No single future is guaranteed. Powerful figures like Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg would rather you forget this and instead accept that he determines our collective future. This is the vision of the “metaverse”, as imagined and marketed to us by Zuckerberg. However, the true origin of the concept of “the metaverse” is snow shocka popular science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson that, in 1992, told of a virtual reality world of avatars, including our hero Hiro Protagonist, interacting, buying things, and trying to build status for themselves within an alternate reality consisting of essentially in an online economic world.

Today, it’s imagined in a similar way, usually through the use of virtual reality headsets (though not always), but with…