I just had a long and fascinating interview with Matthew Ball, who has a greatly updated version of his book The Metaverse, now subtitled Building the Spatial Internet, coming out on on July 23. I'll publish that soon, but meantime, here's Matt's interview with two people who've been building the foundation of the Metaverse since the 90s — Epic's Tim Sweeney, and of course, literal Neal Stephenson.
There's much too much too summarize in a post here, but one highlight is how much the actual conceivers of the Metaverse, both as an idea and as an actual product, are confident about its underlying thesis. The only thing that's "failed" since the recent backlash against the term is the straw man version that had little relation to what was actually described back in 1992.
As Sweeney puts it:
I think what's been rejected is a particular vision of the Metaverse, which is people putting on VR headsets and going to the office and working with co-workers in this Silicon Valley chic art style, that was just totally lame and was never going to succeed. But on the other hand, if you look at what people are doing with their time in video games. Fortnite and Roblox and other immersive games like PUBG Mobile are growing at an amazing rate. People are playing them, enjoying them. You can identify now about 800 million people who engage in these kinds of experiences every month. And what they're doing is very Metaverse. They're going into a real-time, 3D environment with their friends. They're engaging in a variety of different experiences.
And as Neal Stephenson — who's now a co-founder of three Metaverse-related startups (more about that in the interview) — puts it:
We see postmortems for the Metaverse. And yet on the other hand, Fortnite and Roblox and other such platforms have got vast numbers of people using them. We just don't generally refer to them as the Metaverse, but people who kind of understand the concept know that that's what they are. So I think it'll be something like that.
But it's always been the case that the new technologies have a sort of currency in the language that eventually comes to seem sort of dated. So in the 30s, radio was this amazing kind of newish thing to a lot of people. And so you can still buy a little red wagons called Radio Flyer. It's just a wagon, it has nothing to do with radio, but 100 years ago, somebody thought it would be cool to put the word radio on the wagon because it had connotations of this is the thing of the future. And we see that with internet and with a whole lot of tech buzzwords that come and go over time.
I.E., "the Metaverse" as a buzzword is dead, long live metaverse platforms.
But why is the Valley sort of ignoring those 800 million people active in metaverse-type platforms in pursuit of dubious generative AI wealth? Matt and I get into that later this week!
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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