De ‘metaverse‘ werd voor het eerst benoemd in de roman Snow Crash van Neal Stephenson, waar ook een film van is gemaakt. Neal Stephenson voorspelde de metaverse ruim 29 jaar geleden! Nu de metaverse steeds meer aan bod komt kan ik me voorstellen dat jullie bij Snow Crash zijn uitgekomen en benieuwd zijn naar de quotes waar de metaverse in voorkomt. Ik heb ze voor je verzameld:
Voor als je nog niet weet wat het inhoudt: Wat is de metaverse?
“In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
“Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.”
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Ng’s Metaverse home is a French colonial villa in the prewar village of My Tho in the Mekong Delta. Visiting him is like going to Vietnam in about 1955, except that you don’t have to get all sweaty.
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
“Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.”
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
“The Metaverse … could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiber-optic network.“
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead…Guns have come to Paradise.
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a virus might get transferred into your computer… The Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles.
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
There are no cops. You can’t defend yourself, you can’t chase the bad people. It’s going to take a lot of work to change that — a fundamental rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate level.
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
