‘Metaverse’
, held within the video game Fortnite, have had excitable tech ies talking means “with” or “after”, but meta in English has come to acquire a sense of going beyond – as in metaphysics or metafictional. In cosmology, therefore, metaverse has (1974) to mean the universe of universes. The tech sense derives from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which the metaverse is a giant virtual space consisting of all virtual and augmented realities, including the internet. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said not so long ago: “Our overarching goal … is to help bring the metaverse to life.” A bright future, then, of inescapable ambient surveillance and advertising.
