Web3 Marketing

4The Metaverse

The science fiction author Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in the novel Snow Crash, 30 years before Facebook would rename itself Meta and declare its intention to occupy a digital realm of the same name. Snow Crash tells the story of Hiro, a pizza delivery boy in an anarcho‐capitalist future. A hacker in his spare time, Hiro draws a cast of computer nerds, tycoons, and mafiosos into daredevil schemes in an immersive, virtual reality, massive online multiplayer game called the Metaverse. Before nearly anyone else, Stephenson imagined that people would want to merge their physical and digital realities and dive deeper into inhabiting virtual worlds. He turned out to be right. Science fiction classics like Snow Crash and Ernest Cline's 2011 Ready Player One make the natural leap from contemporary capitalism to imagining companies in digital battles to control and monetize metaverse worlds. The bad guys will even sacrifice the quality of the game, or make it too expensive for most people to play, in the name of short‐term profit. Nolan Sorrento, the villain of Ready Player One, runs a company called Innovative Online Industries (IOI). IOI is determined to control the open, accessible OASIS, an immersive gaming world that is a refuge for young people away from their dystopian physical reality, to privatize it behind a paywall and charge high fees for access.

When a company like Facebook creates a metaverse world—a company that already makes users into its ...