TECHNOLOGY FREQUENTLY PRODUCES SURPRISES that no one predicts. But the biggest and most fantastical developments are often anticipated decades in advance. In the 1930s, Vannevar Bush, then president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, began work on a hypothetical electromechanical device that would store all books, records, and communications, and mechanically link them together by keyword association, rather than traditional, mostly hierarchical storage models. Despite the enormity of its archive, Bush stressed that this “Memex” (short for “memory extender”) could be consulted “with exceeding speed and flexibility.”
In the years that followed this early research, Bush became one of the most influential engineers and science administrators in American history. From 1939 to 1941, he was vice chairman and temporarily served as chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor agency to NASA. In this position, Bush convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish what became the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), a new federal agency that would be run by Bush, who would report directly to the president. The agency was provided nearly unlimited funding, primarily for secret projects that would aid the United States’ efforts in World War II.
Only four months after OSRD was founded, President Roosevelt approved the atomic bomb program known as the Manhattan Project, following a meeting with Bush and Vice President Henry A. Wallace. To manage the program, Roosevelt created a Top Policy Group consisting of himself, Bush, Wallace, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Chief of Staff of the Army General George C. Marshall, and James B. Conant, who headed up a subbranch of OSRD previously run by Bush. In addition, the Uranium Committee (later named the S-1 Executive Committee) would report directly to Bush.
After the war ended in 1945, but two years before he left his role as director of the OSRD, Bush wrote two famous essays. The first, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” was addressed to the president and in it, Bush called for an increase in government investments in science and technology, rather than a peacetime reduction, as well as the establishment of the National Science Foundation. The second essay, “As We May Think,” appeared in The Atlantic and publicly detailed Bush’s vision of the Memex.
In the years that followed his essays, Bush stepped back from public office and public view. But soon enough, his various contributions to government, science, and society began to converge. Starting in the 1960s, the US government funded a variety of projects within the Department of Defense, in partnership with a network of external researchers, universities, and other nongovernment institutions that together developed the foundation of the internet. At the same time, Bush’s Memex was informing the creation and evolution of “hypertext,” one of the underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, which is typically written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and enables users to instantly access a nearly infinite extent of online content by clicking on a given piece of text. Twenty years later, the US federal government established the Internet Engineering Task Force to guide the technical evolution of the Internet Protocol Suite, and with the help of the Department of Defense founded the World Wide Web Consortium, which, among other duties, manages the ongoing development of HTML.
While technological progress typically occurs out of common sight, science fiction often provides the general public with the clearest view of the future. In 1968, fewer than 10% of American households had a color TV, yet the second-highest-grossing film of the year, 2001: A Space Odyssey, imagined a future in which humanity had compressed these fridge-sized devices into coaster-thin displays and used them idly during breakfast. Anyone watching the film today will instantly liken these devices to iPads. Per usual, the imagined technology, like Bush’s Memex, took longer to arrive than was originally anticipated. iPads appeared in stores four and half decades after Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film was released, and more than a decade after the futuristic film was set.
By 2021, tablets had become commonplace and spacefaring had begun to feel within reach. Throughout that summer, competing efforts from billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were under way to bring civilian travel to lower orbit and usher in an era of space elevators and interplanetary colonization. However, it was another decades-old science fiction concept, the Metaverse, that seemed to indicate the future had truly arrived.
In July 2021, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “In this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision.”1 Shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg publicly announced a division focused on the Metaverse and elevated the head of Facebook Reality Labs—a division that works on miscellaneous futuristic projects including Oculus VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) glasses, and brain-to-machine interfaces—to chief technology officer. In October 2021, Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook would be changing its name to Meta Platforms* to reflect its shift to this “Metaverse.” To the surprise of many Facebook shareholders, Zuckerberg also said that his investments in the Metaverse would reduce operating income by over $10 billion in 2021, while warning that these investments would grow for several more years.
Zuckerberg’s bold pronouncements drew the most attention, but many of his peers and competitors had launched similar initiatives and made similar announcements in the months prior. In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella began to speak of a Microsoft-led “enterprise Metaverse.” Likewise, Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of computing and semiconductor giant Nvidia, had told investors that “the economy in the Metaverse . . . [will] be larger than the economy in the physical world”† and that Nvidia’s platforms and processors would be at the heart of it.2 In the fourth quarter of 2020 and first quarter of 2021, the gaming industry had two of its largest-ever initial public offerings (IPOs) in Unity Technologies and Roblox Corporation, both of which wrapped their corporate histories and ambitions in Metaverse-related narratives.
Throughout the remainder of 2021, the term “Metaverse” almost became a punchline as every company and its executives seemed to trip over themselves to mention it as something that would make their company more profitable, their customers happier, and their competitors less threatening. Prior to Roblox’s IPO filings in October 2020, the “Metaverse” had appeared only five times in US Securities and Exchange Commission filings.3 In 2021, the term was mentioned more than 260 times. That same year, Bloomberg, a software company that provides financial data and information to investors, catalogued more than a thousand stories containing the word Metaverse. The prior decade had only seven.
Interest in the Metaverse was not limited to Western nations and corporations. In May 2021, China’s largest company, the internet gaming giant Tencent, publicly described its vision of the Metaverse, calling it “Hyper Digital Reality.” The following day, South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) announced “The (South Korean) Metaverse Alliance,” spanning over 450 companies including SK Telecom, Woori Bank, and Hyundai Motor. In early August, South Korean gaming giant Krafton, maker of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (also known as PUBG) completed its IPO, the second largest in the country’s history. Krafton’s investment bankers made sure to tell would-be investors that the company would also be a global leader in the Metaverse. In the ensuing months, Chinese internet giants Alibaba and ByteDance, the parent company of the global social network TikTok, both began to register various Metaverse trademarks and acquire various VR and 3D-related start-ups. Krafton, meanwhile, committed publicly to launching a “PUBG Metaverse.”
The Metaverse captured more than the imagination of techno-capitalists and sci-fi fans. Not long after Tencent publicly unveiled its vision of hyper-digital reality, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began its biggest-ever crackdown of its domestic gaming industry. Among several new policies was a prohibition on minors playing video games Monday through Thursday that also limited their play from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (in other words, it was impossible for a minor to play a video game for more than three hours per week). In addition, companies such as Tencent would use their facial recognition software and a player’s national ID to periodically ensure that these rules were not being skirted by a gamer borrowing an older user’s device. Tencent also pledged $15 billion in aid for “sustainable social value,” which Bloomberg said would be focused on “areas like increasing incomes for the poor, improving medical assistance, promoting rural economic efficiency and subsidizing education programs.”4 Alibaba, China’s second-largest company, committed a similar amount only two weeks later. The message from the CCP was clear: look to your countrymen and women, not virtual avatars.
The CCP’s concerns about the growing role of gaming content and platforms in public life became more explicit in August, when the state-owned Security Times warned its readers that the Metaverse is a “grand and illusionary concept” and “blindly investing [in it] will ultimately come back to bite you.”‡5 Some commentators interpreted China’s various warnings, prohibitions, and taxes as confirmation of the Metaverse’s significance. For a communist and centrally planned country ruled by a single party, the potential of a parallel world for collaboration and communication is a threat, regardless of whether it’s run by a single corporation or decentralized communities.
Yet China was not alone in its worries. In October, members of the European Parliament began to voice concerns. One particularly important voice was that of Christel Schaldemose, who served as a chief negotiator for the European Union as it worked on its largest-ever overhaul of digital-era regulations (most of which were intended to curb the power of so-called big tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google). In October, she told the Danish paper Politiken that “plans for metaverse are deeply, deeply worrying” and that the union “has to take them into account.”6
It’s possible that the many Metaverse announcements, critiques, and warnings are just a real-world echo chamber about a virtual fantasy—or more about driving new narratives, product launches, and marketing than anything life-changing. After all, the tech industry has a history of using buzzwords that are hyped for far longer than they ultimately end up lasting in the market, such as 3D televisions, or that prove to be further away than originally promised, such as VR headsets or virtual assistants. But it’s rare that the world’s largest companies publicly reorient themselves around such ideas at an early stage, thereby setting themselves up to be evaluated by employees, customers, and shareholders on the basis of their success in realizing their most ambitious visions.
The dramatic response to the Metaverse reflects the growing belief that it is the next great computing and networking platform, similar in scope to the transition from the personal computer and fixed-line internet of the 1990s to the era of mobile and cloud computing we live in today. That shift popularized a once-obscure business school term—“disruption”—and transformed almost every industry while reshaping modern society and politics. Yet there is a critical difference between that shift and the impending shift to the Metaverse: timing. Most industries and individuals did not foresee the significance of mobile and cloud, and consequently were stuck reacting to changes and fighting off disruption from those who better understood them. Preparations for the Metaverse are happening much earlier, and proactively.
In 2018, I began writing a series of online essays on the Metaverse, then an obscure and fringe concept. In the years since, these essays have been read by millions of people as the Metaverse has transitioned from the world of paperback science fiction to the front page of the New York Times and corporate strategy reports around the world.
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything updates, expands, and recasts everything I’ve previously written on the Metaverse. The book’s core purpose is to offer a clear, comprehensive, and authoritative definition of this still inchoate idea. Yet my ambitions are broader: I hope to help you understand what’s required to realize the Metaverse, why entire generations will eventually move to and live inside it, and how it will forever alter our daily lives, our work, and how we think. In my view, the collective value of these changes will be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
* For the sake of clarity, this book refers to Meta Platforms as Facebook. Explaining the Metaverse and its various platforms, while also discussing an early leader in the Metaverse that is called Meta Platforms, would only confuse matters.
† In 2021, global GDP was estimated at roughly $90 trillion–$95 trillion by the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and World Bank.
‡ The Security Times cited the author of this book when describing the Metaverse.