Snow Crash coins 'Metaverse' and seeds a generation of tech founders with its political economy

JUN 01 1992 · 12:05

Video: Snow Crash - Crash Punks is inspired by sci-fi, anime & Neal Stephenson Date: 1992-06-01 · Type: literature · Tags: neal-stephenson, metaverse, avatar, post-state, franchise-enclaves, silicon-valley-canon, eth-ancestry, literary-canon "The Metaverse. Hiro's there right now. It's a computer-generated universe." *Snow Crash* arrived eight years after *Neuromancer* and substituted Gibson's ascetic noir sentence-craft with Pynchonian sprawl and a satirical fury that Gibson rarely permitted himself. Stephenson's world — a balkanized post-state America of franchise nation-enclaves where the Mafia delivers pizza and the federal government is one more suburban enclave — is funnier and angrier than the Sprawl, and its political imagination is more explicit: the novel is, among other things, a sustained argument that the dissolution of public institutions into privatized services produces a kind of liberty that is also a kind of catastrophe. The term *Metaverse* — the immersive virtual environment Hiro Protagonist navigates — appeared here for the first time in any medium. *Avatar*, in its current online sense, appeared here too. The Silicon Valley reception was immediate and lasting: Sergey Brin has cited it as one of two books that changed his life; Bezos called it foundational; Carmack credits the networking model directly. Vitalik Buterin, in multiple interviews, has placed Stephenson among the speculative-fiction authors whose vocabulary shaped his thinking about Ethereum's social architecture. Whether Buterin cited the novel specifically in his Bitcoin Magazine writing remains a matter of disputed attribution, but the broader debt is not in question. Stephenson is now Chief Futurist at Lamina1, a layer-1 blockchain co-founded with Peter Vessenes and backed by Joseph Lubin. The novel that named the Metaverse has, thirty-three years later, acquired a balance sheet. Facts • Published June 1992 by Bantam Spectra. • First appearances in any medium: 'Metaverse,' 'avatar' (in current online sense). • Acknowledged influence on Brin (Google), Bezos (Amazon), Carmack (id Software), Omidyar (eBay), Andreessen. • Stephenson is Chief Futurist at Lamina1 (2022–), backed by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. • Stephenson's research notes describe Snow Crash as drafted simultaneously with a graphic-novel proposal. Primary Documents • Snow Crash — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash • Neal Stephenson Coined 'Metaverse' in 1992. Now He's Building One — CoinDesk — https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/08/neal-stephenson-coined-metaverse-in-1992-now-hes-building-one