No one actually knows what the metaverse is. While the spirit of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 ideal remains “a collectively shared virtual space,” it’s difficult to pinpoint what that means or how that ideal will materialize. There are frameworks that guide today’s business titans, however. Mark Zuckerberg reads Matthew Ball’s voluminous essays on the topic and is influenced by them. Ball’s writing has a consistent framework that steadies his rhetoric. He focuses on hardware, computing power, networking, virtual platforms, interchange standards, content, and payment services. His metaverse primer is 33,000 words of intellectual curiosity.
