(2021-08-03) Thompson Metaverses

Ben Thompson: Metaverses. Satya Nadella, for the record, was first: on May 25, 2021, during the keynote for Microsoft’s Build developer conference, he characterized a collection of Azure offerings as a metaverse.

The term “enterprise metaverse” came a month later at the Microsoft Inspire sales force keynote, but it was only on last week’s earnings call that most of the press caught on. As usual, no one cares unless Facebook is involved.

The key difference between the Internet and the metaverse is the idea of “presence”; Matthew Ball, who has written extensively about the concept, including a ten-part Metaverse Primer earlier this summer, defined the Metaverse in 2020 as having these seven qualities:

Stephenson’s Metaverse had many of qualities Zuckerberg and Ball highlighted, including persistence, being synchronous and live, and the quality of being filled with “content and experiences created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors”; the vision in Snow Crash, though, had two crucial differences that made it fundamentally different.

The fact of the matter is that, contra Zuckerberg, the Metaverse of Snow Crash is virtual reality.

This all makes sense in the book because the Internet does not exist.

Zuckerberg, however, is announcing Facebook’s new mission in a world with the Internet, which is why he tried to expand his definition to basically be Internet+.

The Internet, too, is about not just gaming and entertainment, but all aspects of life. There is, admittedly, not much dancing, until you remember that Epic makes a fortune selling emotes, which lets your Fortnite character dance.

From this perspective Facebook’s grand metaverse mission sounds an awful lot like VR re-branded.

Facebook’s goal isn’t the Internet, it’s bigger than that.

Stephenson, for his part, never anticipated a company like Facebook.

This is, in retrospect, the most unrealistic part of Snow Crash. The Metaverse is governed by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Global Multimedia Protocol Group (open standards); it is accessed and maintained by a fiber optic monopoly owned by one L. Bob Rife. Rife is the bad guy in the story, running a cult from an aircraft carrier and trying to use Snow Crash to break the minds of hackers like Hiro; it never occurs to Rife to leverage the fact that he owns the wires Hiro and everyone else depends on.

Indeed, Rife is, from the Ball perspective, a bit of a hero: his monopoly is a hands-off one

This vision of the Internet feels increasingly obsolete: actually keeping a server online means having an Internet Service Provider, which may impose bandwidth constraints at best, and cut you off for arbitrary content rules at worse; national regulators in an increasing number of countries want to control the bits on local bandwidth, professing outrage at China’s Great Firewall even as their actions evince a certain degree of envy.

The vast majority of computing devices in the world are access-controlled by Apple and Google, which not only impose limits on content but also tax their economies at a 30% rate.

One can certainly make the case that Stephenson didn’t see this coming either — except that he kind of did.

Not all of the events of Snow Crash take place in the Metaverse; Stephenson’s real world is, arguably, far more interesting. Nearly everything is privatized, from neighborhoods to roads to law enforcement; private corporations (including the Mafia) operate “Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities” that own properties across the country and include citizenship and privileged access.

The rules in Greater Hong Kong are different than the rules in Nova Sicilia or Metazania or New South Africa or Narcolombia, despite the fact they all exist in what was nominally the United States (the actual government only actually exists in secured enclaves of its own). They are, quite literally, walled gardens.

In other words, I think that Stephenson got the future exactly backwards: in our world the benevolent monopolist is the reality of atoms

This is why I don’t think it is absurd that Nadella was the first tech executive to endorse the metaverse as a strategic goal. There is likely to be good business in building private metaverses for private companies.

Facebook’s goal is more audacious: the company already serves 3.5 billion users, which means creating a shared reality for over half of the world is a plausible goal. That reality, though, will likely sit alongside other realities, just as Facebook the app sits alongside other social networks.

What I am skeptical of is the idea of there being one Metaverse to rule them all; we already have that, and in this case the future is, in William Gibson’s turn of phrase, here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. I speak from personal experience: for two decades I have lived and worked primarily on the Internet; it’s where I experience friendship and community and make my living. Over the last year-and-a-half hundreds of millions of people have joined me, as the default location for the work has switched from the office to online (remote) (that “online” is primarily experienced at home does not mean that home is intrinsic to the work — “work from home” is a misnomer). This too is an inverse of Snow Crash, where most jobs are in the real world, and recreation in the Metaverse; the future of work is online, and the life one wants to live in the reality of one’s choosing.