First As Tragedy, Then As Farce: Snow Crash In The 21st Century
Disclaimer: This is the translation of an essay originally published at Editora Aleph’s blog.
Once discussed in conversations shared by experts in technology and innovation, the term “metaverse” has truly turned into a buzzword after Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta.
Despite the change happening in the middle of a crisis, Zuckerberg has been investing in immersive technologies for a long while. In 2014, he bought Oculus and, since then, the entrepreneur is betting on the transition of social media to a more immersive environment powered by virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.
All this information could very well fit in the plot of a cyberpunk story. Maybe William Gibson would add some flourishing to the ambiance, but, in the case of Neal Stephenson, inventor of the word “metaverse”, there is a mix of rawness and debauchery. This is what makes his novel Snow Crash (1992) be considered both a parody and a reference to cyberpunk.
In this book, Stephenson foresees the ludicrous way the genre developed in the entrails of popular culture and how cyberpunk, once a dystopian tragedy dressed as cautionary tale, turned into a marketing farce. However, this is not actually shocking if we consider that many of the current big techs indeed have science fiction as a particular inspiration for their enterprises.
At first, the neologism “cyberspace” proposed by Gibson was embraced by academia as a technical term referring to digital spaces. Today, it is time for “metaverse” to rise as an “enhanced” version of cyberspace. While some authors see differences in levels of immersion and technological development between the two concepts, both Gibson and Stephenson imagined something quite similar: the creation of a universe accessible through virtual reality headsets, haptic devices and implants directly jacked to the brain.
In the case of Oculus, it’s common knowledge that its founder Palmer Luckey distributed copies of Ready Player One to his employees as a means to inspire them to create something similar to OASIS, Ernest Cline’s take on the cyberspace/metaverse. But just like Snow Crash and Neuromancer, Ready Player One is itself another cautionary tale which aims to teach us a lesson: no matter how amazing OASIS seems to be, there are many controversies and challenges that need to be addressed.
Curiously (or not), Stephenson has joined the tech industry as a consultant on immersive technologies. Since 2014 he fills the role of futurist at Magic Leap, a company that went viral after releasing a demo video featuring a technology that never seemed to become true. In 2017, a British website claimed the company was advertising “vaporware”, that is, a technology that is taking too long to be developed or which might never exist at all.
In the case of metaverse, Stephenson seems to be riding the hype train pretty well — both in technological and sociological terms. But the metaverse is not only promising to social media enterprises. It has proved to be very attractive to more speculative segments of the market, such as it is the case of the real estate and cryptocurrency sectors.
In Snow Crash, Stephenson mentions Global Multimedia Protocol Group as a fictitious real estate corporation that manages virtual real estate. Today, there are investors spending millions of dollars in virtual land — or, more precisely, land in the metaverse. Some of these purchases can be authenticated via the infamous NFT or non-fungible tokens, which are blockchain-base contracts that work as a document to certify someone’s ownership of a virtual asset.
Curiously (or not, considering his book Cryptonomicon), Stephenson has also joined the cryptocurrency game more recently by establishing a partnership with Peter Vassenes. They aim to create their own blockchain focused on the metaverse, which is called Lamina1. All this in the midst of a “crypto winter”, when NFTs acquired for some million dollars are now valued in just a few thousands and Elon Musk is sued in 258 billions of dollars for supposedly supporting a pyramid scheme with the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Recently Bruce Sterling, who happens to be also a science fiction writer, published some controversial tweet saying that Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown creator of Bitcoin, might be one of the unknown human beings that has done the most “egregious harm to society without anybody ever learning his name or who he is.” Sterling was one of the founders of cyberpunk in the 1980s with the fanzine Cheap Truth and the anthology Mirrorshades, only to “kill” the genre in an article published in the beginning of the 1990s.
In spite of all the controversies of the “real world”, Snow Crash is still an important and relevant novel as it acts just like that meme with a portrait of someone laughing and serious is superposed. At the same time that Stephenson seems to be worried about what Zuckerberg is going to do with Meta, he’s also playing the same game by taking part of this corporate ecosystem.
Reading his book 30 years after its release and following his movements in the “real world” is proving to be something quite amusing to those who want to have a taste of what it feels to have your own version of Hiro Protagonist on the metaverse. For now though, it seems that we still need to deliver pizzas on skates and pay for NFTs of luxury branded skins on the so-called metaverse.
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