Imaginary Worlds - Snow Crashing Into The Metaverse

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

For the last 30 years, the real world has been catching up to Neal Stephenson’s vision of the future in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, which influenced the creators of Google Earth, Second Life, Oculus Rift and more. Now the centerpiece of the novel, a virtual world called The Metaverse, may become a daily part of our lives thanks to Facebook (renamed Meta) and other big tech companies. I talk with Meta’s director of A.I. policy Kevin Bankston, Silicon Valley engineer Stephen Pimentel, Australian National University School of Cybernetics director Genevieve Bell, Yale professor Lisa Messeri, and Grace Ng of the DAO Crash Punks about whether it’s a good idea to use a satirical cyberpunk novel as a blueprint for the future. Plus, actor Varick Boyd reads from Snow Crash. The section on Grace Ng has been updated to reflect the crypto market crash that happened after the episode originally aired in May 2022. This episode is sponsored by Backblaze, VAST Horizon, and Squarespace. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. And pretty soon, we might all be interacting with each other in imaginary worlds. CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced what he calls the metaverse, a platform where users will interact in virtual and augmented realities. People and companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the vision of the metaverse. If we think of the internet as something that we look at, the metaverse is a version of the internet that we're inside. This comes close to how the metaverse was first described

in a 1992 science fiction novel, Snow Crash, that coined the term. Yes, the metaverse, as it's being imagined and proposed, is heavily influenced by a sci-fi novel called Snow Crash. And I love any story about life imitating art, especially science fiction. art, especially science fiction. Now at first, I thought Facebook, which has renamed itself Meta, was building the one and only Metaverse. But they're actually going to be competing Metaverses from different companies that are all in development right now. Facebook, or Meta, is just trying to get ahead of the game. And in the tech world, there's a debate whether these metaverses should be fully immersive. Should we put devices on our heads

and enter into virtual worlds? Or should the metaverse be augmented reality, where you're seeing digital projections on the real world, either through a device or even like a hologram of your coworkers sitting right across from you? But there's another question that critics have been asking. Should tech moguls and engineers be using a 30-year-old cyberpunk novel as a design spec? And don't they realize that Snow Crash was a satire?

To give you a sense of Snow Crash, if you haven't read it, the hero protagonist of the book is literally named Hero Protagonist. Although his first name is spelled H-I-R-O, it's short for Hiroki. His mother is Korean, but grew up in Japan. His father is African American. Hero lives in a futuristic Los Angeles. More specifically, he lives in what used to be a storage container. But Hero is also a master hacker. So when he logs onto the metaverse, he can have the powers of some kind of superhero. He is wearing shiny goggles that wrap halfway around his head.

The bows of the goggles have little earphones that are plugged into his outer ears. Here is the actor Varick Boyd reading from Snow Crash. The goggles throw a light smoky haze across his eyes and reflect a distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that stretches off into an infinite blackness. This boulevard does not really exist. It is a computer rendered view of an imaginary place. So Hero's not actually here at all. He's in a computer generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the metaverse. Hero spends a lot of time in the metaverse. It beats the shit out of the used story.

In the interviews that I've read with Neil Stevenson, the author of Snow Crash, whenever he's called some kind of prophet, he brushes that aside and says he was, quote, just making shit up. But the novel is eerily prescient. Kevin Bangston researches the influence of science fiction on real world technology at Arizona State University. And he says what set Stevenson apart from a lot of other cyberpunk novelists is that Stevenson has the mind of an engineer. So when he was just making stuff up, it was still based on a very solid understanding of what the technology was capable of.

You know, a good example here is the sci-fi feedback loop around space travel and rocketry. That is the paradigmatic example of this sci-fi feedback loop in action. And it's basically exactly what happened with Snow Crash and Neal Stephenson. He created this vision. We did not have anything like the technology to get to it yet, but it was foreseeable. And then you had the people inspired by his book going off and actually building all of the intermediate technologies necessary to get to that point. Steven Pimentel is an engineer at a major company in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, I can't tell you which one, but you have definitely heard of it.

I own many of their products. When he started working in Silicon Valley, so many of his colleagues were reading Snow Crash. He heard one of them joke that he wouldn't trust an engineer who wasn't a fan of Snow Crash. that he wouldn't trust an engineer who wasn't a fan of Snow Crash. The joke actually makes sense in that if someone doesn't know of Snow Crash, you might almost take that as a negative mark, you know,

well, who are you? What are you doing here? Kind of thing. Now, he heard that joke when he was first starting out. Jumping ahead a few years... Stevenson discusses technologies that went on to become Google Earth in 2001, Second Life 2003, Google Books 2004, YouTube 2005, Siri 2011, and even Oculus Rift, which came out in 2012. And the reason I bother to list out all those dates is that Snow Crash was written in 1992, so well before these things came out. And I don't think it was so much a matter of, you know, looking ahead into the future and predicting things

as giving a vision that engineers then literally took as inspiration to build products in much the same way that the Star Trek communicator became an inspiration for a lot of our smartphones, so that the fictional imagination of technology can often shape what engineers concretely work toward building. Now, to be honest, whenever I've seen promotional videos of what the metaverse is going to look like, I've been a little underwhelmed. I mean, it just doesn't look like this immersive virtual world that I imagined when reading Snow Crash. It looks more like a combination of Second Life and The Sims, except all the avatars seem to be in work meetings. Genevieve Bell is the director

of the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University. And she says, if anything, we're really just at a breaking point with the technology. And this term that Stevenson came up with, the metaverse, has become a rallying cry. I wonder if the metaverse is as much about a tidying up of a bunch of technologies, of giving them a coherence, than it is about an actual technology per se. So it kind of becomes appealing because you don't then have to have the long list, which isn't very interesting. So I said to you, gosh, Eric, the future is VR, AR, 5G, IoT, cloud-based services, and some algorithms, or also probably a bit of FPGA technology and maybe something else. You'd be like, that's nice. I don't know what that is, but the metaverse makes

it sound like it's coherent. I think it doesn't hurt that it does have this science fiction echo. It's sort of a word that feels familiar, or at least like a familiar stranger, where people are kind of like, oh, I vaguely know that word. And the quality of Stevenson's writing is a big factor in what's made Snow Crash so influential. Like he popularized the term avatar through Snow Crash. Not all science fiction is good science fiction, right? And not all science fiction survives. And, you know, if you look at the ones who have shaped our language, the choices of words we have about this space, right? I don't think it's just about the technology. I think it is about the context in which it is embedded. I think it's about the seductiveness of those contexts or what those

might feel like or the completeness of them. For instance, in this scene, hero protagonist comes across a piece of technology that looks remarkably like Google Earth. In fact, Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, has said Snow Crash is one of his favorite novels. There is something new, a globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hero has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses

to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns. All the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff. The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it tells Hiro or anyone else who knows computers that this piece of software is some heavy shit. It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the Earth would look from a point and geosynchronous orbit directly above LA, complete with weather systems, vast spinning galaxies of clouds hovering just above the surface of the globe,

casting gray shadows on the oceans and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. I enjoy living in a world with technology like Google Earth or Siri, so if the metaverse resembles what Stevenson imagined, what could go wrong? That's after the break. like trainers, fitness pros, spotters to back me up? That's Crypto on Kraken. Powerful crypto tools backed by 24-7 support and multi-layered security. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada.

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as their director of AI policy, focusing on the metaverse. He has heard this critique that tech companies should not be using a satirical novel as a source of inspiration. But he says the target of satire in Snow Crash wasn't so much the tech itself. The target was really of the increasingly deregulated, privatized, globalized, balkanized, digitalized, post-Reagan political economy where like, you know, the federal government is withering away. In fact, in the book, it is withering away in part due to cryptocurrency-related tax evasion,

where there's a much sharper, you know, financial division between the haves and the have-nots and where in response to the withering of state power, you see criminal networks and corporations and gated communities, you know, with their own laws that Stevenson calls burb claves, have sort of stepped in to fill the gap. And so like, that's definitely a dark vision. And it certainly has some political relevance for today, I think. But it's not really relevant to whether AR, VR technology is a positive development for consumers or for the world.

But Stevenson did foresee issues with technology. For instance, characters who are more high status or have money, their avatar can be realistic. They can buy themselves nice digital clothes. And if they're poor or somehow low status, their avatar is janky, pixelated, black and white. And that plays right into the idea of the digital divide, which Kevin says is something they talk about at Meta. I mean, I think the hope for the field, Meta included, I think the hope for the field is that we are going to get to a point,

hopefully sooner rather than later, where the technology is cheap enough that it is as widely accessible as smartphones are today. And smartphones today are essentially a ubiquitous technology. But should this metaverse technology be ubiquitous? Lisa Masseri teaches anthropology at Yale, and she focuses on how people interact with technology. Part of like the metaverse is, and you know, I've talked with some people who have reaffirmed this, it's giving up the game. going to live on a world that is going to be increasingly hard to live in because of environmental change, because of more and more friction in social relations, because of divisive politics? And why not just create a virtual world in which we can escape into? She thinks it's problematic how popular novels like Snow Crash are among engineers, or the novel Ready Player One from 2011,

which was very influenced by Snow Crash. In fact, Ready Player One was so popular among the engineers that created Oculus Rift, the VR headsets that are key to Meta's Metaverse plans. When Facebook acquired Oculus, everyone received a copy of Ready Player One. The author came and gave talks. In Ready Player One, the villain was the big tech company.

They're not the scrappy upstart, right? They're not the people who are fighting against it. And the whole resolution of this story is like, maybe we shouldn't be so online. This gets rationalized because what gets taken away from these texts is not the social story. It's the shiny technology. Genevieve Bell has also been thinking about the ethical problems in building immersive worlds like the metaverse.

But as you start to go back further than that and say, who else was building whole worlds and using the latest technologies to do them? And then you can look at things, ironically enough, like Disneyland and theme parks. Actually, it's funny you mention that because that's where I thought you were heading. I was like, ironically enough, like Disneyland and theme parks. Actually, it's funny you mentioned that because that's where I thought you were heading. I was like, are you heading to Disneyland? I am heading to Disneyland and more importantly, Coney Island, because Coney Island comes first. One of the things about building these virtual worlds that are often characterized by the hyper real in some way or another, right, is that the onboarding and offboarding is always kind of complicated. It's also the case that in building those worlds, part of what is happening for you as the person experiencing them as a kind of quote unquote participant is that there's

an enormous amount of things in the background that are made invisible. You know, whether that's the energy footprint, the human footprint, the labor, the regulation that sits inside of it, And all of that is in some ways a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, right? It's behind a curtain, it's behind a door, it's backstage, right? And the metaverse will be in some ways no different. What it is to maintain something like that will involve data centers, which we know have an extraordinarily complicated energy footprint. We know it will involve an inordinate amount of technology, the creation of which, the maintenance of which, and the ultimate decommissioning and end life of which is an energy sink. We know that there will be people whose labor is being enacted

to keep these places moving who will have suboptimal experiences. The other thing that all of these worlds teach us, and Snow Crash too, right, is that the technology is not emancipatory per se. Extraordinary thing about Snow Crash is at no point does it suggest that the metaverse is a democratizing experience. It's quite clearly the opposite. Like any place in reality, the street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in reality,

such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional space-time are ignored, and free combat zones where people can go and hunt and kill each other. The only difference is that since the street does not really exist, it's just a computer graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere. None of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software made available to the public over the worldwide fiber optics network. When Hiro goes into the metaverse and looks down the street,

and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations, the user interfaces, of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. The metaverse that Neal Stephenson imagined is pretty small by today's standards. His metaverse revolved around a single location, a virtual street. Again, here's Lisa.

In the first scene where people are on the street, right, the main drag of the metaverse, there's all these big billboards, right? There is this idea that you could capture attention, although it was in this kind of, because the street is very analog, right? It's buildings, it's a boulevard, it's a Broadway. The kind of notion of how advertising worked was also very analog. You know, the idea of other ways of capturing attention and capturing vision, just, you know, for Stevenson, who imagined so much, you know, good on him that he didn't quite imagine that notion of like what else can be captured. Even companies like Google, it took them a while to really like lean into what it kind of meant to be an ad-forward company.

Being an ad-forward company means having a lot of sophisticated data surveillance. And surveillance is a theme in Snow Crash, but it's not about monetizing eyeballs. Stevenson thought that surveillance would come from the government. In the novel, the CIA and the Library of Congress have merged into a single organization called the CIC, which collects data by going person to person using these characters called gargoyles. They don't look like gargoyles, it's just a nickname and not a complimentary one. Gargoyles are addicted to the metaverse to the point where they can't really distinguish between the real world and the virtual one. The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering

quantities of useless information to the database on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage, so usually these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of the CIC before too long. Hero protagonist. The gargoyle says his hero finally tracks him down in the darkness beside a shanty. CIC stringer for 11 months, specializing in the industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza deliverer, concert promoter.

He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hero to waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts. The laser that kept jabbing Hero in the eye was shot out of this guy's computer from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few seconds, if you're in the database already, the owner finds out who you are.

If you're not already in the database, well, you are now. This ties into another concern for Lisa. If we're going to be represented by realistic avatars in the metaverse, our bodies will have to be scanned in the same way that the latest iPhones can be opened with a scan of your face. Where my caution comes, this is like my dystopian thinking of what our metaverse future is. Our bodies contain a lot of data. Your movement data can be collected and stored. And there's a wealth of studies in perceptual psychology, which says how few movement points are needed in order to identify someone, that we all actually have

something akin to a fingerprint in the way we move. There's, oh God, I forget which, oh, Upload. Have you seen Upload? It's on Amazon. It's on Amazon, yeah. So, you know, in their future, there's like all these giant corporate conglomerations. So it's on Amazon. So in their future, there's all these giant corporate conglomerations. So it's like Facebook, Wegmans, Apple, CVS have all combined. And that's very plausible. And so imagine a future in which a tech company combines with a health insurance company. Or sells your data to a health insurance company. Now, that is pure speculation, and the company of Meta has been trying to counter these types of criticisms by hiring many of their own critics. For example, before Kevin Bankston worked for Meta, he also worked with the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier

Foundation. I was a critic of Facebook on consumer privacy issues as a civil society person, while also working with them on things we agreed on, like trying to limit unwarranted government surveillance of digital platforms, for example. I do think Facebook has made privacy mistakes in the past. The reason I went to the company was to help ensure it makes better decisions for new technologies like AI. Whatever happens, the metaverse is coming, or at least a multiverse of metaverses. So I wondered, is there anything that we can learn from hero protagonist

in the way that he navigates the metaverse in Snow Crash? As an engineer, Stephen Pimentel always admired hero's sense of agency in the book. hero's sense of agency in the book. If we want a positive theme from Snow Crash, it's that that's how we have to view these technologies. To the extent that we allow the metaverse to simply become a sort of hyper-television, a 3D television, a 3D immersive television, that's going to end up being a very bad thing for us. You know, one of the things you can take from Snow Crash is sort of don't do that. Try not to let that happen with the technology, but regardless of what goes on in the technology around you, always be looking for ways to retake and regain control. be looking for ways to retake and regain control.

I've been talking theoretically about the future. Most of this technology is still in development. But Grace Ang is an example of how this is playing out now. She's part of a group that created NFTs called CrashPunks that you can buy using Stacks, which is an open source blockchain for Bitcoin transactions. I recorded our interview before the crypto market crashed last summer, but she told me in an email that her feelings haven't changed. And that goes back to reading Snow Crash, which imagines a future where people have more faith in decentralized currencies than the U.S. dollar. The whole Stacks team has been inspired by Snow Crash. where people have more faith in decentralized currencies than the U.S. dollar. The whole Stacks team has been inspired by Snow Crash. So the wallet that we use in the Stacks ecosystem is called Hero Wallet, H-I-R-O, named after hero protagonist. And the NFTs, are they characters from the novel?

I think that's what they look like. Yeah. Yeah, so a lot of the traits are inspired by characters and traits in Snow Crash. There's, of course, people with like kind of like the goggles and the antenna and wires sticking out of their heads. Also, Grace's group wants to create a version of the Black Sun Club, which is the cool virtual nightclub in Snow Crash. of the Black Sun Club, which is the cool virtual nightclub in Snow Crash. Yeah, so this is something that we're building out.

It's still on the DL, but basically it's going to be accessible on the internet. You go on and that would be, we're still exploring kind of like whether it's going to be within VR, AR, or like a web VR experience. Ideally, the vision is you log in as your avatar. And so that's kind of like the part of the roadmap that we're working on is turning all the NFTs into 3D avatars. And then once you log in through your wallet, then you can exist as your avatar,

walk around, buy land, and hang out. And this would be like an indie metaverse that they're building, separate from the big tech metaverses. I don't think it's one corporation that owns the metaverse. I think it's all the builders who are very passionate about turning either science fiction into reality or just being able to extend themselves into the virtual space. One of the things that I found interesting in talking with Grace is seeing how much Neil Stevenson's novels from decades ago are still irrelevant to cutting edge technology. In fact, Neil Stevenson met with her group, and at the end of their video call, they gave him a Neil Stevenson CrashPunks NFT that looks like a cartoon of him, except his neck is full of gears and wires like a cyborg.

So Brett, can you reveal that to him? Oh my God. Yeah. Wow. Thing of beauty. Thank you. There is a very complicated and polarizing debate around NFTs. But in my experience, whenever there's a tech revolution and some people promise wonderful things and other people warn of terrible things, both sides tend to be right to a certain extent. One thing I learned from Snow Crash is that

if we're gonna create a new world in a virtual space, it's gonna have the same problems as the real world, just amplified in a brand new way. It doesn't matter if we're avatars or photorealistic holograms or pixelated icons or fantastical creatures. There's still us, and we can never escape ourselves. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Genevieve Bell, Kevin Bankston, Lisa Masseri, Stephen Pimentel, Grace Ang, and Varick Boyd, who did the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

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