Each passing year it seems less like a fever dream and more like a prophecy.

The quote from Snow Crash is longer than I would have liked but it is difficult to split up without losing the structure. I decided to keep it. I didn’t actually realize that Stephenson had invented the word Metaverse until I started researching for this article but as soon as I heard that it made perfect sense.

People spend too much time arguing about the definition of "meta." To me consulting the Ancient Greeks to try and understand a future technology feels completely backwards. Who cares what meta meant back then?¹ What matters is what Metaverse means to us now. I’m not even sure Neal Stephenson’s definition should get primacy anymore, though I think he and I have broadly similar views on the concept.

The idea that the Metaverse is the container universe is subtle and I probably could have expanded on it more. Reality is the thing that contains everything that exists. If something exists outside of your world, that something and your world both exist inside of some fundamentally more real container. It is this base layer shared acceptance that truly defines the Metaverse. A careful reading of Snow Crash makes that clear - Stephenson describes the Metaverse as a protocol, alludes to the technical underpinnings, points out that the Metaverse graphics are skeuomorphic.

Anyway, immersiveness is a trap. You can’t make a universally immersive product because everyone is immersed by different things. It isn’t one-size-fits-all. That isn’t to say that digital real estate in a compelling virtual world can’t be valuable - I expect some of it will be! But they will never be universally adopted. Imagine a virtual space that could technically or culturally encompass World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite. It would be incoherent.

There will be as many digital worlds as there are digital communities. People imagine the Metaverse will be a single monolithic experience like Facebook but instead they should be picturing an archipelago of neighboring worlds akin to Reddit. Different people want different things from their digital environments - the Metaverse needs to be flexible enough to meaningfully encompass all those things.

Every few years the tech industry creates a buzzword about a poorly understood technology and then uses that buzzword to mean so many things it becomes essentially meaningless. That is what happened with the dot-com era, with Web 2.0, with machine learning, with blockchain, with DeFi and now with Metaverse. When a word is popular enough with tech media it becomes useless for a period of time. The Metaverse is just the Internet for people who want to sound impressive.

This amazing graphic was sent in by a reader on the SI Discord.

I don’t think it’s necessarily problematic for people to have a word that lets them grapple with the parts of the future they find confusing and scary. The Metaverse is a way for us to talk about the digital promised land we’re trying to build. The conversation is a little incoherent because people’s visions of the future are also a little incoherent. It’s only the people who want to sell you a Metaverse I distrust.

Back to current events posting again next. Send me your questions!

Thanks for reading. :)

KF

1. I mean, I care. I took Latin and classics back in college. It’s interesting! But it’s weird that people treat language as though it defines the world rather than the other way around.