A persistent shared virtual world you inhabit rather than visit. Coined in a 1992 science-fiction novel — as a dystopia.
What it really means
A metaverse is a shared virtual world that keeps running whether you are in it or not — one you enter as an avatar rather than browse as a visitor.
The word is not a product of the technology industry. It was coined in 1992, by the novelist Neal Stephenson, in Snow Crash. The construction is plain enough: meta-, beyond, plus universe. A world past the world.
What gets left out of the corporate version is the book. Snow Crash is a dystopia. Its America has been sold off into franchised enclaves, public life has collapsed, and the Metaverse is where people go because the physical world on offer is unliveable. It is an escape hatch in a story about what people escape from.
Nearly thirty years later the word was picked up as a strategy, and in 2021 Facebook renamed itself after the prefix. The idea being sold was the one from the novel, with the novel removed.
That is not a rare move — cyberspace came out of William Gibson's fiction the same way, and arrived in business language equally stripped of context. It is worth knowing about a word like this, because the borrowed glamour is doing work. A term invented to describe a place people flee to is being used to describe a place people are being invited to move into.
Where it comes from
A world beyond the world, built on the same pattern as metaphysics and metadata.
Myths & misconceptions
The metaverse is a technology that was invented recently.
The word was coined in 1992, in a novel, thirty years before the companies adopted it. What was new in 2021 was the marketing, not the idea.
Snow Crash presents the metaverse as an aspiration.
It is a dystopian novel. The metaverse in it is an escape from a collapsed and privatised world, and the corporations selling the idea have borrowed the word without the setting it came in.
How it connects
- Allegorywhat Snow Crash is doing: a story about one thing that is plainly about another.
Questions people ask
- Who invented the word metaverse?
- The novelist Neal Stephenson, in Snow Crash, published in 1992. He used it for a virtual world that people enter as avatars — a successor to the internet.
- Is the metaverse from a utopian story?
- No. Snow Crash is a dystopia, and its metaverse is an escape hatch from a broken world. The companies that adopted the term in 2021 took the word and left the warning behind.