Are We in the Metaverse Yet?
The biggest ideas in tech often lurch into the lexicon before they are truly coherent. Jargon appears out of nowhere, underexplained and overused: the internet of things, the sharing economy, the cloud. In some rare cases, the terminology sticks. A lot of people talk a lot about a lot of loosely related things, and then those things merge into a single semi-comprehensible thing. Then we live our lives within that thing forever. Get ready for the metaverse.  The term comes from digital antiquity: Coined by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash, then reimagined as the Oasis in the Ernest Cline novel Ready Player One, it refers to a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the analog one in which we live. In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian  virtual refuges from a fallen world.