“Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services and capabilities integrate and meld together.” There “will be no clean ‘Before Metaverse’ and ‘After Metaverse,’” he writes. Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and prolific essayist, describes the metaverse not as a virtual world or a space, but as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet” - a framework for an extremely connected life.

If you’ve attended a work meeting or a party using a digital avatar, you’re treading into the neighborhood of metaversality.įounders, investors, futurists and executives have all tried to stake their claim in the metaverse, expounding on its potential for social connection, experimentation, entertainment and, crucially, profit. Virtual and augmented reality are, at a minimum, metaverse adjacent. If you own a non-fungible token or even just some crypto, you’re part of the metaversal experience. Video games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which players can build their own worlds, have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. Together, these new technologies hint at what the internet will become next. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian - virtual refuges from a fallen world.Īs a buzzword, the metaverse refers to a variety of virtual experiences, environments and assets that gained momentum during the online-everything shift of the pandemic.

In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. The term comes from digital antiquity: Coined by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, “Snow Crash,” then reimagined as the Oasis in the Ernest Cline novel “Ready Player One,” it refers to a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the analog one in which we live. Remember hearing about “the internet”? Get ready for “the metaverse.”

Then we live our lives within that thing forever. A lot of people talk a lot about a lot of loosely related things, and then those things merge into a single semi-comprehensible thing. In some rare cases, the terminology sticks. Jargon appears out of nowhere, underexplained and overused: the internet of things, the sharing economy, the cloud. The biggest ideas in tech often lurch into the lexicon before they are truly coherent.

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