Remember Cyberspace? It’s what we called the Future of the Internet before the Metaverse.
The word cyberspace became popular in the 1990s when the use of the Internet, networking, and digital communication were all growing dramatically; the term cyberspace was able to represent the many new ideas and phenomena that were emerging. — Wikipedia
While many people struggle to define the metaverse as explained by the mega-corps with different visions and strategies, I simply define the metaverse as the Internet’s transition from 2D websites to 3D web spaces AKA “cyber spaces” or cyberspace as we have been calling it for years.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia plus too many 80s and 90s hacker movies but the term “cyberspace” meant something more to me back then than the “Web”. Coined by William Gibson in the Neuromancer novel back in 1984, cyberspace was often portrayed in movies and books as a 3D experience much like we talk about today as the metaverse. Remember the scene from the movie Hackers when they “hacked the Gibson”?
Remember Tron? A computer hacker is abducted into the digital world and forced to participate in gladiatorial games where his only chance of escape is with the help of a heroic security program.
Remember The Lawnmower Man? A scientist performs experiments involving intelligence enhancing drugs and virtual reality on a simple-minded gardener. He puts the gardener on an extensive schedule of learning, and quickly he becomes brilliant. But at this point the gardener has a few ideas of his own on how the research should continue, and the scientist begins losing control of his experiments.
Remember Johnny Mnemonic? In 2021, the whole world is connected by the gigantic Internet, and almost a half of the population is suffering from the Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (NAS).Johnny with an implanted memory chip in his brain was ordered to transport the over loaded information from Beijing to Newark. While Pharmakom Industries supported by yakuza tries to capture him to get the information back, the Low-tech group led by J-Bone tries to break the missing code to download the cure of NAS which Johnny carries.
Of course there are many other movies and books in addition Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash novel (which coined the term metaverse in 1992) including: The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Neuromancer, and many, many more.
By chance, did you own a Commodore 64 in the mid-80s like me? If so, you may remember a game developed by LucasArts called Habitat. This game took place in a virtual world called Populopolis and had all of the makings of cyberspace or the metaverse before VR existed including: multiplayer, avatars, teleportation, currency, communications, and community.
Habitat is “a multi-participant online virtual environment”, a cyberspace. — Wikipedia
Now fast forward from the 80s and 90s to 2010 (still a little more than a decade ago). Remember Second Life? Perhaps ahead of its time, Linden Lab created a virtual world with avatars, currency (Linden dollars), and an ecosystem that very much resembles the metaverse in our discussions today. While they still have over 40,000 active users online, they never quite made the jump to virtual reality which is now considered table-stakes for the metaverse but perfectly fine to be once considered cyberspace.
My point is that the metaverse is not new. We’ve been talking about it by a different name, cyberspace, since the inception of the Internet. While the mega-corps are pouring billions of dollars into building and marketing their own metaverses (read “The Metaverse vs. Metaverses”), we have already been there. Perhaps it’s time to let them have their metaverses while we embrace our long-lived cyberspace evolution.
The difference is we now finally have all of the Web protocols to build such an open platform that is accessible by all devices (mobile, desktop, VR, and AR glasses) including avatars, cryptocurrencies, and co-present communications (read “The Metaverse v1.0 Is Already Here”).
Feel free to join my metaverses Discord channel to participate in this conversation.
