Facebook sees metaverse potential in OculusĪnother central concept to “Snow Crash” is that of the aforementioned metaverse: a kind of parallel digital world, in which people flee from the bleak reality of the present. Then there’s an ingenious piece of technology featured in the book called “Earth,” which can only be described in a manner eerily reminiscent of “Google Earth,” which has been around since 2001-nearly a decade after Snow Crash first hit shelves. The term avatar, for instance, now firmly entrenched in popular usage, was a novelty at the time. Nevertheless, Stephenson’s prognostications not only struck a nerve across Silicon Valley, but several products, concepts and circumstances predate the digital age. The book was “just me making shit up,” he told Vanity Fair in an interview in 2017.

“Hiro Protagonist,” the novel’s protagonist hero, delivers pizzas and ends up getting tangled up in the search for an enigmatic drug called Snow Crash.Īuthor Neal Stephenson says he never really saw himself anticipating the future. The world is run by mega conglomerates and inequality is extreme. Snow Crash ( here’s a brief synopsis on Wikipedia) paints a bleak, dystopian future dominated by technology, in which the State has almost entirely retreated from the fore. The Google co-founder lists the science fiction romp as one of two books that had a particular influence on him. It kind of anticipated what’s going to happen, and I find that really interesting”, said Sergey Brin in an Interview from the year 2000.

“ ‘Snow Crash’ was really ten years ahead of its time. Today, we’re breaking down what the term means on the surface, what it means moving forward, why it’s in vogue again and which industry players are tapped to pull off creating a metaverse. It seems that whenever the world’s tech elite starts talking about their vision of how the internet of tomorrow will be, there’s one term they’re apt to drop: “Metaverse.” The term first appeared in the 1992 science fiction novel titled “Snowcrash,” which has left a lasting impression on the founders of Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Snow crash author stephenson