In Meta’s long-winded metaverse announcement, Mark Zuckerberg spends more than 10 full minutes speaking about commerce in the metaverse. You cannot just go out and explore an open world you are relegated to individual, user-created environments. It is the Ocarina of Time to Stephenson’s Breath of the Wild. Though his actual vision is still amorphous and incredibly ill-defined, we do know it is cartoony and limited.

He envisions it as a vast extension of the network created by Facebook. The metaverse as Zuckerberg sees it is not a world but a platform. Much of the Metaverse mimics the real world - you can’t teleport, for example, and can only use a monorail or walk - but it is still an escape. It is easy to lose yourself in the Metaverse, here, and many choose to do just that, never unplugging from their headsets. The Metaverse experience is always first-person your perspective in the virtual world becomes your reality. To be thrown into Snow Crash’s Metaverse is to become your avatar. It is a densely populated urban center with almost no other development. Most of the virtual world is nothingness. That road circles a perfectly round, black sphere of space with a circumference of 65,536 kilometers. You are transported to an overcrowded metropolis with one hundred-meter-wide road leading in and out. Doing so is immediate and all-encompassing. Stephenson’s Metaverse is accessed via highly specialized goggles (what we’d today call a VR headset), either a personal pair (expensive) or a public terminal (less expensive). Mark Zuckerberg’s willingness to throw away his baby’s identity (read: his brand as it’s always been known) has encouraged many others to consider the metaverse as a solid function of the future.

Talk of the seemingly inevitable metaverse has dominated the tech media cycle for months now, thanks to Facebook’s rebranding as “Meta.” Suddenly the idea of a fully virtual world is mainstream. It also bears almost no resemblance to the cartoonish, legless office-based avatars we’ve seen from the likes of Meta and Microsoft. In many ways, Snow Crash’s Metaverse is exactly what Big Tech wants the future to look like, with the ability to hop in and out of a virtual world at will. Reading Snow Crash - Stephenson’s 1992 novel that spends a significant amount of its narrative in the Metaverse - 20 years after its publication is an uncanny experience. But Stephenson’s metaverse has many things our concepts don’t, including - most importantly - the possibility of chaos. Neal Stephenson has long been credited as the creator of the “metaverse” as we’ve come to understand it in modern parlance.

Snow crash metaverse