Metaverse, Metavirus, Meta mistake?

NPR files 2

The Metaverse is born in Neal Stephenson's roman "Snow Crash", when the main character, Hiro Protagonist, is at home in his 20-by-30 U-Stor-It. "So Hiro's not actually here at all. He is in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping in his earphones. In the Lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse." That was 1992. Now, almost 30 years later, the Metaverse stands for a promise, a new world, a new business model, the next phase of the internet or hype that spreads like a virus, a metavirus. A perfect time to push aside Facebook's marketing blitz and dive into the novel and the mind of one of the spiritual fathers of virtual worlds, Neal Stephenson.

The Drug
Snow Crash is the hacker's term for "a system crash — a bug — at such fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray widely across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels in a gyrating blizzard." A Snow Crash toasts the fundamental core of the computer that communicates with the user, the monitor, the user interface. But Snow Crash is not only a bug; it is also a virus in the Metaverse. A virus that infects the user, not the computer. When you get it, it infects the fundamental structure of your brain. After being infected, you go blank and can only produce babbles. The infection happens when you are exposed to a scroll that displays "a living wall of light, like a flexible, flatscreen television set, and it is not showing anything at all. Just static. White noise. Snow." After the virus is introduced in the Metaverse, Hiro realizes that: "The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to a point where you might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place. Guns have come to Paradise."

The Virus Plot
The global fibre cable monopolist, L. Bob Rife, spread the virus. First, he produced it as a physical drug that made people braindead and speaking in tongues, Glossolalia. He spread the drug through churches, he sat up around the world, especially in developing countries, where he injected the drugs during vaccinations. — it is a dangerous remark to write…