Snow Crash, Decentraland and the coming of The Metaverse

I read Snow crash in the 90s when the internet was just starting to show it's face to mainstream culture. London was a drug fuelled haze and I was a young techno punk, Snow Crash was the "Neuromancer" for Generation X and it inspired some ridiculous fashions. We played at being the cyberpunks of this cool science fiction future, and that's what it was, pure science fiction, an authors vision that we could have only imagined existing 20 years ago.

Two decades later and we live in a digital world dominated by technology. We are all plugged into the internet for more time than not. Our personal computers have developed into a global network sharing and storing information, chatting, playing, working, learning, trading, all at a speed we can not comprehend. Technology has evolved to a point where it can now support the vision of Neil Stephenson's metaverse, a parallel universe made of code.

Decentraland is a VR world powered by the Ethereum blockchain where developers can buy LAND and build out Genesis City, the beginnings of the Metaverse. This project is due for release to end users towards the end of the year but the buzz in the developer community behind the scenes is already creating ripples in the wider world. MANA - the currency that will be used in world is already 10 times it's ICO price and rising, expect that to go crazy when the world opens!

I am working in the background of Hive account@decentraland with two of the districts proposed last year on github. The University ( Hive account@dcluniversity ) and Festival.land. We are hoping to build the foundations of something that will evolve beyond my lifetime. A place that will embrace the paradigms we are facing and look at new ways of governance and finance that are enabled by blockchain technology.

There are philosophical questions surrounding our addiction to technology and our innate curiosity of digitised environments. People will undoubtedly abuse VR, push it to and beyond it's limits. The kind of behaviour we see now with smartphone technology will be compounded with VR and I think it is important that we find ways to balance progress with the need, physically and mentally, to connect with nature.

There is also a scientific school of thought that proposes that we already live in a holographic universe and would suggest that building a virtual metaverse is merely imitating the creator, but I'll leave that up to you to figure out.

Snow Crash arrived in the post today, I ordered it a few days ago, I want to read it through the eyes I have now, in the world we have become, I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime check out Decentraland, it's an awesome project that's still in it's early days.