Now in hard cover you can hold in your hands, Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For (Wiley), is in book stores in a couple of weeks! If you've enjoyed anything I've blogged here over the last 17 years (or at least had some fun disagreeing with it) please consider pre-ordering:
Or on Bookshop.org benefiting indie bookstores here
As I write in the acknowledgements, New World Notes readers have been an invaluable part of my approach to this book, so if you're a regular reader and commenter reading these words now: Much mahalo.
Here's a sneak preview of the Preface:
There is a fight for the Metaverse’s future, with the outcome far from certain.
This conflict will enmesh companies and the user communities who depend on each other, and draw the current Internet giants into the fray. It will finally ensnare whole societies and world governments, who scarce grasp the barest outlines of the alternate reality already emerging beneath our screens. Making a Metaverse That Matters tells that story too.
The “matters” of the book title comes with a hidden double blade. I believe the Metaverse will transform us, on balance, for the better. But it will also introduce dark old troubles in a new context, and new dangers that we are hardly ready as a society to understand; I have seen too much of that side of things to avoid telling the full story.
The primary focus of this book is not on the technological and business components required to operate a metaverse platform. For that, I highly recommend The Metaverse (Liveright, 2022) by Matthew Ball, who has done essential work on that front.
Making a Metaverse That Matters is fundamentally about the people behind this technology, both as creators and as users. More than anything, their experiences explain why this concept, drawn from a relatively little-read sci-fi novel, has so much power. I’ve seen first-hand how the Metaverse can transform lives and enable human flourishing.
Making a Metaverse That Matters is also, finally, my story — one that I’ve been writing in one form or another for roughly 20 years, around the start of my writing career.
In 2003, a publicist’s email led me into the office of Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, for a demo that went on to transform my life.
Hired as the start-up’s official “embedded journalist” in the virtual world, I began in 2003 to interview Second Life users as a roving avatar reporter wearing a white suit (my somewhat pretentious tribute to Tom Wolfe), impertinently asking them about everything — from virtual sex to ambitious collective art projects to savvy virtual business ventures which turned their founders into literal millionaires.
During that time, Second Life became the first metaverse platform to reach mainstream awareness. After leaving the company in 2006 to write The Making of Second Life (HarperCollins), I was shocked and saddened to watch as Second Life failed to realize its potential for many strange, aggravating, and tragically hilarious reasons — and feel some personal blame for what went wrong.
At the same time, I have learned from the ongoing story of Second Life, which still generally flourishes against all odds, what aspects of the Metaverse are truly compelling. So Making a Metaverse That Matters is also about watching the dream re-emerge, and vowing that this time, everything possible must be done to insure that it scales to the benefit of all.
Much more soon!
Comments