Metaverse

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1992 · Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Snow Crash; the corporate boom began with Facebook's rename to Meta in October… · Also known as The metaverse; Meta; Horizon Worlds; Web3 metaverse

What it is

A metaverse is meant to be a shared, computer-drawn 3D world that people enter as cartoon versions of themselves (called avatars), often wearing a headset that covers their eyes and fills their view. They meet, talk, play, work and buy things there. In 2021 the word stopped being a science fiction term and became a corporate promise: big tech firms said it would replace the flat websites and phone apps people used, and spent billions trying to make that happen.

Where it came from

The word comes from Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash. Worlds like it already existed online: Second Life (2003) let adults build and sell things as avatars, and children spent hours in Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, where a 2020 Travis Scott concert drew millions of players. In October 2021, weeks after a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, leaked internal documents about harm on its apps, Facebook renamed its parent company Meta and Mark Zuckerberg said the metaverse was its future. Other tech firms, crypto projects and brands rushed to announce metaverse plans, and the word turned up in company reports and press releases everywhere.

Why it mattered

It was one of the biggest corporate bets the internet had seen, and it was made in public. Meta's VR division lost over $10 billion in 2021 alone and kept losing money, while anyone could see that few people were using what it built. A leaked 2022 memo reportedly showed Meta's own staff weren't spending much time in Horizon Worlds either. By early 2023 Zuckerberg was talking mostly about AI, and the word had become shorthand for tech hype no one asked for. The virtual worlds people actually liked, such as Roblox and VRChat, carried on regardless.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People were happy to spend evenings in shared virtual worlds when those worlds were games their friends were already in. When the biggest social media company told them it was the future and tried to sell it back to them, they turned it into a joke within a year.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.