Way back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson published his breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, a cyberpunk exploration of then-futuristic technologies: mobile computing, virtual reality, wireless Internet, digital currency, smartphones, and augmented-reality headsets. The book famously opens with a breakneck car chase as the main character, Hiro Protagonist (it’s something of a satire), races to deliver a pizza on time. It’s a literal life-or-death scene as our harried gig-economy driver races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and risks angering the mob. TaskRabbit "independent contractors" can surely relate.
Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.
In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”
Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be drawn more toward immersive virtual-reality experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is selling with Facebook’s Oculus headset, or augmented-reality gear, like Apple’s Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal Stephenson: I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize. You look at somebody wearing a VR rig on their head, and somebody wearing an AR rig, anything that’s on the market now, and those two people kind of look the same. But what they’re seeing and experiencing is completely different. If you’re in a VR simulation, every photo that’s hitting your eye, everything you see is a virtual object that’s rendered from scratch by a computer graphics system.
If you’re in an AR application, you are where you are. You’re in your physical environment, you’re seeing everything around you normally, but there’s additional stuff that’s being added. So VR has the ability to take you to a completely different fictional place—the kind of thing that’s described in the Metaverse in Snow Crash. When you go into the Metaverse, you’re on the street, you’re in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a shabby shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate. AR’s a whole different bag.
VR: Do you see VR and AR as competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
NS: Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in. That pervades everything in terms of how you think about content, how you tell stories, what it is that you can actually do with these devices. (...)
VR: There are characters in Snow Crash called Gargoyles, who are perpetually plugged in. You wrote: "Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions . . . You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.” Do you anticipate a future in which we’re all plugged in 24/7?
NS: The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions? The practice of going around hunched over a rectangle in your hand is completely normal now, and when I see somebody in a car or walking down the street hundreds of feet away, I can tell that they’re texting just by their posture. We all can. It’s what we’ve turned into because of the particular way that we’re connected through technology. I’d like to think it can get better than what we have now.
Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”
Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be drawn more toward immersive virtual-reality experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is selling with Facebook’s Oculus headset, or augmented-reality gear, like Apple’s Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal Stephenson: I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize. You look at somebody wearing a VR rig on their head, and somebody wearing an AR rig, anything that’s on the market now, and those two people kind of look the same. But what they’re seeing and experiencing is completely different. If you’re in a VR simulation, every photo that’s hitting your eye, everything you see is a virtual object that’s rendered from scratch by a computer graphics system.
If you’re in an AR application, you are where you are. You’re in your physical environment, you’re seeing everything around you normally, but there’s additional stuff that’s being added. So VR has the ability to take you to a completely different fictional place—the kind of thing that’s described in the Metaverse in Snow Crash. When you go into the Metaverse, you’re on the street, you’re in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a shabby shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate. AR’s a whole different bag.
VR: Do you see VR and AR as competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
NS: Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in. That pervades everything in terms of how you think about content, how you tell stories, what it is that you can actually do with these devices. (...)
VR: There are characters in Snow Crash called Gargoyles, who are perpetually plugged in. You wrote: "Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions . . . You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.” Do you anticipate a future in which we’re all plugged in 24/7?
NS: The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions? The practice of going around hunched over a rectangle in your hand is completely normal now, and when I see somebody in a car or walking down the street hundreds of feet away, I can tell that they’re texting just by their posture. We all can. It’s what we’ve turned into because of the particular way that we’re connected through technology. I’d like to think it can get better than what we have now.
by Joanna Robinson, Hive | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. I read a lot (but not much science fiction), and Snow Crash is one of those "beyond the beyonds" novels you stumble across now and then and go "how did I never hear about this before"? Pure genius. There isn't a page or two where you don't go ..."wow, how did he ever come up with that metaphor/turn of phrase/premise/insight?" Highly recommended (word of caution: I hear his later novels are almost impenetrably dense). This is a guy bursting with talent and ideas. Now I see where Ready Player One came from. See also: The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.]
