I was already deep into its writing when this book took a sharp left turn, or maybe a full 180: Neal Stephenson himself announced, 30 years after the publication of Snow Crash, that he was becoming an active participant in the creation of the Metaverse.
His new company was Lamina1. And as cofounder Peter Vessenes explained in a June 2022 announcement:
In a keen irony, the Lamina1 announcement received less media attention than it might have at other times. By then, “the Metaverse” was garnering so much coverage, many people missed that the actual creator of the Metaverse was now also involved. Up to and including (as a subsequent premiere white paper announced), designing a virtual world himself:
It later emerged what the title of that project actually meant: Once the foundation of Lamina1's blockchain, SDK, and payment systems had been laid down (more on those below), Neal Stephenson would himself lead the development of the Metaverse as he first imagined it in Snow Crash. But that was long down the road.
“[It] was clear in late 2021,” as Stephenson wryly explained to me on a video call in the summer of 2022, “that I was going to spend the next year answering emails and phone calls and messages about the M word anyway.”
After my 20 years of a writing career that sometimes feels like a long footnote to Snow Crash, it's jarring to finally speak face-to-face with Stephenson for the first time. His trademark goatee, something you might picture a steampunk dirigible commander wearing, has turned almost completely silver since the ’90s.
“So,” he continues, “I just made the decision that I would basically put my novelist career on hold for this calendar year and see what I could do to try to make something of the opportunities that have emerged from all of this.”
This was not Stephenson's first foray into the business of metaverse-related development; as we saw in Chapter 1, he apparently made some initial inquiries (mostly lost to history) into actually building some version of the technology in the 1990s, shortly after Snow Crash was published. In 2012, he unsuccessfully attempted to crowdfund CLANG!, an online sword-fighting game that would have realized something like the Metaverse-based blade duels from that novel. In more recent years, he was “chief futurist” at Magic Leap, a heavily funded augmented reality headset startup that promised consumer marvels. (And after several false starts, pivoted to become an enterprise-focused product.)
Similarly, I'm told Stephenson's role at Lamina1 is not a figurehead position simply to attract investors and media, and goes far beyond just brainstorming company branding and drafting the company's white papers (though he's involved in all those things). Stephenson even participates in regular developer standup meetings, and helps work through technical blockers. “Neal's a coder so he talks a lot with the engineers,” as Lamina1's Casey Halter puts it.
So cofounding Lamina1 is a decision he did not make lightly, Stephenson tells me. Up to then, he has held back from being involved in many other Metaverse projects:
“Interest in the Metaverse has been kind of slowly building for decades,” as he put it to me, “and there have been various opportunities that have come my way from time to time to work for some company or other that's trying to do something there. And I was kind of reluctant just because I didn't want to throw my weight behind any one particular interpretation of it.”
That finally changed in 2021.
“When suddenly, everything was Metaverse all day all the time. And the idea that we're working on it with Lamina1 feels to me like it's kind of more foundational; it's not one particular interpretation, or product, it's kind of a base layer of functionality that anyone ought to be able to use to build experiences. And so, as such, I sort of felt like I could get involved without seeming to officially throw my weight behind this company or that company, this interpretation or that interpretation of what [the Metaverse] is supposed to be.”
As that suggests, Stephenson’s vision is to turn Lamina1 into the revenue backbone of many multiple metaverse projects—and serve the community of creators who make it all possible.
Lamina1 aims to be a Metaverse-as-a-Service for creators working across various metaverse platforms—a play on the unwieldy Valley acronym SaaS, for software-as-a-service. (Salesforce is probably the most well-known company in that category.)
“What we're trying to do is kind of lay down payment rails,” as Stephenson told me. “In order to kind of get from where we are now, to the situation where the Metaverse is a global communications medium, like TV or radio or whatever, we have to have experiences that people enjoy having. And by and large today, the people who know how to create those experiences work in the game industry. And some of them are happily employed, some are less happy, some are making good money, some are kind of struggling indie developers.
“But the bottom line is that there needs to be a way for people who devoted their careers to acquiring skills with Maya or Blender or Unreal or Unity or any of the other tools that are part of the tool chain—a way for them to extract some compensation if they are involved in making an experience that people enjoy and are willing to pay for.”
The Unity Asset Store and other platforms already make something like this possible for creators, but Lamina1's approach is to give creators access to “smart contracts”—the web3 world's somewhat strange name for mini-applications that exist on the blockchain—to track royalty payments around a designated virtual item.
This will lead, Stephenson argues, “[to] what we hope is the creation of what [VR pioneer] Jaron Lanier calls ‘value chains,’ which is a way that a number of people could contribute to the creation of an experience and each derive some kind of compensation for their work.”
As an example, consider a cool virtual car made for a metaverse platform. The external chassis may have been created by a 3D modeler, while its physics and interactivity were added by a scripter; a UX designer might later add a heads-up display and player controls, so it's actually drivable. Even though the car itself might be bought as a single object, each creator who contributed to the final vehicle—in the Lamina1 model—gets a cut of any sale.
So essentially, Lamina1 hopes to become the leading service to track, credit, and pay creators in the Metaverse.
My conversation with Neal Stephenson inevitably led me to a question I've been tangling with since the start of this book. Or for that matter, since 2003, when I began writing about a metaverse platform inside a metaverse platform.
And now I was finally able to ask the very source for the answer:
“When I define the metaverse, I adhere as closely as possible to what you described in Snow Crash, because so many startups have been directly inspired by it. But I've been curious, 30 years later, what's your own working definition?”
Stephenson's face flickers on the video call.
“In a weird way I don't need one,” he begins, deadpan, “since I'm the one who coined the term.”
But having said that, he continues:
“I would say the basic idea behind the Metaverse from 30 years ago is still applicable and is basically: What would it take content-wise to make 3D immersive graphics as broadly popular as television? And so my main concern at the time I wrote the book was that the hardware [back then] was incredibly expensive, and still slow.”
That started changing with the 1993 launch of the first-person shooter Doom, just a year after Snow Crash's publication, creating a burgeoning market for immersive, interactive 3D content.
“The World Wide Web was launched basically the same year,” Neal notes. “And so those kinds of developments created a big consumer demand for computers that can show graphics, first two-dimensional and then three-dimensional graphics. Almost everyone now has got some kind of device that can render at least simple three-dimensional scenery.”
And with that shift in place, Stephenson can paint his contemporary vision of the Metaverse, which remains more or less unchanged from a generation ago:
“I still stick with the basic conceit, I guess you could say, of the Metaverse in Snow Crash, which is that [immersive experiences] should be linked in a kind of spatial arrangement. It's what is lacking in the World Wide Web—you've got this web of hyperlinks all over the place that jump you from one site to another, and there's not really a kind of spatial organization that ties it all together. I think there should be a spatial way of tying it all together. So I think that's another kind of fundamental aspect of the Metaverse.”
As we explored in Chapter 1, this “spatial arrangement” is a single virtual world, “a black sphere” geographically larger than Earth, including fantastic “special neighborhoods” where the rules of three-dimensional space-time don't apply.
“And stuff that's almost too obvious to mention,” Neal continues. “Multi-user on a massive scale. Interoperability is kind of implied and kind of necessary, and just certain constraints as to scaling and physics. So gravity is pointed down, avatars are all kind of the same size, so that the thing just kind of makes sense and hangs together as a three-dimensional construct.”
That suggests to Neal Stephenson that the Metaverse should be a single shard, but he is still thinking through those details:
“[L]et's say I build up an experience somewhere in the Metaverse that turns out to be incredibly popular, and a million people show up. Well, I can't fit a million avatars in the space, my servers maybe can't process that much data. So what do I do with this problem of too many people showing up? I could have something similar to the fire code in a physical space—‘Sorry, we can only have 100 people in this room’—something like that. But that would really place a severe limit on the ability to generate revenue from this popular experience.”
What Stephenson is discussing remains a core challenge for every platform ascribing to be the Metaverse. Thirty years after conception, it is still technically daunting to display many dozens, let alone many hundreds or thousands, of 3D avatars in the same contiguous virtual world space, such as a large virtual concert or a political gathering.
It's a phenomenon Stephenson mentions several times in Snow Crash. As a seasoned technologist, he had an awareness, even back then, of the daunting challenge of concurrency. Since it would be computationally impossible to collision detect millions of online users walking on the Street together, he notes in the novel, “avatars just walk right through each other.”
With those limitations in mind now, he suggests a compromise:
“[M]y guess is that the Metaverse as a whole is a one-shard proposition, but that in certain areas that are extraordinarily popular, we just can't fit everyone in—that there has to be some sharding or something equivalent to sharding.”
If there's any reason to be skeptical about Lamina1's own plans for the Metaverse, they largely lie in this irony: By the time Lamina1 announced its cryptocurrency and blockchain-driven metaverse technology, several platforms inspired by Snow Crash had already attempted similar projects—some to great fanfare, but mostly with commercially dubious results. And because Lamina1's prospects probably depend on cryptocurrency and other web3-based virtual worlds succeeding, it's worth knowing more about the footsteps Neal Stephenson must follow.
So before returning to my flickering Internet chat with the author, a brief flashback follows. With any luck, it might vaguely remind you of a short historical digression from—well, from a Neal Stephenson novel.
Whether you are reading this in a near future where Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is remembered with a shudder as an utter economic disaster, or if crypto is still considered a groundbreaking, transformative technology, know this:
Like most things metaverse-related, crypto pretty much started with Second Life.
“Created” by “Satoshi Nakamoto”—quotes being necessary in both cases, since its originator remains anonymous to this day—Bitcoin and its would-be successor Ethereum were not originally conceived as virtual currencies for metaverse platforms. But as noted in Chapter 2, Linden Dollars of Second Life were ultimately intended for use in purchasing real goods and services.
As explained in a June 2021 news article on Bitcoin.com aptly titled “A Look at How Second Life's L$ Helped Kickstart Bitcoin's Value,” Linden Dollars helped drive up the value of the cryptocurrency shortly after its inception in 2009, when purchasing Bitcoin with standard fiat cash was nigh impossible. “Bitcoin had a fascinating relationship with Second Life users because L$ could be exchanged for fiat, which gave BTC an alternative fiat gateway in the early days.”
For a while, there were even in-world ATMs where Bitcoin could be purchased for Linden Dollars, and vice versa. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey once recounted to me, entirely bemused, a time when he purchased Bitcoin from someone who insisted that they meet each other as avatars in Second Life to finalize the transaction.
Without Second Life, in other words, it's quite likely Bitcoin and crypto in general might not have achieved enough escape velocity to enjoy the market euphoria they went on to attract.
This origin story is important to keep in mind. Because while it started in Second Life, the virtual world could not also offer a good answer to a question that also remains to this day: What can you actually buy on a regular basis with cryptocurrency?
For over a decade, Bitcoin enthusiasts have floundered about for a convincing answer to that question.
Linden Dollars, by contrast, are valuable because an economy of some half a million people use it to purchase Second Life–based goods and services from community creators. L$ is regularly used more often for daily transactions in the virtual world than Bitcoin is across the entire real world: Roughly 400,000+ per day in Second Life, a rate rarely exceeded by all BTC transactions across the entire planet.
And then an answer to cryptocurrency's usefulness as currency finally emerged: to buy content from yet another virtual world.
Launched in August 2017, Decentraland appeared years before the latest Metaverse hype wave. Announced as an open standards–driven social VR world, it was unveiled with the fervor of a 21st century land rush, with plots of land offered in exchange for Ethereum—1,000 square feet for the ETH equivalent of USD $24.
Within seconds, the founders had sold $25 million worth of nonexistent (not even digitally, at the time) plots in Decentraland.
“[It] will finance the development of the protocol, the tools and services that developers will use to build on top of Decentraland,” cofounder Ari Mellich proudly told me at the time. “And for the first time in virtual world history, each purchaser of a Decentraland plot could well and truly claim that plot to be their property.”
He meant as opposed to Second Life and other virtual worlds where land may be buyable and sellable by consumers but only on the indulgence of the platform's actual holding company (which usually imposed rules to these sales or even forbade them in some cases).
“[T]hey literally OWN the land, unlike in centralized virtual worlds,” Mellich claimed to me, “so there's no entity, not even ourselves, who can take away ownership, modify their content, or suddenly decide that their content is not theirs anymore. That's the power of the blockchain and decentralization…. People are used to having their virtual worlds created by a company. In our case it's an open community that builds collaboratively.”
Stephenson's Snow Crash envisions Metaverse land distribution as being operated by a trust fund similar to Network Solutions, the private company contracted by the U.S. government to manage domain registrations in the web's early days. In the novel, the consortium also develops the network architecture underlying all this virtual real estate. This is perhaps the only significant way in which subsequent metaverse platforms have differed from their fictional conception.
Except, that is, for Decentraland.
But when whispers of real estate gold (however virtual) reached the ears of those who trade in real financial assets, they came calling. In early 2022, J.P. Morgan erected an official “lounge” in Decentraland—as bland and perplexing as you might imagine. And with that imprimatur and other buzz-generating events, a metaverse real estate boom was born—eerily paralleling the Second Life real estate boom of 2005–2006.
With every Decentraland announcement, Second Life déjà vu echoed through seemingly every major news periodical. As if the earlier boom had never happened—or no one in these outlets remembered it:
In the end, however, it was a feather in a cyclone of howling avarice.
As the media clamored in 2020–2021 around the latest news hook from Decentraland and The Sandbox, another entry in the blockchain-based metaverse niche, neither of them gathered steam in the only way it ultimately mattered: attracting actual users.
By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game-industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me when I checked back in on the world's status.
“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects—like people turn the [project's] Discord into a meetup place for poker games. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”
As of this writing, no full-fledged metaverse platform organized around the blockchain has succeeded in terms of mass growth. Or really, hardly any growth at all.
The same can be said of NFTs, touted for their purported ability to confer ownership across all platforms, including the Metaverse, with smart contracts that designate royalty payments when a particular NFT is sold by one user to another. At their supposed peak in early 2022, analytics firm Chainalysis found that fewer than 360,000 people owned NFTs.
An insider has told me the NFT ownership number is higher, but not by much. And this is judging blockchain on its own purported objectives, setting aside the crypto implosion of late 2022, when the cratering of FTX amidst criminal charges for the CEO seemed to convert the entire industry into a value-hemorrhaging sinkhole.
Why?
“I think they put the cart before the horse,” I told Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic in early 2022. “If you put out a speculative offering, like a new coin that gains people entry into a digital world, people might show up, but I don't know why they'd necessarily keep coming back. On a basic philosophical, human level, a thing is only valuable if a group decides it is. These crypto metaverses put the speculation before the community.”
I note all this not to categorically condemn blockchain—I know at least a few good and smart technologists who still find potential value in it—but to set the stage for Lamina1's entry. Because at the moment, that stage is covered in blood and fire.
Which takes us back to my call with Neal Stephenson.
It's odd to be in a place where you're not fully convinced by a new approach to the Metaverse proposed by the creator of the Metaverse, but here we are.
“Let me ask what is I guess a devil's advocate question,” I put it to Neal Stephenson. “The blockchain hasn't really worked for any other metaverse platform, and there's been several. The key factor, far as I can tell, is that creating a value to virtual land as the first and foremost principle leads to just rapid real-estate speculation, but not really community. And so there's not this flywheel of user-created content that we've seen in Second Life and other platforms.
So how do you think Lamina1 will succeed as a blockchain-facing tech?”
Stephenson pauses for a moment, then answers from a philosophical height:
“Why are dollars valuable? Because you can buy regular stuff with them, stuff that you actually need in the real economy. People do speculate in dollars, there are currency speculators, but it's a small fraction of the number of people who engage in dollar transactions every day. And you can make similar comments about real estate in the real world. But why is it valuable?
“Well, it's valuable because hopefully, people are using it to do interesting things. Again, there are people who speculate in real estate, who buy property because they think that the value is going to go up. But at the end of the day, the value is grounded in something—a real economic value that is happening on different patches of land.
“So I think that the same is true of virtual real estate and cryptocurrency, that the value is going to arise—in the case of real estate—from the use of that real estate to, as you say, build communities and create experiences that people enjoy having. And if people enjoy having those experiences, then that suggests to me that they'll pay for the privilege. And so now you've got a real economy that's using tokens to pay for virtual goods and services and compensate the people who made those. And it doesn't prevent speculation, you can never prevent people from engaging in speculative activity.”
And unlike other blockchain-oriented metaverse startups, Lamina1 will not itself be built on crypto speculation:
“This is not a company that is going to fund itself by putting out an Initial Coin Offer or something like that,” as Stephenson puts it. “We're seeking investment through normal tech investor channels. And when it comes time to establish a market for real estate, we want that to be based on, again, something more than just pure speculation. That's why we're focusing on creating tools and foundational utilities that content builders are going to need. Because if they don't show up and begin to populate the Metaverse with interesting experiences, then there's no “there” there. And the only thing that's left is speculation.”
Setting aside my own pronounced skepticism around the blockchain, I went in search of a web3 expert who could parse out Lamina1's white paper and value proposition. Devin Abbott is a developer and colleague who—after a successful stint as a mainstream Valley entrepreneur, selling his first company to Airbnb—became a passionate if nuanced advocate of the blockchain and other web3 concepts.
Royalties, Devin pointed out, are not part of the original specs of NFTs. By 2022, we were already seeing the rise of NFT marketplaces that explicitly ignored the NFT royalty stipulation in their smart contracts. So Devin saw some value in what Stephenson and Lamina1 were proposing, that royalties would be stipulated at the code level:
“Conceptually I agree with the premise [of Lamina1],” he told me. “Blockchains are a good solution for global payment processing, especially for digital goods, so it makes sense that this will grow to encompass game assets.”
That said, he went on, much of what Lamina1 seems to be creating might seem redundant to web3 developers. As he put it: “It's already easy for a web3 dev to write a smart contract that supports attaching assets and splitting payments like what [Stephenson] describes. Without diving deeper I'm not sure what value he's bringing to what already exists.”
Devin Abbott suggests something like this may first happen on smaller, niche metaverse platforms with people who already own NFTs. “If I want to build a metaverse game and cut costs to get something that kinda works, I can connect my wallet with a platform/engine that supports different assets.” From that, he argues, grassroots developers might follow suit, making those assets easier to support and transfer, creating a feedback loop where such content is compatible with larger and larger metaverse platforms.
If any of that happens, these indie developers—and for that matter, Lamina1—may find themselves going up against serious competitors.
In the summer of 2022, the Roblox Corporation announced a job opening for a senior engineer who could “help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.” It would be strange if the creator of the Metaverse found his startup losing out to a much larger metaverse platform, but that is a quite possible outcome.
I have often wondered over the years how Neal Stephenson, having written over a dozen novels, feels to be barraged so often by questions about Snow Crash, a much earlier work that's not his most literary in the classic sense (it began as a graphic novel), mainly pestered about the Metaverse piece that's actually just part of a much larger whole. For instance, who talks about Snow Crash character Sushi K, an Asian rapper who tours the United States to great acclaim? What seemed like a comically impossible hypothetical back in the ’90s is now, in the era of KPOP global dominance, a standard everyday phenomena.
As Stephenson tells it, Lamina1 will not only reflect Snow Crash but echo many of his other books and the ideas contained in them, written throughout his career—often inspired by the technologists who were in turn inspired by him:
“After I wrote Snow Crash,” as he puts it, “I got to know people in the tech industry who had read the book and who had been working on projects like Habitat … and they had figured out long ago that you couldn't build these kinds of virtual communities without, basically, other people's code running on your hardware.”
Habitat was a pioneering virtual world developed for LucasArts in the late ’80s by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar. In the updated acknowledgments to Snow Crash, Stephenson credits the first use of “avatar” in this context to Habitat.
“So they've gotten really interested in the problem of how do you do that without letting them take over your computer,” he continues, “and then began to look to cryptographic solutions as a way to create that kind of controlled execution environment. And so crypto entered the picture very, very early, when people began to think in a serious engineering way about virtual communities. And that led pretty soon to thinking about cryptocurrency.”
So Lamina1 draws from roughly all of Stephenson's major novels.
“If you look at The Diamond Age, that is a book whose entire plot makes no sense unless you assume the existence of a worldwide network that can transfer money anonymously. So now the girl in that book, Spence, and Miranda know each other through a virtual environment for years, but they have no way to establish each other's real-world identities, because of this anonymous system. The whole plot story basically revolves around that.
“Cryptonomicon is obviously about cryptocurrency. It's about a different kind of cryptocurrency than what we have now, because it was published 10 years before the blockchain came into existence. But nevertheless, it's about that. The Baroque Cycle books are all about the origins of money, currency, and payment systems [and] why money has value.
Finally: “In REAMDE, that's explicitly about a video game in which real world money can be used to carry out financial transactions and about the kind of various complications that arise from that. Fall is kind of in a sense a sequel to REAMDE, to re-engage some of the same characters, and sort of takes that to the wildest possible extreme.”
The influence of Stephenson’s writing on Lamina1 even includes his 2021 environmental thriller, which has little to do with the Metaverse:
“Termination Shock deals with climate change, and one of the things that we're engineering into the Lamina1 chain is carbon negativity. If you're running a node you need to be able to demonstrate that you've done it in a way that doesn't create a net increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“So that's kind of soup-to-nuts to answer your question about how my books relate to what we're doing now [with Lamina1]. It seems like a reasonable, natural next step.”
When we first talked in the summer of 2022, Neal Stephenson and his team expected the main net of Lamina1 to be running by late 2023, around when this book is to be published.
“So it'll be a real functioning currency token system,” he told me then. “And we'll be rolling out tools that people can actually use and then we'll have to be able to say more about some of the first party projects that we're working on.” Including, hopefully, his secretive but oddly named virtual world, THEEE Metaverse. (Talking with an insider, my sense is it's an ironic placeholder title; with so many other parties claiming to be making The Metaverse, it's Stephenson's snarky reply that he himself is making the one where “The” deserves so much emphasis.)
So as this book goes to press, it is far too early to know what will become of Lamina1 in the greater landscape of the Metaverse. But for painfully obvious reasons, no survey of the technology is complete without situating it somewhere central. (For the latest updates, consult this book's Afterword.)
I should also add another irony: In all my interviews with quite a few Gen Z metaverse platform creators, none of them have mentioned having read Snow Crash. Many only knew it by reputation. (Ready Player One is somewhat more known, but largely due to the Steven Spielberg adaptation.)
Asking them about Stephenson's novel itself only elicited awkward pauses. I felt an embarrassing tug across the X to Z generational divide. Bringing up Snow Crash felt a bit like asking them if they had heard Nirvana's Nevermind all the way through. How do you do, fellow metaverse kids?
For that matter, few of these metaverse platform creators even consider what they do to be “working in the Metaverse” per se, preferring instead to specify their platform of choice.
This strikes me as a positive milestone. In the 1990s, “the information superhighway” was a pervasive metaphor to describe the Internet. Now that we are all hurtling on that digital autobahn all the time, the term is scarcely remembered (and certainly not needed).
In a similar way, Neal Stephenson's Metaverse plans and ambition to build THEEE Metaverse paradoxically face a market where his ideas have already become so influential, inspiring so many massively popular platforms, that his success as a business founder now competes with his success as a novelist.
On that theme, it's an additional irony that Neal Stephenson's novels greatly influenced the rise of both the Metaverse and cryptocurrency, but it very much remains to be seen whether these two concepts belong together in the same platform. (More on that in Chapter 8.)
And in another final twist, the success of Lamina1 and THEEE Metaverse might depend on the long (long, long) awaited adaptation of Snow Crash for the screen—recently planned as an HBO series but now in the hands of Paramount Studios.
When that does finally happen, as Neal Stephenson notes drolly, computing technology has become so advanced over the decades, it's no longer even necessary to depict the Metaverse in Snow Crash with 3D graphics.
“[T]oday if we were to watch a 1995 adaptation of Snow Crash, we would be immediately pulled out of the story by the obviously substandard graphics from 27 years ago,” as he puts it.
“[W]e've kind of reached the point where it's not clear that you would even use computer graphics. I mean, you could film actors playing whatever role and just claim that they were photorealistic avatars.”
Or to put it another way: Neal Stephenson conceived of the Metaverse as something that might one day be as popular as television. For his own metaverse startup to stand the best chance to succeed, the Metaverse might first need to be depicted on TV.