Fieldnotes from the Metaverse — Neuromancer and Snow Crash
NOTE: “Field Notes from the Metaverse” will be turned into a book that documents the history, visions, perspectives, and narratives of the Metaverse: Specific milestones, their immediate impact and how they shaped the discussion going forward. You can find updated content here:
I want to start this series in the 1980s and early 1990s, specifically with two books that coined the terms “Cyberspace” and “Metaverse”: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
Setting the scene
The 1980s were a reality-check for the technology-utopia-optimism of the sixties and seventies. Computers became affordable but our homes didn’t evolve into Jetsons-like computer-aided boredom. We had nuclear power but didn’t drive nuclear powered flying cars. We went to the moon but didn’t colonize it. Instead, it became clear that the current technological progress was polluting cities and the environment. The cold war was still very warm. The wave of love and flower power came, broke, and vanished and was replaced by a darker and angrier culture of punk, rap +hip hop and early electronic / Techno.
Meanwhile, science fiction expanded from outward-looking space operas (Star Trek, Space: 1999, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica and others) to explore inward-looking, earth-bound futures narratives. The hopeful utopias of the 60s and 70s, where technology had propelled societies beyond basic needs, were replaced by dystopias, based on a deep-rooted cynicism against technology and capitalism. Ridley Scotts Blade Runner was released in 1982 and set the tone for a dark and gritty Cyberpunk future where the line between real and artificial was blurred. In the same year Steven Lisberger’s Tron explored Computer space as a new spatial dimension, imagining what lied “beyond the screen”. Android (1982) and The Terminator (1984) explored human-like androids, followed by RoboCop (1987), looking at humans turning into machines. In Japan, Cyberpunk Anime followed with Bubble Gum Crisis (1987) and Akira (1988).
The movie WarGames (1983) explored themes like computer networking, human-machine interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and the dangers of automated decision-making. The resulting discussions influenced the first US computer and internet policies, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in 1986.
Fueled by the home computer revolution, Hacker culture grew from hardware tinkering into illegal networking and cracking, but also the free & open software movement, digital art, and other subcultures. The Hacker Manifesto (aka “The Conscience of a Hacker”) emerged, published 1986 in Phrack Magazine.
The Sony Walkman was one of the first electronic wearables, allowing users to selectively augment their hearing with music. MTV (Music Television) became a thing, transforming all music from audio and tactile experiences into visual ones.
Max Headroom, the first “computer generated artificial intelligence TV presenter”, appeared first in the TV movie “Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future” and was adapted into a TV series in 1988.
And while the MTV generation hackers used Max Headroom to hack the established mass media broadcast system, let’s talk about two books that came out during this time.
Neuromancer (1984) and Snow Crash (1992)
Both books feature elaborate world building and bold explorations of social and technical concepts. However, they were not created to make predictions of potential futures, but as commercial pieces of entertainment.
William Gibson was commissioned to write Neuromancer as his first full-length novel in 1982. He based the world and characters on his previous short stories, published in science fiction periodicals, especially Johnny Mnemonic (1981) and Burning Chrome (1982).
In an interview with Larry McCaffery in 2000, Gibson said he’d written Neuromancer in a state of “Blind animal panic”. Later in 2003 he added on his blog: “BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. .. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for,” which made him re-write the first two-thirds of the book 12 times.
While not an instant commercial success, it hit a cultural nerve. The term “Cyberspace” was first used in Burning Chrome, but it was Neuromancer that established it as a concept in the public consciousness, used in mainstream media as a synonym for the emerging Internet. Neuromancer became the first novel to win the coveted Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Awards in the same year.
A decade later, Neal Stephenson initially envisioned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel. However, due to the lack of available tools and image-processing software in 1992, he eventually turned the story into a novel.
Like Neuromancer it established many technological concepts within its setting, coining the term Metaverse as a massively multiplayer game-like successor to the Internet, populated by user-controlled Avatars, as well as system-controlled Daemons.
Neal Stephenson told Vanity Fair in an interview in 2017 that “He never really saw himself anticipating the future. The book was just me making shit up.”
Impact
Both books describe violent, capitalistic, and cynical dystopias, but their setting aligned well to the “No Future” cultural Zeitgeist. They took the financial (early eighties recessions), environmental (for example the Exxon Valdez disaster), and nuclear (Chernobyl) disasters of the 1980s and 1990s and (together with the microcomputer revolution) extrapolated a hyper capitalistic, post-apocalyptic, fully digitally transformed future vision.
Much like Blade Runner, the books were used as a template for how this new Cyberpunk / Metaverse genre should feel. They were a stark contrast to previous clean and sterile future visions, and their worlds felt alive, used, lived in and thus more relatable and realistic to the audience.
They provided a stylistic template for the new computer enthusiast subculture. Cyber Samurai, Netrunners and Avatars became role models and lifestyles to identify with. Instead of imitating rock stars or athletes, computer enthusiasts imitated Rache Bartmoss or Johnny Silverhand.
Many people working in technology will confirm that they were influenced by either or both books. Here are some examples from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft:
“Snow Crash was really ten years ahead of its time. It kind of anticipated what’s going to happen, and I find that really interesting”, said Sergey Brin in an Interview from the year 2000.
“It’s worth noting that, at least for a time, product managers at Facebook were required to read Snow Crash as part of their internal training”, wrote Dean Eckles in his personal blog in 2014.
According to Wikipedia “Former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer J Allard and former Xbox Live Development Manager Boyd Multerer claimed to have been heavily inspired by Snow Crash in the development of Xbox Live, and that it was a mandatory read for the Xbox development team.”
The books didn’t necessarily inspire these companies and teams from a technical point of view, but again stylistically: “Wouldn’t it be cool to have something like this…?”
And thus the “cool things” were separated from the dystopic warnings surrounding them, detaching them from their original world and context. Just like “Wouldn’t it be cool to have nuclear power?” sounds great if you remove the questions around waste disposal, securing nuclear waste sites, the fact that this technology also enables nuclear weapons.
Those stylistic-only visions inevitably inspired and influenced public expectations and thus investors and thus actual products. Life imitated art when Cyberspace shaped how Google saw the World Wide Web. And again, when the Metaverse shaped how Facebook envisioned communication and how Microsoft enabled online play.
Both books are important because they influenced our language and thinking how digital worlds should feel as we created the early commercial Internet.
Afterthoughts
When we look at Neuromancer and Snow Crash today, we see neat science fiction books — an entertaining read that is about as relevant for virtual world designers and developers as Star Trek is for NASA space engineers. And that’s fine — they are 30 years old pieces of entertainment. Inspiring, sure, but not technical literature.
Both “Cyberspace” and “Metaverse” were metaphors for a “3D Internet”. Servers were seen as “property” located on a virtual map. “Websites” were buildings and structures on these properties. People “travelled” between virtual cities on the “Information Superhighway” and between buildings on virtual streets. Users interacted as they would in real life, but also having access to digital capabilities. Entering these worlds was fully immersive and context-consuming. And the virtual space was unregulated, anarchistic, and somehow still coherent and egalitarian.
Now we know that this doesn’t make sense. But as Raph Koster said, it’s unfair to in hindsight call Snow Crash bullshit or ask: “How did we get virtual worlds so wrong?” Neither Snow Crash nor Neuromancer were written as predictions or instructions on how to create a potential future.
A novel doesn’t get bonus points for being scientifically accurate — in most cases it breaks the flow and makes the narration less approachable. Even when introducing concepts, they are detached from details, focusing only on specific aspects that drive the story. Reality is usually far less “cool”, way more challenging, and sometimes more dangerous than their early imaginations.
Trying to extract “the true meaning of the Metaverse” from Snow Crash today is moot as reality has turned out to be different. Just like we can’t extract the “true meaning of space travel” from Star Trek.
Over time, the computer enthusiast subculture evolved beyond the early templates, becoming hackers, crackers, nerds, geeks, gamers, bloggers, streamers, podcasters, social media influencers and more.
The Internet with web sites, online platforms, e-commerce, and games evolved into multi-modal, context-sensitive experiences that span from fully digital to digital-physical to fully physical.
The understanding and thus the stylistic expectations of the World Wide Web, Social Virtual Worlds and Ambient Computing evolved beyond the scope of Neuromancer and Snow Crash — to the point where they are now only mentioned as “the books that started it” or as Member Berries for investors.
In a recent interview, Neal Stephenson himself reflected on the legacy of Snow Crash and current state of the Metaverse. He found that the term now represents a narrative — a vague stand-in for the next paradigm in technology: “Metaverse is kinda a catch-all term for stuff that people want you to buy a few years from now. And by process of elimination t’s got to be something beyond screens.” (Starting at 21:30)
About the series
The term “Metaverse” is currently claimed by many groups, driven by different incentives. Some groups attach the term to specific technologies (for example VR, AR, XR, Digital Twins or Blockchains), others see it as a future vision or narrative (sometimes dystopian, sometimes utopian). Some groups talk about the coming Metaverse, others argue that it already exists.
“Fieldnotes from the Metaverse” is a series that discusses the history, visions, perspectives, and narratives of the Metaverse: Specific milestones, their immediate impact and how they shaped the discussion going forward. The goal is a holistic and inclusive view of the Metaverse space, separating visions, signals, trends, and hype.
