Metaversed

Chapter 9Understanding Reality

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

One of the ways that we often envision the future of technological realities is through science fiction and pop culture. This is true of the metaverse, although in most cases it wasn't called the “metaverse” in the movies, TV shows, or books. Ready Player One, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Tron, The Matrix, Free Guy and others allow us to explore new and different worlds enhanced by technology. “The richness of ‘storyworlds’—the ‘universes’ within which [fictional] stories take place—provides us with detailed rules of the context in which a larger reality unfolds that extends beyond a single story, and has the potential to provide us with deeper learning about the underlying systems that regulate those worlds,”¹ say Alex McDowell, creator of the 2002 film Minority Report and Peter von Stackelberg, self-described as a “worldbuilder” and “transmedia story architect.” These worlds are built either with a utopian purpose, driven by their creators' wish for a perfect society, or out of a desire to tackle an impending apocalypse. From the 1950s through 1980s, an entire genre of science fiction called cyberpunk, which focused entirely on a dystopic future, was at peak popularity. In many cases, the fiction provides enough technical accuracy and detail to satisfy the critical eye of their tech-savvy audience. ...