Notes from the metaverse with Neal Stephenson and Ori Inbar
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Neal Stephenson has hit the speaking circuit heavily in the past year since he cofounded his Lamina1 blockchain infrastructure startup. But he’s always thoughtful in his appearances, and today’s fireside chat with Ori Inbar, founder of Augmented World Expo, was another good example.
Here’s a rundown of some interesting things that Stephenson and Inbar said in their opening talks. Inbar noted that while Stephenson was recognized for coining the word “metaverse” in his sci-fi novel Snow Crash 30 years ago, Stephenson said there were other earlier inspirations for the ideas around it like Habitat.
In writing Snow Crash, he took what he saw with advances in computer graphics and posited what would happen when we had true mass adoption of those technologies. The result was Snow Crash, where people lived in a virtual environment, complete with their own nightclubs, homes and tactile experiences.
As there were a lot of futuristic promises around the same time, Stephenson felt he couldn’t just present his vision of the future as a straight view of the future. He felt it had to be dystopian, in a kind of recognition that there were a lot of dystopian stories already out there with their own tropes. He saw Snow Crash as a way to make a parody those earlier ideas.
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“It is also a parody of dystopian novels. The tropes were familiar. It didn’t seem I could write one of those with a straight face,” he said.
Fast forward to his
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