✍🏻+ 📱WIRED | "Neal Stephenson Named the Metaverse. Now, He's Building It
I have no idea what to make of this.
“Stephenson is now entering the marketplace with his own take on how his fictional concept might become a real-life make-believe world. He’s partnering with a crypto guy—Peter Vessenes, who heads the Bitcoin Foundation—to start Lamina1, a company hoping to create a scaffolding upon which creators can build an open metaverse.
“It’s like Neal is coming down out of the mountains like Gandalf, to restore the metaverse to an open, decentralized, and creative order,” says Rony Abovitz, the former CEO of Magic Leap, who is a strategic adviser to Lamina1.”
I have no idea what to make of this. Stephenson’s fictional work has included notions of both blockchain-style currency for a long time. Books like The Diamond Age feature digital currency that pre-date the invention of Bitcoin, and people even openly speculated that Stephenson was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, which he denied.
Stephenson was previously involved with Magic Leap, another audacious company that received breathless WIRED cover story coverage but has scaled back its ambitions. He’s also worked for Blue Origin.
This is an interesting move because Stephenson is both thoughtful and technical. His writing signals that he thinks about the social and technical roles that technology plays in contemporary life. That he is participating in these metaverse/blockchain spaces may turn other heads, too. We’ll see.