Thirty years ago, the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson invented the concept of the metaverse. Now, he is intent on building it in real life. We must hope his constructive feats are more uplifting than his imaginary fears — the metaverse he depicted in 1992’s Snow Crash was an escape hatch into an alternative virtual world from the hellscape of 21st-century Los Angeles. The novel’s main character, Hiro Protagonist, lived in a shipping container, worked as a pizza delivery driver and tried to survive in a brutal anarcho-capitalist world disfigured by menacing monopolists, economic collapse and environmental degradation.
Yet in a video call from his home in Seattle, in which he spells out his current thinking on the metaverse, Stephenson expounds a much cheerier theory about the future uses of technology. “Snow Crash is both a dystopian novel and a parody of dystopian novels,” he says. “And I am increasingly of the view that technologies, with a few notable exceptions, aren’t really dystopian or utopian; people are.”
Whether the metaverse is a good or a bad thing will depend on how we develop and use it. Stephenson sees the real-life metaverse — as opposed to his fictional creation — emerging as the next big computing platform, a kind of next generation “3D internet”. He is excited by its possibilities as a deeply immersive new means of communication and entertainment that will open up “new categories of experiences”. But the metaverse will only fully flourish if it is decentralised, interoperable and not dominated by a few giant corporations, as the current internet has been. He himself is working on the latter problem, attempting to build “the base layer for an open metaverse”.