Mark Zuckerberg might have already doomed his metaverse, but Neal Stephenson’s vision is very much alive

Like much of the world, Neal Stephenson doesn’t give a damn about Meta’s Metaverse. “My book will outlast Zuckerberg’s metaverse,” he tells me over video conference to talk about Lamina1, the company that he cofounded to actually turn his idea of the Metaverse into a reality. “People can go read the novel anytime they want. I don’t actually spend a lot of time worrying about Facebook.” 

Clearly, Stephenson is tired of people asking him about Zuck’s Snow Crash-turned-train crash, and I can’t blame him. Zuck’s Metaverse may be dead but Stephenson’s ideal lives on—just not how he initially imagined it.

Stephenson coined the term Metaverse in his seminal sci-fi book Snow Crash. He was the first person to envision a persistent three-dimensional digital world in which humans could exist and interact as real entities, to the point where people could decide to live inside that alternate universe continuously. It was a place with virtual goods and real estate, owned by a major corporation, and accessible only with virtual reality goggles. Exactly what Meta is failing to recreate in the most toe-curling way possible.

But now, the author has a different idea of what the Metaverse is. Or at least the way you can live in it; one that goes counter to everything Meta—and allegedly Apple too—is doing. “I don’t believe that most people will access the Metaverse using goggles or glasses,” he says. “I think 30 years ago, we were in a very different place in terms of computer graphics and what hardware was available.” At the time, the idea seemed like a reasonable prediction to him. He thought that, “in order for people to experience a three-dimensional computer graphics world, they would need an inherently three-dimensional device like goggles and a complicated user interface.”

The Metaverse already arrived years ago

Obviously, no matter how much Zuckerberg wants this antiquated vision of the metaverse, and how many billions he burns to manifest it, that hasn’t happened yet. It probably won’t happen for many years, if ever. No matter how many Quests—Meta’s VR headset—get sold to die-hard enthusiasts, as long as you need goggles, putting a piece of plastic on your face will always feel like an unnatural barrier; a barrier that will stop billions from embracing it in the same way they embraced the smartphone, computers, or game consoles.

Ironically, these 2D interfaces remain the most accessible and natural way to access the Metaverse. Stephenson recognizes this now. “What happened is that Doom came along and gave birth to the video game industry as we know it,” he points out, “so today we have many very beautifully realized 3D worlds that we can run around in when we’re playing games, but for the most part, we don’t do that wearing goggles. We’re just looking at screens.” 

In other words, the Metaverse in its primogenial form is already here. His argument is that it’s been here for decades now. And, from World of Warcraft to Red Dead Redemption to Fortnite, these Metaverses are getting more sophisticated, increasing their level of fidelity while building up entire economies. The only problem is that they are still disconnected from each other. There’s currently no way for us to maintain our digital selves—and the assets we own—across these platforms. But the Metaverse does exist. It’s just that, instead of living inside those worlds, we live them through a looking glass that we can’t cross quite yet. “That’s not what I thought was going to happen 30 years ago, but it is what did happen,” Stephenson admits. “And so today, there are billions of people who are familiar with that style of game and that style of interface. I think that’s how the vast majority of people are going to access the Metaverse.” 

The stories are what matters

While these worlds are not physically immersive, as VR promised, we can feel them through the characters that we see on these flat screens. Their stories are our stories. And if those stories are very good, they draw us into their Metaverses. 

That seems to be the other half of Stephenson’s current definition of the Metaverse: “The best way to think of the Metaverse is as a communications medium, like radio or television or the Internet,” he says. “And that makes it a pretty broad designation if you think about it that way. You don’t see people arguing about whether or not television is cool, but it is cool if there’s a cool program on.”

A side effect of this belief is that he doesn’t think that the Metaverse will ever have a killer app, because it is already its own killer app. The Metaverse will be defined by these cool worlds you want to step in. “Sometimes there is a killer app that absolutely sells it, like a lot of people went out and bought CD-ROM drives because they wanted to play Myst,” he points out. “So maybe that was like the killer app for CD-ROMs, but now it’s a more diverse and complicated marketplace than that. And so it’s not as though everyone is going to line up to do the same thing at the same time.” 

The primitive Metaverse as we know it—the different persistent game worlds that already exist—is already successful. It’s already bringing in billions of dollars. They are just not truly connected yet. And not everyone can build them because it is a very complicated and expensive proposition, Stephenson says.

Open tools to connect worlds

That is why Stephenson started a company with Peter Vessenes, who describes himself as a digital currency, tokenization, and blockchain technology expert. Its name is Lamina1, and it aims to allow anyone to build worlds and bridge them to others. Vessenes—who is the company’s CEO and chief cryptographer—says that right now, it takes too much effort for independent developers to build up these persistent digital worlds and monetize them. Lamina1 wants to provide all the necessary underlying technologies to indie developers. These, they hope, will be the ones creating the “cool programs” you will like to live in. 

Blockchain technology will be at the center of all that, which they think is the only possible way to create digital economies, connect worlds, and interoperate with each other, so you can bring your battle armor or your supercar from one world to the next. This is something that we all have heard before but nobody has been able to make yet. Meta seems to want to control its own walled gardens and milk users out of their last dollar, like every other big developer out there. It’s hard to see these worlds’ economies coming together as one wide open standard, even while the many companies—including Adobe, Nvidia, Sony, Microsoft, Epic, or Unity, but curiously not Apple or Roblox—are all part of the Metaverse Standards Forum, the W3C group that is supposedly working toward the creation of true interconnected Metaverse. Lamina1 is also part of that group but, from what Stephenson and Vessenes convey, they are approaching the problem differently. 

Vessenes and Stephenson seem to believe that the real Metaverse won’t come from those big companies but the small guys. “We’re building this up for everybody, we’ll have these indie experiences, we’ll have these more independent things,” Vessenes says. They claim to be creating a tool that will provide people with the underlying infrastructure to build interconnected metaverses. Vessenes explains that it takes a lot of game development expertise to build these complex universes from the ground up. Stuff like payment protocols, digital goods, avatars . . . “I could probably list like 30 of these things that we’ve identified,” adds. Their foundational development tool kits are meant to take care of all that.

They also want to create their own content too, “to eat their own dog food” and understand what needs to be provided to these indie developers. But mostly, they are interested in what independent people can do if you give them the right tools to avoid the grunt work and concentrate on world building.

“Standards in general work when people voluntarily come together and use something, because it solves a problem for them, which is kind of what happened with HTML,” Stephenson tells me. “So you can’t enforce standards effectively from the top down—you’ve got to make it open and cultivate the community, which is the approach that we’re trying to take.” Their path, Stephenson says, is “not dictating from the top down how it ought to be.” 

That sounds like a dig at Meta or any other corporation trying to own the Metaverse. But this being Stephenson, it’s hard not to imagine Zuckerberg as L. Bob Rife, the villain trying to take over the Metaverse in Snow Crash. The only problem with this, however, is that it looks like Zuck’s Metaverse is dead already. No need to topple this evil, people. It just killed itself.