hello everyone.Elizabeth is mourned, Ukraine is fighting back and the new Covid vaccine is here. However, this week may be remembered for a merger, making crypto more useful and moving forward beyond the age of fraud.
The Plain View
Neil Stevenson invented the Metaverse. At least from an imaginative point of view.Other of his sci-fi writers had similar ideas, but while VR pioneers were already building artificial worlds, Stephenson’s 1992 novel snow crash Not only did it embody a vision of escaping to a place where the digital has replaced the physical, it gave it a name. That book cemented him as a major author, and he’s enjoyed great success ever since. The next step in computing. Became a “metaverse” buzzword, and Big Tech raced to bring it into production. Most notably, Facebook spent billions on its reality lab and renamed it Meta. From Microsoft to Amazon, everyone has suddenly come up with a metaverse strategy, but we still don’t understand the technology that makes it happen.
At the time, Stevenson said his recent novels, on subjects involving climate engineering. “That turned into ‘Neil, what do you think of the Metaverse? Book tour,'” Stevenson says.The answer Stevenson provided to the question was a mixture of bewilderment and, as WIRED’s writer noted, disgust. snow crash And it wasn’t fun to watch his fictional creations be colonized by profit-seeking, growth-hungry giants.
But there is a strange plot twist here. Stephenson is now entering the market with a unique take on the potential of his fictional concepts to become real fictional worlds. He’s affiliated with the crypto man—Peter Veseneshead of the Bitcoin Foundation — to get started Lamina 1a company that hopes to create a scaffold on which creators can build an open metaverse.
“It’s almost as if Neil came down from the mountain like Gandalf to restore the metaverse to an open, decentralized, creative order,” says Rony Abovitz, former CEO of Magic Leap and strategic advisor to Lamina1. says.
In fact, justice seems to be the branding for this new venture. Vessenes admits there were initial suspicions that Stephenson was “Kardashian-ing” and jumping on a bandwagon he accidentally started. “That could be the first question: Is Neil selling his brand to some metaverse company?” The big question was whether his Lamina1 was for cash. “But when people talk to us, they conclude that this is a principled effort,” he says. “So they ask, ‘Is this real?’ Are we actually going to do this?” Hoffman wrote a personal check after assuring that he would do so.
