ZEITGEIST SYNTHEVERSE
It may be hard to credit, but when Cosmos Issue 1 appeared in 2005, the metaverse was in a brief renaissance, its second life. Its first life ran from the 1992 publication of Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk masterwork Snow Crash – which gave us the word “metaverse”, describing an environment where billions electronically project themselves into a 3D world, a space in which seeing and being seen generates the social capital driving a decaying mid-21st-century America.
Wickedly funny, but almost wholly dystopian, Snow Crash nevertheless provided a defining vision for a generation of engineers, product designers and entrepreneurs who imagined the metaverse as the next big thing, hot on the heels of a brand-new and white-hot World Wide Web. Products poured out, most of them slow, many hard to operate, and all of them lacking any driving reason to use – many people tried Active Worlds, one of the most popular early metaverse tools, but most abandoned it to text-based messengers, like ICQ. Each attracted a small community of fans, yet all eventually shuttered, as the spigot of venture capital money funding the early metaverse went dry.
Was the metaverse dead – or merely “pining for the fjords”? For half a dozen years it looked gone for good, until Philip Rosedale's Linden Labs launched Second Life. In a bit of nominative determinism, it breathed life into a dead metaverse. For a brief moment in time, Second Life became the most talked about app in the world, with millions of signups, commercial “spaces” owned by firms such as IBM, and more than enough revenue to keep the whole thing rolling along years after attentions had shifted to Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.
Second Life's still around, with about a million monthly users – many of whom, because of distance or infirmity, have a real need to connect socially through a screen – but it's passed out of popular consciousness.
After its second death, the metaverse became the favoured punchline to many a
