In my virtual office in Waterhead beside a river in Second Life, I have a shrine to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It's a holdover from the virtual world's golden era, when the novel's publisher saw fit to produce (with Stephenson's official blessing) an 8-foot-tall monolith in which a readable excerpt of the novel is embedded.
To this day, avatars sometimes pay a pilgrimage, showing their respect for the shrine that symbolizes The Source to All This. Recently checking my Twitter mentions, I noticed that an excitable raccoon from Japan had posted a virtual selfie in front of it.
I vividly remember when I first read Snow Crash in the early ’90s. It touched a yearning I already felt playing now-ancient computer games as a kid in Hawaii. Secure and surrounded by the sea, I found it difficult (and frankly a bit embarrassing) to sit inside and explore fantastic virtual worlds when the golden glow of constantly perfect days kept pouring in.
I'd spend afternoons outside surfing or playing beach volleyball, almost on general principle, impatiently waiting for night to come, when the sun would be outshined by the glow of cathode rays. Early milestone computer games like NetHack depicted a whole vivid alternate reality with simple text characters.
“This,” I recall thinking, as I raced through Snow Crash, “is what we'll have in a decade or two.”
Snow Crash has a unique place in the history of science fiction. Most classics of the genre do not pretend to describe the future in any literal way; they rarely articulate a highly specific technology that does not yet exist. Doubtless many people who went to work for NASA were first inspired by reading Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon as children. But that does not mean that they took the book with them to Cape Canaveral as a reference, sketching out schematics to shoot Neil Armstrong at the moon with a giant cannon.
Where sci-fi tends to shine best is dramatizing very real contemporary social anxieties through a futuristic, otherworldly context. And while Snow Crash succeeds at that as well, few remember the novel's rollicking satire of modern America at its most dystopian, katana-sliced-with-cyberpunk style and black-matte irony.
Instead, Snow Crash has the rare distinction of describing in granular terms a future technology that didn't yet exist—which then directly inspired thousands of very talented people to spend tens of billions of dollars over the span of several decades to bring that technology into existence.
Or, to put it another way: Stephenson's Metaverse is less remembered as a science fiction concept than as a product roadmap.
This is not an exaggeration: Decades before Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook-to-Meta name change announcement, influential technologists excitedly discussed grand plans to make it.
In the ’90s, video game developer John Carmack (most recently a senior Meta adviser) not only brainstormed plans with his colleagues to build the Metaverse but even described that mission as a “moral imperative.” (More on that curious phrasing in Chapter 13.)
“I had read the [William] Gibson canon in high school, but I had initially missed Snow Crash,” as John Carmack affirms to me by email now. The novel was introduced to him through his partner at id Software, the pioneering game studio.
“I remember that someone told John Romero about it, and he relayed it to me, probably during Doom 2 development.”
And while Carmack doesn't necessarily credit the novel as driving his current metaverse work (“I have always been more focused on the problems of the day, while fiction is usually far into the future”), he does describe Snow Crash as background inspiration:
“I have read it, I think, three times at this point,” as Carmack puts it, “and still recommend it to other people, so it has been a very notable book for me.”
Other technologists do reference the novel more directly in their own metaverse projects. When I became a contractor at Linden Lab in the early 2000s, I immediately noticed that Snow Crash sat among a handful of technical guides, such as Richard Bartle's seminal Designing Virtual Worlds, in the startup's small library. It was even cited during Second Life design discussions (for instance, when staff were thinking through the implications of point-to-point teleportation of avatars from one part of the virtual world to another).
Virtual worlds over the years have varied widely in their particulars from what Neal Stephenson first described, evolving to work with what was technically feasible and commercially viable. But for countless companies and creators, the core of his conception has remained a lodestone.
“‘Metaverse’ has turned into a sort of golem,” as Stephenson once mused to me in an email exchange from 2014, “capable of wandering the earth on its own, out of the purview of its creator. So I am always surprised to see where it turns up and what it's doing.”
At the time, Facebook had just acquired Oculus, and the founders of that VR startup openly talked about creating the Metaverse for months. (A December 2013 post on the Oculus company blog is titled, plainly, “Onward to the Metaverse!”)
“Ten years ago,” Stephenson told me back then, “that wasn't the case. Anyone who wanted to use it in front of a normal audience would have had to say ‘Metaverse, an idea from the novel Snow Crash.’ Twenty years ago, they'd have had to add, ‘a novel by Neal Stephenson.’ Now, apparently, ‘Metaverse’ can stand up on its own three feet and lumber about, at least in the setting of tech blogs. That is the kind of event that many writers hope will happen at least once in their career. It is gratifying.”
But the Metaverse was never just a fictional conceit for a cyberpunk novel.
In fact, based on one expert's account, the first steps to actually build the Metaverse were taken by Neal Stephenson himself.
That's according to Avi Bar-Zeev, whose own footprint in metaverse-related technology is impressive in its own right. Currently a senior experience prototyper at Apple, Bar-Zeev helped develop Second Life in its early days, cofounded the mirror world project eventually dubbed Google Earth, and coinvented Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality device.
But Avi's first job out of college was at Worldesign, a very early virtual world company based in Seattle, launched in the ’90s during the first flush of media and business excitement over VR. (I'm just old enough to remember watching various befuddled national TV newscasters demonstrating the then-novel technology, getting strapped into headsets the size of motorcycle helmets.)
Shortly after Snow Crash was published, Avi tells me that Stephenson, a Seattle resident himself, would often hang out in the Worldesign office, located above an antique furniture store in the Ballard neighborhood.
At some point, says Avi, Neal Stephenson's visits took on a very specific end goal:
“Neal came by with his business lawyer and was really interested in, ‘Could we build the Metaverse now? How much of the Snow Crash Metaverse could we actually build on present 1994 computers?’ [Stephenson] wanted to know if it was feasible to build the Metaverse for consumers.”
The Worldesign team, which was showing off VR demos it had made to companies like Disney, had a sober answer to that question. As Bar-Zeev puts it now:
“We told him it's probably not going to fly in 1992 or 1993: ‘You're going to have to wait awhile.’” The computing requirements at the time were simply not feasible. “We were using $100,000 computers to do decent VR.”
Again, this query didn't seem to stem from research for a new novel. In Bar-Zeev's telling, it reflected plans by Neal Stephenson to build something like the virtual world he had just written about. (“We met with him and his lawyer, so I think it was serious.”)
Bob Jacobson, founder and CEO of Worldesign, warmly recalls meeting Neal Stephenson during his time running the startup, but he remembers it somewhat differently. In Jacobson's telling, his company was already planning to build something similar to the Metaverse, and Stephenson's vision helped catalyze their designs.
“We invited Neal because Snow Crash had just come out, and we needed a new dinner speaker,” Jacobson tells me now. “He obliged, and I was knocked over [by what he described].”
In the 1990s, Jacobson's company created virtual world simulation projects for major organizations including Fiat and the U.S. Department of Defense.
As for creating something like the Metaverse, says Jacobson: “We already had it in mind. The reason I brought [Stephenson] along was he had envisioned it [in Snow Crash].”
Asked about all this in 2022, Neal Stephenson himself remembers meetings with Jacobson in the early ’90s. However, he doesn't quite remember discussing practical plans about building the Metaverse. And certainly not with a lawyer.
“It may have just been a friend who happened to be a lawyer,” he tells me. “It's certainly not my style to roll up to somebody's office for a discussion with a lawyer in tow.”
As for any proposals by Stephenson to actually build the Metaverse shortly after Snow Crash came out, he puts it this way:
“I don't specifically remember what I was talking to those guys about at the time. I might need an old memory jar. It'd be fun to turn the time machine back to see what I was thinking when I was talking about it at the time, but it's always been an idea that is floating around.”
On that point Bob Jacobson agrees, calling Stephenson “a spark plug” for a concept that was already emerging in the era when the novel was published.
Whatever happened in these encounters, Avi Bar-Zeev does have one regret from that time, talking with Neal Stephenson about the Metaverse:
“I wish I had advised him, or had his lawyer say, ‘Go trademark this name.’ Like, if he came up with the name ‘Metaverse,’ he should actually have trademarked it, and then we wouldn't be having these arguments as to what it'd be like.”
Bar-Zeev means continued disagreements about how to even define the Metaverse. (More on that later in this chapter.)
But that takes us to another mystery:
On October 7, 1993, a year after Snow Crash was published, someone did attempt to trademark the Metaverse—on Neal Stephenson's behalf.
With a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office serial number of 74444540, the registration is for “METAVERSE,” described as “interactive on-line computer communication services” and “interactive on-line computer education and entertainment services.” It was filed by an attorney designating a “Neil [sic] Stephenson” of Seattle, Washington as the trademark's owner. (I am grateful to Bar-Zeev for pointing me to this registration.)
Shown a copy of this trademark filing now, Neal Stephenson tells me that the Seattle address listed in the trademark filing is indeed where he lived at the time.
But, he adds, “I was not involved! Perhaps a fan who decided to do me a favor.”
At any rate, the “Neil Stephenson” trademark filing was abandoned a year later. “Abandoned because the applicant failed to respond or filed a late response to an Office action,” a note on the filing reads. (As of press time, my attempts to contact the lawyer listed in the trademark filing have been fruitless.)
Since then, there have been well over 300 trademark filings containing references to a “Metaverse.” What that suggests about the legal implications for competing companies now claiming to make the Metaverse, I cannot speculate, but I suspect they're serious.
At the very least, as Bar-Zeev suggests, an official trademark that defined what the Metaverse actually is would have spared us decades of argument and confusion that continues to this day.
In any case, active projects attempting to create something like the Metaverse began arriving soon after Snow Crash. Active Worlds (first conceived as AlphaWorlds) launched in June 1995, quickly followed by Microsoft's V-Chat later that year. In 1996, Blaxxun—a company originally dubbed “Black Sun Interactive,” after the exclusive hacker nightclub in Snow Crash of the same name—acquired Cybertown, a virtual world running on Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), designed to extend the web browser's standard HTML into 3D. While these platforms may seem lost in obscurity, many of the communities that developed around them persisted for many years. (In 2022, The Verge reported on a poignant campaign by its most passionate denizens to revive Cybertown.)
Whatever transpired in 1993 above that furniture shop overlooking Puget Sound's Shilshole Bay, it illustrates that the Metaverse was never simply a nebulous sci-fi conception.
Rereading Snow Crash recently after many decades, I'm struck by the biblical specificity of its details—and by how eerily it resembles the technology and the cultural experience that actually emerged a decade or so later.
In other words: The Metaverse was not simply “coined” in Snow Crash.
It was effectively designed in Snow Crash.
This 1990s history is important to tell, because despite the recent buzz around “the Metaverse,” its actual conception has largely been forgotten. Consequently, many people not only believe it doesn't exist but even assert it can't even be defined.
Consider this cascade of cringey headlines from 2021/22: “No one knows what the metaverse is and that's what's driving all the hype” (CNBC); “The metaverse can't be explained” (Engadget); “The Metaverse Isn't What You Think It Is Because No One Knows What It Is” (CNET).
This is why the definition of the Metaverse that opened my book is drawn directly from excerpts from Snow Crash, and what Stephenson has later said about it, both of which are worth unpacking here:
It is a vast virtual world:
Contrary to what the novel describes, I have often seen the Metaverse described by some colleagues as a collection or federation of discrete virtual worlds. That is not only inaccurate according to the original source but dilutes the power of the original conception: a singular virtual world where discrete areas can have completely different environments but where the whole is unified into the same contiguous, consensus reality, as is the program's user interface, which is essentially a part of the world too. This is an important distinction when discussing Metaverse interoperability, because by definition, everything within the same virtual world is interoperable on some level. (But more on that in Chapter 6.)
Onward:
The Metaverse is accessible through VR, but also flat screen devices:
… [There's] a liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people-persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white.
That passing mention of “cheap” terminals contains more insight than most Silicon Valley Metaverse boosters have ever managed to muster. With it, Stephenson strongly suggests that only the wealthy and dedicated enthusiasts access the Metaverse through stand-alone VR headsets. Those without the time, interest, or money for such hardware make do with low-budget terminals.
While Stephenson does suggest in his novel that the Metaverse will be accessed only by headsets, he changed his mind almost immediately; Carmack and Romero's first-person video game Doom was published a year after Snow Crash.
“It's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom,” as Neal Stephenson said in a recent interview, “meaning games where your screen is a flat window into a three dimensional world…. You absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the Metaverse.”
A quick note on the hero of Snow Crash living in a storage container:
When Meta began bandying about its Metaverse vision to an oblivious public, some pundits noted that Snow Crash takes place in a dystopian future, with democratic government in retreat as for-profit corporations and organized crime arise to replace it. In other words, they infer, people escape to the Metaverse in Snow Crash because material life is so horrible.
That's not quite the case.
“Snow Crash is clearly a dystopian novel, although it's kinda poking fun at dystopian novels,” as Stephenson told The New York Times columnist Kara Swisher in December 2021:
“[T]he Metaverse I think is kind of neutral … it's just an entertainment medium, it's not inherently bad.”
At any rate, calling the novel “dystopian” misses the zany, winking fun of a future where, say, a pizza delivery franchise is run by a Godfather-like Mafia family; Orwell this is not. And true to his word, Stephenson went on to actively cofound a metaverse company. (But more on that in Chapter 6.)
Back to the words that give us a working definition:
It has highly customizable avatars:
When preparing to write this book, I read these passages from Snow Crash for the first time in decades and gasped at the uncanny accuracy of what Stephenson envisioned, compared to what specifically came to pass.
Some 10 years after the novel was published, I found myself in Second Life interviewing gorillas and dragons and, yes, reporting on a notorious incident when Internet trolls interrupted a media interview conducted within the virtual world by unleashing upon it a phalanx of giant flying penises. (Not talking, sad to say, though they did dance to Tchaikovsky's “Sugar Plum Fairy.”) And these avatars were actually on the milder side of the spectrum, creatively speaking. I once interviewed an avatar customized to resemble a 3D version of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.
Stephenson's notion of avatar quality being limited by the power of a user's equipment has also come to pass in unexpected ways, especially in Second Life: As avatar graphics improved and became ever more ultrarealistic, only users with the most expensive PC rigs and dedicated broadband lines could fully enjoy the latest high quality, hyperrealistic avatars on the market.
The Metaverse has powerful experience creation tools:
It is integrated with the real-world economy:
Gaming, it's important to note here, is a core part of the Metaverse of Snow Crash. In some interviews, Stephenson has suggested otherwise, saying that he didn't anticipate how immersive online games like World of Warcraft would popularize virtual worlds and the 3D technology needed to run them.
“And so what we have now is Warcraft guilds,” as he told Forbes in 2011, “instead of people going to bars on the Street in Snow Crash.”
Stephenson sells himself short. Combat games are not only depicted as important in his Metaverse, but he also describes—for what might be the first time in literature—what's become a ubiquitous part of the online experience: the gamer leaderboard.
This occurs when a sweaty Japanese businessman is beaten by the hero in a duel of virtual samurai swords:
Number One, the name and the photograph on the top of the list, belongs to Hiroaki Protagonist.
And I'd argue that the rise of World of Warcraft and other MMOs affirms Stephenson's vision. As any dedicated MMO player can confirm, people in them do tend to spend a fair amount of time socializing in virtual bars and taverns, as playing the actual game.
Back to our definition:
It is accessed by millions of users at the same time:
When Stephenson wrote these words, New York's population was about 7.3 million. Double that number, and the average concurrency of his original Metaverse—that is, the number of users logged onto an online platform at the same time—is about 15 million.
While no one metaverse platform has yet reached that number, the aggregate number of people online across the most popular metaverse platforms easily exceeds it.
On a related note—and an important one, as it's a common misconception, even among colleagues—the Metaverse is never presented as the entirety of the Internet.
The novel's very first reference to the Internet is on the hero's business card, which first lists “[h]is address on half a dozen electronic communications nets”—then followed by his Metaverse address. It's another way Stephenson's future eerily resembles our present: Even now, well over 50 years after its invention, when we have devices with the power of a supercomputer in the palms of our hands, we still send emails.
Nor is the Metaverse depicted as being used by everyone. A virtual world platform with 15 million average concurrent users as Stephenson describes would probably translate into, at a very rough estimate, 150 million to 300 million monthly active users. Quite massive, but very much not everyone. (Though as noted previously, the total user number across disparate metaverse platforms in 2023 is well over 500 million monthly actives.)
Even more telling, the hero's ex-girlfriend, once an early pioneer of the technology, has entirely exited from the virtual world by choice: “[She] decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.”
In a similar, equally important vein, the Metaverse of Snow Crash is presented as a singular virtual world. For this reason among many, I think it's a mistake to speak of the Metaverse as containing multiple virtual worlds (a commonly made misconception).
That single virtual world vision has also turned out to be the case in actual, successful metaverse platforms. With VRChat, for instance, you can jump from a Tolkien-esque castle to a space cruiser to a shopping mall from the ’80s and beyond, but you are still recognizably within VRChat. And the essential interactive framework of the platform remains with you at all times: VRChat's user interface and facilities, such as your inventory and friends list, are as fundamental to the experience of the virtual world as the 3D representation of the world itself.
Returning to my definition and its Snow Crash origins:
The Metaverse is compatible with external technology and the economy.
Portals into the offline world, this compatibility can encompass something as simple as the “flat web” of web browsers (which is itself connected banking services and other systems) or, at the most ambitious, integration with physical devices. In Snow Crash, for instance, that includes a VOIP-controlled vehicle, piloted from within the Metaverse, from an elegant office in a virtual palatial estate:
In this passage, we learn that Ng, an inventor of amazing robotic devices, is actually a horribly damaged survivor of the Vietnam War, whose injuries are so profound, he is confined to a life support system. But this system is embedded within a van, and the van is also wired to its driving system—which is, in turn, wired to the Metaverse.
It's my favorite moment in the novel, and also among my favorites from all science fiction—a head-spinning revelation that not only forces you to rethink the future but what it means to be a thriving human. Snow Crash up to that point in the story is rife with edgy coolness and irony. Then suddenly we meet this minor character who's leveraged this technology to transcend personal tragedy.
“Your mistake,” as Ng puts it, “is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms—like me—are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before.”
It would be a decade later, reporting within Second Life, that this passage would also seem prophetic; I have met countless people with profound physical and mental disabilities who flourish in the virtual world in ways that would be difficult if not impossible without it.
Befitting the Snow Crash vision, Second Life's developer community began to take early, experimental steps to bridge the virtual world with hardware devices outside its digital realm.
Researchers at Keio University, for instance, created a brain-to-Second Life interface, so that a person could move their avatar around just by thinking—an invention, project lead Junichi Ushiba told me, inspired after a friend of his was paralyzed due to a swimming pool accident. He wanted to give people like his friend a new way to socialize. (VRChat and newer platforms also boast similar cross-reality projects.)
So back to our definition that ties these passages all together:
The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that's simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology.
Of the nine core features in that definition, most of the leading metaverse platforms boast seven or eight, with the most outstanding lacuna being scale of usage. While some have hundreds of millions of monthly users, none can yet boast Stephenson's average concurrent users of twice the population of 1990s New York: 15 million.
But at the time of this writing in 2023, we are close.
By the summer of 2022, Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite alone were hitting an aggregate peak concurrency of about 15 million every day. (When I pointed this out to Neal Stephenson himself at that time, he seemed surprised.) And during rapper Travis Scott's immersive 2020 performance in Fortnite, Epic reported reaching 12.3 million concurrent players.
This high usage among existing metaverse platforms, by the way, solidifies my commitment to defining the Metaverse as originally conceived in Snow Crash—and not out of literary fundamentalism or dogged loyalty to the author. The Metaverse, more or less as Stephenson conceived it, works.
And when Neal Stephenson first imagined the Metaverse, as he told me recently, it was an answer to this question: “What would it take content-wise to make 3D immersive graphics as broadly popular as television?”
Fifteen million concurrent users is comparable to mass mainstream popularity across legacy media. In the movie industry, 15 million+ people attending the same movie on opening night represents a rare pop culture phenomenon. In 2019, on its first day in theaters, roughly 17 million people gathered to watch Avengers: Endgame. (And their viewings stretched out over the entire 24-hour period of that day.)
It is rarer still for 15 million or more people to simultaneously engage with any medium. At the moment, only television can still achieve that. And it is TV that's the key comparison point.
In 2022, about 16 million people watched the Oscar award telecast. On the night of its premiere in 2019, 14 million people viewed the final episode of Game of Thrones. But lately, just a few television programs reach those lofty heights of viewership on a regular basis. (Yes, I'm speaking only of viewership of a single program across all TV, but these specific examples are so integral to popular culture, they strike me as sufficient comparison points.)
So Neal Stephenson's original concurrency figure also strikes me as the most reasonable benchmark for when we can dispense with talking about various metaverse platforms, and speak about the concept with a capital T and a capital M:
If we are to define it according to the features described in Snow Crash, and recognize that it has achieved the goal that inspired Neal Stephenson to conceive it, the first metaverse platform to reach 15 million concurrent users on a regular basis has the best claim at being called The Metaverse.
And if you are reading this book in 2030 or beyond, I have a strong sense that this threshold has already been passed.
While no metaverse platform has yet reached such heights in terms of mainstream usage, there was one that, in its heyday, very much reached that level of mainstream awareness. It was featured in top-rated TV shows and on the largest news sites and programs around the world.
Until, that is, most of that attention suddenly went away.
It was (and is) called Second Life. And I've spent at least the last 12 years trying to uncover the mystery of why so much potential could be so squandered—and what that can teach us about The Metaverse to come.
Especially because I share some of the blame.