“There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery.”

-Hiro Protagonist, Snow Crash

The internet, when compared to the entirety of human history, occupies a very small slice of the timeline. What we think of as the internet didn’t come around too long ago. January 1, 1983 is considered the birth of the internet, and it didn’t become widespread until the early 90’s. The internet was a new frontier, ripe with possibility and imagination. Not since the development of the radio and telephone has a technology had such a profound effect on rapid communication, until the internet. As the years progressed, the internet grew more and more, enabling access to vast amounts of information, changing commerce and connecting people across the world. The internet holds its place as one of the most influential inventions in history, shaping the world we live in today. 

Before the internet was in its current form we know today, it was bare bones and simple, with lots of room for speculation. Many doubted the stability of the internet, believing it would eventually “crash.” Philip Agre, an AI researcher and humanities professor at UCLA, warned that computers would one day “facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.” Fiction would also have its place in the discussions of the internet. While many novels have been written that discuss or contain references to the internet, two of the most important are William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. While Neuromancer has many things that could be discussed, Snow Crash will be the main focus due to the effects it has had on the internet as a whole. 

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash is a speculative science fiction novel set in 21st century America. The America of Snow Crash is one where the federal government, following a worldwide economic collapse, has given up control of its territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs. The system is akin to anarcho-capitalism, where government institutions are deemed useless and replaced with private ones. The story follows Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia. In his downtime, Hiro accesses The Metaverse, a vast virtual world populated by avatars controlled by users and focused on social and economic connection. Hiro discovers Snow Crash, a computer virus that causes brain damage in the real world, and is sent on a rabbit hole to uncover its true origin. The novel deals with many themes, such as history, language, religion, philosophy and politics. On the surface, Snow Crash is nothing more than a good speculative sci-fi novel that has a lot of complex themes, but Snow Crash has had a more profound effect on our culture today than most people are aware of.

The definition of “metaverse” varies depending on who you talk to. Supporters of the metaverse will praise it as the inevitable future of the internet, a virtual space that allows for endless connection between millions of people. This argument is championed by cryptocurrency and Web3 supporters, who use the metaverse to generally refer to a decentralized internet built around the blockchain. While not all visions of the metaverse rely on AR and VR, many of the recognizable ventures into the metaverse use them as a hook, such as Facebook’s Metaverse or Decentraland. Advocates of this vision will point to Snow Crash as inspiration for their vision, parading it around not as speculation, but as an inevitability. Stephenson’s depiction of a virtual 3D space, where users can purchase products, interact with programmed elements, and navigate a fully immersive 3D world, is very attractive to these people. But this vision comes at a cost. The supporters of this new internet rely strongly on these aesthetics to gain support for their vision. If their vision of the future of the internet lacks a 3D contiguous virtual space, then their vision risks becoming muddled because they are just describing the internet. And this is the argument that critics of the metaverse bring up. Visions of the future of the internet that fall back on Snow Crash and Ready Player One as evolutions of the web need these aesthetics. They will praise anything that works as “the future” and anything bad as flaws of that specific execution.

But this view cuts both ways. If anything deemed as “good” can be a success of the metaverse, then failures can also be acknowledged not as failings in execution, but a failing of the broader vision. It can’t be had both ways.

The metaverse is a divisive subject. There is no doubt that strides are being taken in virtual reality, cryptocurrency and user-oriented experiences like Decentrland or Facebooks’ Metaverse. The degree to which the metaverse will actually exist is a question that should be considered. A version of the metaverse may eventually exist, many already exist, but a 3D web browser where users physically walk from web page to web page isn’t a vision that should be counted on. But be on the lookout, perhaps a pair of Metaverse goggles will be coming to a Best Buy near you!

Image courtesy of AI, via DeepAI.

Sources:

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/493634-snow-crash

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/he-predicted-the-dark-side-of-the-internet-30-years-ago-why-did-no-one-listen/